Green Eggs and Ham, Meet Your Competition

Kelby

As you may know, the Sisterhood has finally arrived in Hangzhou! But does that mean we are no longer busy? No. No it does not.

So far the food in Hangzhou has been nothing short of exemplary. We have definitely not been eating as much eggplant (which Mrs. Waterman and I love so much) but we have been trying many new kinds of food. Take yesterday, for example. I had 3 amazing opportunities to try the Hangzhou cuisine: once at our “Welcome Banquet” for lunch, another at our cooking class, and a third at dinner with my host family. Let’s start with the Welcome Banquet.

The Welcome Banquet comprises of many faculty members from the school, including the Vice Principal, a Dean of the institution, and two teachers involved in the program. The staff was responsible for ordering the meal, and one of the dishes in the meal was sweet lotus with sticky rice. This particular dish is a Hangzhou delicacy, and essentially tastes like rice and syrup (so basically syrup), which is absolutely delicious. From the Welcome Banquet we proceeded to our cooking class.

Our cooking class was taught by the school chef, Mr. Bacon. Personally, I’m a big fan of Mr. Bacon not only for his name, but also because he can cook some amazing food and he has a stellar fashion sense. Mr. Bacon decided he was going to teach us how to make dumplings that looked like flowers. He had Liz, Iona, Mrs. Waterman, Yiran and Irene (the two students who show us around), and I roll the dumpling wrapper, stuff the dumpling with a pork and bamboo filling, shape the dumpling into a flower, and further stuff the dumpling with peppers, ham, and egg. The process sounds difficult and long, but we had Mr. Bacon to help us... so everything was fine! We then had a nice, dumpling snack.