my birthday meal #5

On our second night's stay at the resort we decided to have our dinner at the Chinese restaurant. When we were presented the set dinner menu we were amazed to see that it's a 10-course dinner! We secretly hoped that it wasn't going to take forever to eat the meal.

To start off we got given some cold pickled vegetables with cucumber, radish and cabbage. Not bad.

Our starter, from left: Shaoxing drunken chicken, marinated jelly fish, and mock chicken. The drunken was pretty bony and we couldn't really get much meat off it. And mock chicken was actually like tofu and it wasn't bad at all but most surprisingly of all I actually loved the jelly fish. It was crunchy and the vinegar-base marinate was a perfect match.

First course: shrimps with longjing tea leaves. Of course we had already tried the exact same dish the previous afternoon and we were happy to be having more.

Steamed crab with egg. It sounded weird and it tasted weird. Basically it's a bowl of water downed egg with a hairy crab leg in the middle. We had a little bite of the egg and it didn't really agree with us at all...it was really really fishy and salty.
We swapped the usually fatty grandma pork for some ma po tofu instead - glad we did it cos the tofu was very nicely cooked.

The fried rice again was excellent.

We told the waitress that we did not wish to have shark's fin (and we tried to convince her that shark's fin is bad but she wasn't interested). She was happy and quick to suggest a switch with our soup so we got some West Lake beef soup instead. I am not really keen on these thick northern soups they remind me of eating corn starch paste. My husband enjoyed his however and thought it was pretty good.

Crispy chicken with red chili. Too bad they were wings cos it was a lot of work trying to get to the meat. The little meat we got was really good though, even with the skin off we could still taste the chili seasonings.

Stir-fried chrysanthemum greens. It was our first time ever trying chrysanthemum greens. We assume it's the sprouts of the flower.

Finally for dessert we got the usual fruit combo with dragon fruit once again, and some sweet azuki bean paste jelly. I am guessing azuki bean is actually red bean. The "jelly" was more like a mousse and it tasted very plain and boring. We were happy and full from the meal though so we didn't really care.