Restaurant A. Wong, London Victoria

Raise your hand if you like dim sum. No, the prawn toast doesn't count. Put the prawn toast down. Good.

Aahh...dumplings. Now we're talking :D

This dim sum post kicks of a series of restaurant related posts I've got coming up. I haven't found the time to bake very much in the lead up to this exam I have in June (I've somewhat called it a "baking ban" I'm going on but I think that's just a paraphrase of "gotten a bit lazy and time constrained"). However, I have remained to find the time to eat, whoop whoop! Which, you know, is great.

Moving on to restaurant A Wong. It's a small restaurant just off Victoria station which, in my opinion, looks a bit takeaway-ey from the outside, but in the inside it's an oasis of dim sum related well cooked and beautifully presented upmarket Chinese food. I came here with my boyfriend a few weeks back after hearing some pretty damn good reviews. We were not disappointed, hurray!

Zhonghua Traditional Snacks, Cambridge

I miss Cambridge.

I miss being a student. I miss the may ball chat, the not being allowed to walk on the grass, the tourists with the big cameras who wander around looking lost, and yes, even the supervisions (!).

I mean, where else will it be acceptable to cycle around wearing a gown and black tie??

So, last weekend I went back to Cambridge for a friends birthday, and we went to formal at Trinity College. Which was fun! Aside from the part where two of us got on the wrong train, ended up in Biggleswade, taking a 45 minute taxi to Cambridge whilst changing into black tie in the back of said taxi, and running into formal hall 15 minutes late.

At first I got angry. And then I got sad. And then I got hungry.

So the next day (after formal hall and a few bad headaches), a few of us wandered over to Zhonghua Traditional Snacks, a new(ish) cafe that opened sometime after I graduated in June. I've heard a lot about it from my Chinese friends in Cambridge, so here is the rundown!

(Please excuse the photo quality, I only brought my point and shoot to Cambridge.)

Zhonghua Traditional Snacks serves Chinese dim sum including jaozi (dumplings), bao zi (steamed buns), noodles and wontons.

The food is good, quite traditional in that I would expect this on the cafes in China. I don't think the food alone is enough to rant and rave about but I would definitely recommend purely because its such great value - one of the great points about this cafe is the price. You'll struggle to spend more than £10-£15 per head, with drinks.

Well, I mean, unless you're reeaaaalllllyyyy hungry.

The cafe is quite small, located near the Grafton Centre off Newmarket Road. We came at about 12pm and managed to get a table, although it got quite busy afterwards. The owners were really nice though and tried their best to fit everyone in. On the walls inside there are posters showing how to make dumplings, which was pretty cute.

The Awkward Moment When Your Dad Starts A Blog

The even more awkward moment when you realise that blog is about you.

I won't post the link here to my dad's post here, because it's a little embarrassing. Probably because it depicts my life. Mostly because he's got more page views than me.

********* 
p.s. update! Okay, I give in. Some people have asked for the link and I feel rather mean so....Here's the link!(It's all in Chinese though, apart from a few words here and there but that could be enough to get the gist!) 
*********

(Before I go on, these are lotus root and pork fritters. It's a Chinese dish so quite fitting for what I'm going to say next.)

Sushi Cake!

I don't normally like to say I'm particularly good at baking, but I'm going to make an exception. This is epic...unless you don't know what sushi is.

But for those who do, well, hello world, I have arrived ;)

I was trying to think how long this took me compared to my meringue brownie cake, but then I decided I couldn't compare them. This is bigger. This was better. And it was definitely not blander.

Oh, and if you really don't know what sushi is (?!?!), then head over here for some good old rice lovin' and here for sushi photos!

From China With Love: Rice.

22/12/2020

So originally I said I was going to leave out the boring part where ‘we eat lots of rice’, but my friend wanted a post on it, in which I replied that I had already done one, but he was persistent, so I took up the challenge and wrote…an ODE TO RICE! Oh yes, you’d better believe it.


Ode To Rice
by Xinmei Wang, age nine…teen.

Oh rice, oh rice, why are you so nice?
You fill me with carbs but I guess that’s the price.
”I just made some rice dumpling, would you like to try it?
Oh, I’m sorry, you’re on a gluten free diet”.

It’s rice, it’s always rice! Can even make it into drinks,
Let it ferment, it’s alcohol in two winks.
Be careful not to boil too much, remember 8 cups is a lot,
It would be heart breaking just to see all of this rice rot :(

And rice, and rice, my bowl is full of you,
Wouldn’t have it any other other way, and that is the truth.
So dedicated am I, that I eat you with chopsticks,
Hope you appreciate that, I can’t use them for…toffee. (I know, let down, sorry)

Dear rice, dear rice, you’re so easy to make,
But saying that, you’re quite versatile to bake.
I can cook you in the oven and I can cook you on the hob,
I can even cook you in the microwave slot!

My rice, your rice, his rice, her rice,
That old lady who works at the checkout’s rice!
We all eat rice! We all love rice!
And now I’m at the end of the poem, if I say rice one more time I think I might die.

Authentic Chinese ‘sao mai’ – gluntinous (sticky) rice wrapped in wonton skin type things and steamed. Nothing like the Hong Kong version of ‘siew mai’, which doesn’t even have rice in it! :O

Lesson learned today: You can love the afore mentioned foodstuff, then write a poem on it and lose all craving to ever eat it again (note to self: never, EVER, write a poem on desserts).

Copyright Pudding Pie Lane 2011 at puddingpielane.blogspot.com

From China With Love: Out and About

17/12/2010

As soon as I got used to the freezing temperatures and accepted the fact that I probably wouldn’t regain the feeling in my toes for the next two weeks, I finally left the house and went scouring the streets for food and photo opportunities. There are loads everywhere, literally about 2 minutes down the road from my grandparent’s house will be someone selling fruit and vegetables:


And two minutes down the road from that, will be street vendors selling ‘little eats’. I once found the best Chinese sweet onion pastry thing, and wanted a fresh one for breakfast the next day.


Except breakfast for everyone here is about 8am, which (ha!) isn’t going to happen, so when I woke up at 10.30am, I ran out in my pyjamas (it’s er…a fashion statement back in England), but to my dismay, they had gone :(

Most of the street vendors set up at night, usually on a busy road or next to the street markets.

Xiao Long Bao (‘Little Lion Buns’), are like steamed buns but with soup inside, which annoyingly always seems to dribble out when you bite into it. Tasty though!


Here, she’s making omelette with potato strips, egg, frankfurter sausage, and seaweed. Who would have thought, “I think it’s missing something… I know! Let’s add ALGAE!!”. And this wasn't the type that you normally put into soup, it was the crunchy, and slimy (does that have bad connotations? Is there a way of saying nice-slimy?). Just to Asian-fy what could have turned into a Western dish.


All the tea you could ever want – or think of – in your life. Also makes great pot pouri.


’Old Beijing’ toffee apples…and now they’ve also branched out to strawberries, pineapples, kiwis, oranges, even cherry tomatoes. Which is probably good, because I swear those apples were a bit rotten under that mountain of sugar crust.


And last but definitely definitely not least, cakes! Surely they can’t beat my ‘baked with love’ cakes? We shall see (I bought two of each, came to about 80p)….damn, these things are nice.

Lesson learned today: it’s not just sugar that you can put onto anything to make it taste nicer, it seems seaweed does the trick too!

A Digression into Dumplings

This was an article I wrote for a magazine at uni on how to make dumplings, and I was so proud of it (mostly of how I managed to stand up for 4 hours on end making them no not complaining once) that I wanted to share it on here! So taking a step back from the birthday recipes, dumplings are dominating the day.