The Australiafiles: Part 1- How a Chinese Family Eats

Family food time. <3

For the past two weeks I was in Sydney, Australia, having made the long journey from here in the UK for a cousin's wedding. I took the opportunity to document some cool food experiences, from aeroplane food to fancy restaurants. I think I'll start with the latter!

Quick background: My mum's side of the family is Chinese, and scattered over Malaysia (where her generation was born and raised), the UK, the US and Australia. The only place I haven't been to is the US, and all others I've either lived in or visited a number of times to see family (luckily this time around my relatives in the US made it to Oz for the wedding so I got to see them too). A high percentage of Australia's population is Chinese or otherwise East Asian, so that will probably reflect in the food I post about here.

Now, onto Chinese eats, and with a very traditional type of food: dim sum.

See that round thingy in the middle? It's called a Lazy Susan: the multiple dishes are placed on it and the diners at the table can spin it around to try a bit of everything on offer (which is quite a traditional Chinese way to eat, rather than Western-style where stuff is plated up for you). In the case of dim sum you order what you want off of trolleys of food that are pushed around, and it's added to a tab thingy that's added up at the end of your meal. You often also get a pot or two of green tea.

The gold sparkly thing in the middle was because we were celebrating my jia po's 80th birthday.

You can get all sorts in dim sum: jiaozi dumplings, baozi dumplings, egg tarts, choi sum, beef balls, noodles... and, of course, chicken feet.

One of two things I find too fiddly to eat: the second being cherries without a pitter.

I'm not grossed out by chicken feet (more poetically called 'phoenix claws' in Chinese), but I find them so damned difficult to eat. You're supposed to just pop them in your mouth and (look away if squeamish) suck the skin and sinew off the bones, spitting the bones out, but this is a way of eating I just haven't inherited from that side of my family. (Noodle slurping I can do, though.)

A beef ball: tender and flavoured subtly with things like ginger, garlic and spring onions

Mum and I, with me showing off my mad chopsticks skills.

Afterword: We went to a really nice restaurant for dim sum on this occasion, but dim sum isn't usually a formal thing. I've also noticed that a lot of Chinatown restaurants in London only do dim sum at lunchtime to 5pm (and it was indeed lunchtime when we went to this place)- so I guess it's more of a lunch/ brunch thing.