Fanchoi

Bottom of the Fanchoi

From time to time, I like buying a small bowl of Fanchoi from the coffee shop below my parents' flat. It's very basic food, consisting of rice, a tiny piece of hardboiled egg and a slice or 2 of char siu. But I'm very fond of it.

Since I had some char siu leftover after making Yangzhou Fried Rice, I boiled an egg and cooked some rice to make the dish. I suspect that there are at least 2 ways of making the dish :

Top of the Fanchoi

1) You oil a steaming dish and line it with a few slices of char siu and hard-boiled egg. Then you add some soaked raw rice with some char siu sauce seasoning (or just use a bit of sugar, soy sauce, oyster sauce and rice wine) and steam everything together over rapidly boiling water for at least 20 minutes; or

2) You oil a steaming dish and line it with a few slices of char siu and hard-boiled egg. Then you add some cold cooked rice with the char siu seasoning and steam it for 10 minutes just to heat everything through. Which also means that you can do it in the microwave oven - forget the traditional method blah blah.

I have never tried method 1. The Teenager loved it, I didn't even get to have a taste. It looked like it could have done with more sauce.

I'm getting cross-eyed from staring at the computer screen all day. Am trying to plan at least 2 trips (one for early April and one for end May and eventually also for June, July and August...) at the same time and it's really time-consuming and painful. Wish I could just call up a travel agency and let them do the work, no problem with the cost :-). But alas, resources are still very limited in this big household.

This week the kids have breakdancing lessons at school. In my time, we associated breakdancing with the "bad" kids. Those hanging out at Centrepoint shopping centre or somewhere like that. Fancy us having a breakdancing expert come give lessons to interested students, staff and parents at the school? The world is certainly different now.

On Friday, there'll even be a whole-school breakdancing jam finale. And no, you won't see me trying anything. We all know that my bones are stiff and I don't have a dancing bone in me.