Moon Festival Fun

Moon Festival was Sunday. We celebrated by going to the Mei Hua Chinese School’s party on Saturday night. Kai and Shen made paper lanterns and a calligrapher wrote the Chinese characters for their names for them. There were a bunch of musical performances. A group of children sang a song called "Jasmine Flower" that Shen thought he knew and he was singing along.

On Sunday night we celebrated by having our friends the Gudmundsens over for a homemade Chinese dinner. We kept to a pretty simple menu: fried rice, egg flour soup and pot sticker dumplings. Cooking for 8 meant lots of chopping and mixing and some math for doubling recipes. Egg flower soup is very simple to make and is Kai’s absolute favorite food. The trick to fried rice is using day old rice so we had cooked up lots of jasmine rice the day before. We considered using packaged wrappers for the pot stickers, but in the end did the right thing and made our own. The dough is really simple and a little goes a long way. We made over 40 of them which was pretty labor intensive, but definitely worth it as these were the hit of the dinner!

After dinner we ate mooncakes. We bought fewer mooncakes this year because we’ve had too many in the past. I think they are something of an acquired taste if you haven’t had them before. They aren’t like a regular western cake, and their diminutive size does not convey the heavy richness inside. This is the fourth year we’ve celebrated Moon Festival and now I find myself looking forward to mooncakes. Kai and Shen both really like them too, so we probably could have done with a few more this year. We had a bunch of little ones with a sweet pineapple filling and two large lotus-seed ones with the duck egg yolk inside. Shen preferred the sweeter pineapple ones while Kai really loves the lotus-seed ones (these ones remind me of peanut butter bars). I was disappointed we couldn’t find any of the red bean paste ones locally this year, but there’s always next year.

After eating mooncake we waited for it to get dark then went outside and looked at the moon. We have had beautiful clear weather lately so it was warm and the moon was very, very bright. It was almost 9 o’clock before the moon cleared the trees around our house so the boys had to stay up pretty late to see it, then it was straight to bed!