My Dinner Attempt

Well, we managed to find some ingredients I thought I needed to cook for the whanau. Good Old Guangzhou had everything, as I said.
My menu was to be: braised beef in grappa sauce; couscous with capsicum and onion; tomato pasta; basil and mushroom pasta; roast chicken stuffed with appropriate herb stuffing; roast herbed crunchy potatoes; tomato and mozzarella salad; olive platter.
My first pit was the lack of good cheeses, though I picked up some passable ones in Guangzhou. Then was lack of an oven. I had to rethink all the roasted stuff into fried/boiled stuff. I didn't realise how much I'd depended on an oven for cooking.
The next was that Lemon's mum ate nothing that came from a cow or sheep, but wasn't vegetarian, so still ate fish etc. All my dairy dishes, bread dishes, beef, cheese etc had to be reconsidered so she could partake. Pesto has cheese, for instance.
Herbs are impossible to find - fresh certainly, but not any I'd heard of (at least in Chinese) so keeping an interesting flavour was a challenge.
I did passably well despite these hurdles, but who ever thinks their planned dinner is exactly perfect? The polite trying of each unfamiliar dish and the apprehensive looks gave me, though somewhat vindictive I suppose, great satisfaction as I got to introduce new and weird flavoured dishes and vigorously encourage people to eat more! Hah! That's for the dove's gizzards, gecko floss and snout broth I ate all over China!

There was plenty left over for tomorrow.