A weekend meal idea for 2-3 people

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Weekend is coming again? Time - where has the time gone? Last weekend is just like yesterday. I could not remember what I have done during the whole week at, or probably I did not do anything at all. A few nights I woke up from sleep, could not help thinking time fast passing by, and how much I have wasted. I swear, for some time I got even scared to sleep. --- Don’t we just miss the years when we were very young, and we never had to understand what time was, what worries meant, what life means.

One thing has got to continue, and not wasting time --- to eat. We don’t only take ‘eating food’ to supply our body, but also for tasting life, you know, bitterness, spicy, sweet, salty, sour… and just joyful chewing…:))


Here is a meal idea for the weekend. I picked up some recipes I already posted.

I say ‘weekend recipe’, is because, in northeast China, it is a kind of tradition -- on the weekend -- to cook some flour based food, the common ones are different kinds of dumplings, baozi, shaomai…
It is not only because it takes some time to make, but also because it can gather the whole family spending time together -- help cooking and chat.

So here you go, the main dish is Bao zi. Although in the Bao zi recipe I posted before is vegetarian, if you look at the recipe posts for  dumplings’ fillings, most of them can be used for Baozi as well. You can choose vegetables, meat, or seafood of your choice.

In northeast China, homemade Baozi is normally considered as the main and only dish for dinner. (If you have Baozi in some restaurants, and chat with friends and families over the dining table, people tend to order some other dishes as well.) For in case my husband is not used to this kind of Chinese way of eating, I often prepare some other dishes to combine with Baozi. So here is what I would prepare for a weekend meal with Baozi. :))

Baozi is considered as ‘a bit’ dry, so traditionally, it is accompanied with some clear based soup. Since these Baozi are vegetarian, I made egg and tomato soup (clear based) to go with it.

As for the other dishes, there is no need (or time) to make too complicated ones, since Baozi could take up some of your time already. I think one or two salad (liangcai) dish is very good for the ‘hot’ Baozi, and in addition, probably one hot stir fried light dish.

So the meal idea would be, Baozi (with vegetarian filling), tomato and egg soup, bean sprouts salad, and stir fry cauliflower and broccoli, which is a quick-fix, and can leave you enough time to do other dishes. And if you want to have beer to go with the dinner, black fungus and cucumber salad is an excellent choice.

The whole meal can be done within 2 hours including raising up the flour dough for the pastry of Baozi ( 1 hour and half for kneading and raising the dough). Enjoy the weekend!