Hot Pot

We left Canada at the start of Thanksgiving Weekend and are at our cousin Bessie’s place in WA right now. Even at 12:28am we’re still eating! LOL

If you’ve known me for a while or have read my posts, you know how much I’m capable of eating. A visit to my cousins is probably one of the only times where I can get so full that I fall into a food coma for an entire weekend. I actually gained three pounds during one of our visits over just two days! It’s a wonder that they’re not chubby. I think the trick is to be super active — they’re P90X-ers and ‘let’s go training for a half-marathon on Saturday mornings’ and ‘we just came back from climbing Mount Kilimanjaro’ uber-fit people.

We arrived yesterday evening just in time to surprise Bessie at her belated birthday party. Before arriving, we stopped to refill the tank at a gas station beside a KFC where Ang asked “you think we should get something at KFC?” to which I replied “are you kidding me? We’re going to Bessie and Mary’s!” (Bessie and Mary are sisters). Ang said that the party was only going to have “snacks” according to Mary. HA! As if. Mary ended up serving lasagna, seafood pasta, two types of salads, four types of hor’dourves, crackers with cheese and two types of dips, chips with salsa and guacamole, Chinese sticky rice, a Costco sized Greek dessert platter, moon cake, chicken nuggets, fancy cheese filled bread, in addition to Bessie’s signature lychee bellinis and iced tea vodka drinks etc.

Ang and me boxing at 321 Bounce

After “snacks” we went to 321 Bounce to sumo wrestle, box with giant gloves in a bouncy castle, compete through inflatable race courses, play dodgeball, and pretend to be kids at a birthday party. Mary had booked the place for an hour and didn’t think it’d be enough time, but one hour was the maximum allowed. After an hour we were all pooped! Best workout ever! It was so much fun — I was even laughing when Ang hit me square in the face with a giant boxing glove. My nose hurt for a while — she hit me so hard Morten actually heard a smack and thought I’d really been injured.

We got back to the house at around 11pm and spent the next three hours chatting and eating and then woke up eight hours later to meet everyone and start the food fest all over again! We went to a Chinese restaurant for a traditional Chinese breakfast that included salty soy bean soup, green onion pancakes, black bean noodles, Chinese beef pies (best ones I’ve tried), barley dumplings, stinky tofu, sticky rice filled with meats and veggies, fried Chinese donuts, and sticky seafood rice noodles.

It isn’t just the fact that there’s a lot of food around that makes us eat so much, it’s the fact that the food is SO GOOD!! My cousins know how to cook the yummiest foods and which dishes at which restaurants are the best. Tonight we had hot pot at Bessie’s for dinner and went to two different Asian grocery stores to get the right ingredients. Hot pot is always about the sauce, and they had all the stuff: garlic paste, green onion, soya sauce, vinegar, the hot pot black paste (it’s labelled barbeque, but it’s not actually barbeque flavour), and lots of grated daikon. They also had every kind of ball (fish, chicken, beef etc) and veggies, udon, clear noodles, and so on and so forth. For dessert Bessie made chocolate brownies that were crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside. YUM! If I spent a week with my cousins it’d take me a month to list out everything we would’ve eaten. Gobble gobble! Oink oink.

Time to sleep off the food coma…

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