Yum Cha or Dim Sum

Lucky Seafood Restaurant

Yum cha (drink tea)

Dim sum (small tastes)

Yesterday I had lunch with two women I’m getting to know here in NZ. They are both intelligent and interesting to me.  One was born and raised in Singapore the other in the Philippines.  With my background being the US it makes for a good mix.  

Ever since taking my first Cultural Anthropology course at 18 and actually meeting Margaret Mead 5 years later I have been hooked on learning about other cultures.  I love the titillation of hearing about mundane practices in other countries, which would be considered quite risque in the US.  Oh there seem to be so many!  This I know harkens back to the puritanical foundation of US history and the veneer to ‘propriety’ proffered by the US media.  More on these perceived differences later right now I’ll concentrate on the wonderful yum cha or dim sum we enjoyed.

The Lucky Seafood Restaurant in Manukau, a suburb of Auckland, has an upstairs dining area with tables set wide enough apart to allow the carts of small tastes of Chinese foods to pass through.  The women pushing the carts are of Asian descent and speak a very little English.  The food is freshly prepared in the kitchen, plated in servings of 3 to 4 and arrives on the table at just the right temperature to enhance the seasonings.  I tasted chicken feet for the first time, and found them to be chewy and savory, with lots of cartilage to feed my nails.  This goes into my ‘everything once’ category.  All of the other tastes were of the typical varieties, but the pièce de résistance was the sesame ball at the end of the meal.  This is a wonderful mixture of oil, salt, and sugar rolled into a deep fried hollow ball of dough with just a dollop of sweet bean mash inside and lovely sesame seeds coating the exterior.  The sesame ball must be eaten warm with a nice hot tea.   

A young woman who works as a hostess told us that one yummy bite had Spanish in it.  Sure enough there were green leaves evident through the translucent steamed dough.  When one of my friends corrected her pronunciation explaining that the bun held spinach not Spanish the young woman was jubilant. "I've learned a new word!" she said with delight.  She said she is from Hong Kong and is obviously working hard to perfect her language skills.  She will do well here.

Off to meet the day with a walk into Howick Village and a few errands.  Laundry on the line, dinner sorted, I feel like a real NZ woman! All is good. J

Kiwis of East Indian descent taking wedding pictures on the beach by our home.