Chatteris LOVE 16/09
I love Wednesdays...for so many reasons. Lucy and Amy introduced me to humpday wednesdays - I think I am quite late to this concept but in a nutshell, you make it to Wednesdays and you are over the hump of the week and its all downhill until to the weekend I think that its ingenious and quite fitting for how my week seems to go! Another special thing about Wednesdays are that, the evenings are spent at Chatteris for workshops and Chatteris LOVE events. It's a great opportunity to see and catch up with all the other CNETS and to share experiences of the week whilst also trying out and experiencing something of the Hong Kong culture (and also eat copious amounts of biscuits and Chinese tea!). It's kind of our home away from home and a great atmosphere to relax in. This week Chatteris hosted its first Read and Write Chinese with Auntie Grace (the project manager of the charity) and also a Cantonese cooking lesson! Grace, with the invaluable help of a few girls from the Fresh Fish school, where the Chatteris office is and also where we did our first week orientation wnet through some of the Cantonese strokes for learning to write Cantonese (there are 8 if I remember rightly) and then introduced us to a kinergarten sets of picture flash cards for us to learn how to read Cantonese. Our group were given colours and we were subjected to Suki (one of the lovely primary girls) sitting near us and making us repeat and repeat and repeat each sound after her to the familiar refrain of 'no, not zee but ze ee' - what i was saying and what she was saying sounded rather similar to me however rather different to her! Hopefully by the end of the 9 months, I will have mastered the basics in kindergarten reading and writing! we alo have our own notebooks complete with boxes for the chinese characters. Since Chinese is a graphic language as opposed to a phonic langauge like ours. The entire process involves a much different approach to most other subjects and indeed languages and sometimes it is not what you feel like doing after a long day at school but it is an extremely worthwhile thing to aim at. I am making the basic reading and writing my challenge this year as I have no excuses since there are many willing and kind helping hands on offer to help me so expect some interesting and illegible Christmas cards from me..haha!
After an intense Chinese language training session, (!) we moved in to the more relaxed cooking lesson, where Margaret and Irene were teaching us the delights of how to make Chinese wontons and dumplings which you see everywhere around Hong Kong. Chinese dumplings are made by wrapping meat or vegetable fillings in a flat dough (which looks like very thin pastry, almost like rice paper) which is then crimped around the edges (rather fiddly!) Similarly, wontons are made from Chinese wrappers of wheat flour, water and egg, which vary in thickness depending on what they will be used for. You can stuff them with ground meats or tofu and beans -indeed it seems any kind of variation is okay! These can then be boiled or steamed in the wonton soup or fried until crisp The dumplings can then be pan fried, boiled or steamed. In our case, we had a soup going for this purpose which, in true Chinese style, seemed to have all manner of things floating in it, to give it flavour. In Hong Kong, many of the dishes are based around this idea of a soup into which go pretty much everything, noodles, meat, dumplings, egg, vegetables etc. I think it is some kind of wonton soup which again dates back to the 7th century. Apparantly, the long finger like, almost crescent shape for the dumplings symbolise wealth and so are traditionally served and eaten around Chinese New Year for good luck.
However fiddly it proved to be, (Margaret saved most of mine which I think is why they worked so well!) it was also really fun forming them and then plopping them in to the big communal bowl of ever steaming soup and then attempting to work out which shape was yours to eat, when we wanted it again later! We were given a sheet with some other recipes on it so if I am feeling adventurous anytime soon, I may give it a try!
It was such a nice evening and I feel as if the charity continues to provide such a wealth of support and help even when though we have started our schools etc and it feels like we have been here for ages, its like our family away from home! awww! xxxx
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