One doesn't usually associate Chinese dim sum with Christmas.
But what with the diet these days and all that comes with it, you take any opportunity (and season) that comes around, and you go eat.
I didn't want to wait till Chinese New Year 2024 to go have dim sum at Yum Cha.
If best, I wanted it to be part of the celebrations closing the 2023 year.
We'd talked about it.
We'd put it on the list.
But I still wasnt' sure.
That is, until one day when a free afternoon popped up in the schedule and so we decided to go.
Yum Cha in Chinatown doesn't have a special Christmas menu.
Neither does she have anything Christmasy in her dim sum offerings.
What she does have, however, are familiar favorites that anyone who fancies dim sum will know, and love.
There wasn't any particular dish I was looking out for this afternoon when we got to the restaurant five minutes before the alloted time.
But so happy was I, when, very quickly, almost three minutes after our order, amongst all that came to the table there was a plate of fried chicken wings, there was a plate of egg tarts, there was a basket of the yam puff thing, there were siew mais, and there was a basket of char siew pau.
All favorites were they, and I loved them all, beginning with the fried chicken wings, which although not the har cheong kai kind, were hot, crispy, and full of flavor even down to the meat inside.
There was the delight of the egg tarts where I'm glad to say that instead of finishing all three at one go, I decided to space out and eat them up like an in-between dessert between everything else.
It wasn't a bad way to have them egg tarts.
The custard was firm, the flavor was lightly sweet, and by the time I came to the third tart I was eating the custard out of the custard crust using a little spoon.
I went on to the paus not too long after my first tart, deciding it best to split the pau up into half, pick the soft, sweet, slinky pieces of char siew out with my chopsticks, and nibble away on the bun after.
It's an unusual way of having char siew pau, I know- most of us just bite into it with the bun held in our hands- but on rare occasions it's pretty cool to take things slow and eat with elegance rather than focus on the fun.
Then again I'm the sort who leans more towards fun than decorum, so yep, the siew mai was eaten with a single chopstick skewered right through.
I couldn't do that with the yam puff, of course, the outer layer was flaky and any effort to spear the puff with a chopstick would result in a shower of pastry bits dropping on the plate and the table below.
It takes a bit of skill to eat this, by the way, so what I did was to lift it up with my chopsticks, take a small bite, put it back down, attempt to break the outer layer apart with my chopsticks, then eat the filling and the pastry each on its own.
I don't know whether it heightened the enjoyment of the puff or not, but definitely it made things easier and the plate neater.
There were a lot of food that we ordered that afternoon.
Except that right now- what with it being three months down the line- I can't seem to remember them all.
Perhaps there was a plate of bean curd skin skilfully wrapped around thick, chunky sweet prawns.
Perhaps there was an order of Crystal paus, which is, by the way, one of my favorites in dim sum and at one go I can easily eat a few of them cute little steamed translucent buns of glutinous rice skins stuffed with tasty, savory chives.
I like the chew of these little paus.
Especially the skins.
But I like how the minced vegetables and turnips and chives mix with the chew of the Crystal Paus too.
Really, I was thankful to have them.
Likewise thankful so was I to have not one, but three bamboo baskets of xiao long baos which, we first ordered two, then afterwards decided we could eat another three- and so ordered the last basket- which is, I tell you, a really good idea because you don't need to speed through the eating or have to go through the unfortunate situation where the thin skin of the dumpling gets stuck to the paper underneath and you lose your soup.
If three baskets of xiao long bao marked one of the highlights of this meal, well, there were others too.
Like the basket of siew mais which came not too long after the third basket of xiao long baos and which I really love.
Like this radish cake which was a surprise actually because it's not something we tend to order when we have dim sum at other places but here today at Yum Cha's buffet it felt impossible to ignore.
May I say that the cute, neatly-cut rectangular shaped of radish cake was fried just the way I like it, crisp on the outside, soft on the inside, pleasantly hot on the tongue?
I loved how the edges were crusty and crispy, the insides soft and mushy.
You didn't need to chew.
One bite and everything simply crumbled, leaving you with its gentle flavors of savory and salty without the cloying sense of over-fried oil.
We were getting rather stuffed by this time but then my friend noticed that there were a couple of interesting new dishes on the menu that we previously hadn't tried before, so we decided to order.
Here's the thing, however.
I can't remember what they were.
No doubt what stands out in this plate of dim sum is the fresh, gorgeous, Christmasy color of green, but, really, what's charming isn't just the prawn (or is it scallop) in this siew mai-looking thing, but that the skin's made out of a vegetable.
Spinach, pea, something else, I can't now remember.
It wasn't distinctive a flavor- you couldn't tell what it was made of- but the texture was chewy, the prawn (or the scallop) inside was firm, and the flavor was lightly salty, with a very, very, very faint hint of sweet.
I wish I hadn't forgotten what it was we ordered.
A befuddled memory don't do these pictures justice.
Especially when I'm now looking at this youtiao-looking thing, which might well be really a piece of youtiao sliced into half then stuffed with cuttlefish or some other meat inside, but which I'm sure, was, based on the standards that Yum Cha upholds, crispy, firm and good.