Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da, Yum Cha

On Sunday, we were invited to join two other families for yum cha. 

Known as dim sum in the US, it's a meal at a Chinese restaurant where servers bring by all sorts of various dishes and you take what you want. Because we had a large group, we had the upstairs banquet room to ourselves, which was fortunate:

Great chance to try lots of different foods. Lots of dumplings, steamed buns, even delicious calamari. Of course, our kids mostly stuck to rice, though they did like the dessert:

Afterwards, we took advantage of a rare warm and sunny winter day and took the kids to the park. 


It was such a nice weekend. Although we try not to eat out two much, it was a rare weekend as we did it twice. Andy and I joined two other American couples (our friends Tierney and John, and their friends Annie and Colin) for dinner in the CBD on Saturday night. Luckily we were able to drop the girls off at a friends house and therefore we didn't have to pay $18/hour for babysitting! Gills Diner was delicious, and in a cool building. The menus were on chalkboards on the wall. Didn't get a picture, so I'll steal borrow one from another blog. 

The waitress told us of the specials, and some words/dishes, especially in French, were unfamiliar to us. The "highlight" though was when I asked about the "oxtongue pastry" that was served with a porterhouse steak. The waitress explained that it's "a pastry with oxtongue!" Go figure. I was hoping it was something else, I guess. Despite Annie's insistence that it was very good, I couldn't bring myself to order and try it. 
The meals we did order were delicious, but the culinary highlight was the churros served with a cup of orange-flavored chocolate for dipping. Beat Andy's chocolate slice with peanut butter ice cream hands down!