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Tahoe Lake Beach Dinner

John Liu
11 years ago

I've mentioned our yearly week at the beach in South Lake Tahoe, in prior posts. As usual, I can't find those posts on GW.

Anyway, Thursday is our turn to cook. Two of the ladies, both named Nathalie and both French, turned fifty recently. So we are planning a nice sunset dinner on the sand for them.

Provisional menu:

- Bacon salmon gorgonzola balls. These are wrapped. chilled, and deep fried. I made a version earlier, but it needed work. Hopefully these will not suck.

- Five spice pork ribs. I've not made this dish before. It requires boiling the ribs, then marinating them overnight, then deep frying, then wok frying in sauce. It seems like a restaurant sort of dish with all these steps, but what the hey, I brought star anise and five spice powder up with me to make this.

- Fish and chive dumplings. "Eww," says SWMBO, "who makes dumpling with fiiiiish?" The Chinese do, says I.

- Thai stir fry prawns. As far as I can tell, this is basically fish sauce + lemon grass + prawns + heat. Another "never made before" experiment. To make it worse, the lemon grass I can find up here comes-in-a-tube.

- Dry-cooked green beans. The problem with a dish like this is that everyone has had it, and every Chinese-American greasy spoon serves it, so success is measured by how closely you can replicate the product sold at Chin's Kitchen or whatever the local Chinglish place is called.

- Vinegared beets. This doesn't go with anything but I want to eat it. So there.

- Fried rice. Okay, we have nine kids to feed and (a) they may not like any of the above (b) I may not want to spend enough effort and shekels to fill a six-year old's plate with hand-built delicacies just to see almost all of it thrown in the trash ten minutes later. You know what I mean.

- Peach cobbler and ice cream. Let us speak the Truth. Chinese desserts are lame.

Okay, having listed the dishes here I am forced to make them, rather than falling back on, say, fish sticks and Ding Dongs. I will post pictures unless it is a real disaster.

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