My Dinner Table: Vancouver Wedding Banquet

I'm not sure anyone is still reading as I haven't posted in a very long time. It has been a busy couple of weeks and you'll get to read about all the food I've eaten in my recent travels over the coming days. But first, I needed to write about the second wedding. For most people to have a second wedding banquet they need to get divorced and remarried. Luckily for me and Daphne that wasn't the case. As regular readers, if there are any of you left, know, I got married last year on Nov. 1 in Cordele, Ga. It was an amazing weekend of non-stop parties and feasting. But for my parents that just wasn't enough. I have lots of relatives in Vancouver who did not make the trip to Georgia. Nearly all of my family is there, so we needed to go to Vancouver and hold some sort of event to celebrate there. So my parents decided a sort-of-traditional Chinese wedding banquet was in order. I say sort of traditional because we didn't exactly follow all of the traditions, but it was in a big Chinese restaurant, Sun Sui Wah. My family loves the place and they treat us well, so it was my Mum's first choice. Dinner began with an appetizer plate of all sorts of goodies. Roast pork, some honey garlic spareribs, jellyfish, some deep fried rolls of some sort, some bean curd thing, it was all great.

Then came the Peking duck. I love Peking duck. Crispy duck skin and a little duck fat, rolled in a pancake thing. What is there not to love about it. It is crispy and rich. They do it quite well at Sun Sui Wah and it was fun for those who had never had it to give it a try.

Next up the soup. A seafood and winter melon mixture. Just what winter melon is, I'm not entirely sure, but it is great in soups and I've been eating it for as long as I can remember. This winter melon soup though was made special with all the seafood that was included in the soup.

Then came the potato bird's nest with seafood and peas. The seafood at Sun Sui Wah is handled so well. It was just cooked. Not overcooked. This is very important for me. I hate overcooked seafood. How they are able to do 15 tables so quickly is impressive.

After that was the lettuce wrap. We ate the skin of the duck in the Peking duck. This was the meat. When I was a kid this was one of my favourite dishes. The cool lettuce against the warm duck meat mixture and crunchy fried noodles. It is a dish that hits all the right spots.

The crab and lobster stir-fried with ginger and green onion was the next dish to arrive. The crab is always the highlight for me, but maybe not for the same reasons as it might be for you. While I love the crab and lobster and cracking into the shells and getting every last bit of meat out of them is great, what I really love are the innards from the crab and the noodles that sit under the dish. Especially the noodles. They take on so much flavour from the crab and lobster sitting on top of them, they are fantastic. And there is no other way that I know of to get them to taste like that. They were probably my favorite thing I ate that night.

This is the crispy skin chicken with shrimp chips. Imagine the finest roast chicken you have even had. That's what the crispy skin chicken at a good Chinese restaurant is. To be honest I don't know how they cook it. I believe it is a two step process in which the chicken is either boiled or steamed and then either deep fried or had hot oil poured over it until the skin in golden and crispy. This is what I'm trying to imitate when I make my roast chicken at home.

The gailan with squid and prawns came next. I was happy to see a little bit of vegetable hit the table, plus I love the squid and prawns. Heavily flavoured with garlic, the dish is quite simple, but delicious.

These are pea tips. My favourite vegetable. Stir fried with oil and garlic. That's all you need to do to them. Well, it is a lot of garlic and oil, but really, that's all you need. Maybe a little salt. As much as I did enjoy dinner at Play a couple of weeks ago, theirs don't come close to these. I say when cooking vegetables it is always good to consult the Chinese. I didn't get a picture of the next dish. It was steamed black cod with black bean sauce on tofu. I remember having just a bite, because as I'm sure you can imagine, I was quite full at this point in the meal. Black cod though is one of my favourite fish to eat, so I loved having it at this particular meal.

And just in case you were still hungry, there was fried rice. There is some sort of wedding fried rice, but I like this one more, so that's what my Mum and Aunt decided to order instead. Unfortunately I was so stuffed I didn't eat any that night. I had some the next morning as leftovers, but I was just too full.

However I wasn't too full for dessert. Though there was mango pudding, which I also did not get a picture of, my Mum ordered us a cake. I guess she thought a wedding banquet wasn't the same without a cake. But she didn't order just any cake. This is diplomat cake from Notte's Bon Ton. Far and away my favourite cake in the world. It was huge. The biggest diplomat cake I've ever seen. I loved it. As much as I did love the wedding cake in Georgia, this cake was better. Rich layers of cake, French pastry and butter-cream icing. This is the best cake in the world and I've eaten a lot of cake.

And here's a picture of mum Mum and my Aunt, who organized the dinner. I just thought I would post up a picture of them because of all the work they put into the dinner. I've lost count of the number of times I used the phrase "my favourite" in this post because although I had no part in deciding the menu, they picked all my favourite dishes. They hit it out of the park with this one. That's my Mum on the left and my aunt on the right. It was so much fun to go to Vancouver and celebrate our wedding all over again. So many relatives that I don't often see and friends that I no longer see now that I'm living in Ottawa.

Comments

Awesome!
Were you forced to play any Chinese marriage games? Ugh.

Posted by: are you gonna eat that | February 18, 2009 at 10:48 AM

Your mom and your aunt always hit it out of the park. This meal was no different. We had a great time and a great feast.

Posted by: Rob | February 18, 2009 at 11:29 AM

Sorry I missed it. Looked like a fabulous chinese feast!
I too LOVE the diplomat cake. I didn't know they were still around... I used to get one for my birthday as a kid, but much smaller.

Congrats again!

Posted by: Mike D | February 22, 2009 at 07:34 PM