Tamander's Travels: Dim Sum Fun

One of my favorite memories growing up was going out for dim sum with my family on Saturday or Sunday mornings. The Chinese restaurant was always bustling with hungry customers and my siblings, cousins, and I would get to pick our favorite foods off the carts that clattered by. Last Sunday, my parents invited us out to dim sum (or in Cantonese, "yum cha", a phrase Mike knows quite well) to kick start my and my sister's spring break.

Sometimes we have a tendency to be late...

But not too late...!

One of the best places in the Twin Cities for dim sum is Mandarin Kitchen off of Lyndale in Bloomington.

As the Cantonese name indicates ("yum cha" means "drink tea"), hot tea is the first thing that arrives at the table.

It doesn't take long, however, for the people maneuvering the carts or carrying dishes to stop by and present you with their assortments of small plates.

A lot of dim sum fare is steamed, sometimes in bamboo steamers and sometimes in metal ones like those below.

Because dim sum was traditionally considered a snack to have with one's morning tea, the serving sizes are small. Now it just means there is more opportunity to try a variety of things.

The first thing we dug into were two fried cakes made of root vegetables. Lo Bak Goh is made out of daikon, a kind of Japanese radish and is the paler cake in the picture below. We also had Wu Tal Goh, which is made out of taro root and slightly darker (also already eaten by the time the picture was taken). Overall, we kids (Kim, Mike, and I) preferred the slightly sweeter Lo Bak Goh. They both are good when eaten with soy sauce and chili oil.

My parents said that the curried squid was especially good this particular day. My siblings and I used to fight over who got to have more squid in our noodle soups.

Siu Mai is a steamed dumpling filled with ground pork (sometimes mixed with shrimp) and topped with either crab or fish roe. This particular dim sum dish is now often found in some frozen food aisles of grocery stores.

Har Gow is one of my all-time favorite dishes. It is a shrimp dumpling in a translucent wrapper made with wheat starch in the dough. Seriously amazing.

Mike's artistic plate of Siu Mai and Har Gow.

My sister and I really enjoy jelly fish salad. Yes, what looks like noodles below is really pickled jelly fish cut into thin strips. Yum.

A close up of the jelly fish.

Mike was brave enough to take a bite. It has a surprisingly crisp, yet chewy texture.

The chicken feet was also really good, albeit not attractive looking in the picture. There are lots of little bones you have work around, but the skin fell right off and was flavored just right.

Another one of my personal favorites is Har Cheung. It's a Fun Cheung (steamed rice flour roll) filled with shrimp and eaten with a sweetened soy sauce. Delicate and delicious.

Another dumpling, this time with a scallop on top.

In addition to savory dishes, dim sum also includes a number of sweet pastries and dessert type foods. Our family favorite is the Sesame Seed Ball which is made from a sticky rice flour that is filled with either a sweet red bean or yellow bean paste, rolled in sesame seeds and fried. Here, the waitress is using the favored cutting utensil of the Chinese to split our Sesame Seed Balls: scissors.