Dinner

After Vivian's boss left, we had our family gathering three days later for the Winter Festival - in a local Peking restaurant.

(No, it was not the Spring Deer. We went to the one a block next to it.)

The main dish of this event was a beggar's chicken. We deliberately avoided all expensive stuffs. I'm sure many of the audience of this blog are the same as me and are tired of the menu of a traditional Chinese banquet, with sucking pig followed by hot dish followed by shark fin followed by abalone followed by steamed fish followed by chicken followed by rice and noodles ...

(Oh, the menu seems endless; it just put an end to your coronary artery with tons of cholesterol.)

Alas, don't have the impression that traditional Chinese people were all that affluent and they had the same list to go through in a wedding ceremony a hundred years ago. If you take a look on a banquet menu 60 or 70 years ago, you would be impressed to find the dishes were less elaborated but in fact environment friendly. (One classic example is to use crab meat for the noodles because that's what left after using the claws for the hot dish.) It is, in fact, all those restaurant owners who make this kind of lengthy and costly menu seemingly indispensable.

This is, alas, a kind of product bundling (綑綁銷售) to increase the profit margin.