TV Dinner

In the States, if you are feeling too tired to cook, you might pull out that old frozen dinner that you keep for just such an emergency and enjoy a night of pre-made turkey dinner with mashed potatoes and peas. Here, we pull out baozi, or buns. Usually we get jaozi, which are boiled, but this new variety meant we got to use our bamboo steaming basket! Very exciting.


The baozi are ready made, so we just take them out of the plastic wrap and put them right into the steamer. When we finished cooking we remembered that we actually have some steamer liners to prevent the buns from sticking to the wood. Luckily no buns were fataly wounded during the removal process - even without using the liners.

This is our special steamer wok. It's more rounded than the cooking wok so that it can hold a lot of water under a steamer basket. The sales ladies had a good time trying to explain the difference between cooking and steaming woks back when Michael was buying them.

And here is our dinner all plumped up with steam and ready to be eaten. Add a little spiciness, seaseme oil, and soysauce and we are ready to go!