Mystery Meat

My dad has a few friends who are Burmese, one of whom recently had a daughter. In their tradition, you celebrate 100 days after birth with a feast. So this party of sorts was at a Chinese restaurant, which sounds awesome because who wouldn't want nine courses of General Tso's yumyums? But hold on to your taste buds, this was real Chinese food. None of the made up, American, not even remotely Chinese in nature, Chinese food. Nope, this was the real deal.

We started of with a platter, which I neglected to take a picture of because I was just so enthralled. There were beef ribs, calimari, and duck, all of which was pretty harmless. But there was also duck tongue. Tongue! And there were probably at least 30 on our platter, and multiply that times every table at the party...well, that answer begs the question my Dad so artfully asked. How many ducks are we eating?!

(Two duck tongues!  Actually they tasted fine, but there isn't a lot of meat on there.)

But the fun doesn't stop there!  Also on this platter were these mystery orange things.  Perhaps octupus.  No one was really all that sure.

(Aakash bravely approached the orange stuff.)

Okay course two.  Much tamer, and much more delicious!  Little balls of fried dough with condensed milk inside, candied pecans, broccoli, and shrimp.  It was all quite good, except for the fact that the shrimp was drenched in this mayo-based sauce.  Like, you could tell you were eating a whole lot of mayo.  That made me squick out a little.  Okay, a lot.  So, needless to say, tht shrimp did not get eaten by me.

Course three- soup!  It was quite good, although I don't actually know what it was.  I do know that someone at the table put a little bit of red wine vinegar and Johnny Walker Black in the cup to bring out the flavor of the seafood.  

(Good to the last drop!)

Course four was perhaps my favorite of the night.  Why?  Because no one knew what it was.  No one!  Even the wait staff just shurgged and said "Seafood?"

(In the end we decided that it may or may not have been conch and abalone.)

The fifth course, lobster, was very artfully displayed.  With both the lobster head and tail on the plate, it represented good luck from head to toe for the baby.

This was followed by a sixth course of chicken and a seventh course of fish, also featuring the heads and tails.  I have the pictures, but they're kind of creepy, so I'll refrain from posting them.

Then came the tame stuff.  Courses eight and nine were lo mein and fried rice with nuts and raisins, followed by a fruit platter and a sweet soup of black bean and tapioca, making it a grand total of eleven!

But the fun didn't stop there!  Someone at the table put in an order for the chef's specialty.  And I was very glad they did.  Out came chicken wings stuffed with sticky rice with a side of Sriracha mixed with something sweet.  So good!

(YUM!)

All in all, it was a very interesting night.  I tried a whole lot of new things and had a lot of fun doing it.  Certainly a culinary adventure worth having.

I leave you with the quote of the evening:

Me: I work for Habitat for Humanity

Random Guy: Oh cool, you work with ducks!