What a month of celebrations!  March, my birthday month, St. Patrick’s Day and this year, Earth Hour was celebrated on March 31st at 8:30. Kman had a good day, celebrating the milestone 10th birthday of a long-time friend (Happy B-Day Tiny-L), the last day of the month capped off with a candle-lit dinner and subsequent rousing game of Milles-Bournes (the 10,000 point championship won by your scribe, if I may say so).  It was enchanting.  We sat at the centre of our universe – the dining room table – playing by candlelight.  It was a rare opportunity to use both of our large candelabras, providing enough light to play our game but not so tall that they set the paper-covered dining room chandelier on fire. What a strange thing that would’ve been – our electric light, turned off for this environmentally-friendly occasion, set on fire by our earth-hour friendly candles.  Perish the thought.

We started the evening by using our newly purchased butane-powered hot-pot burner.  Let me give a bit of history here.  While we were in Beijing, our delightful hosts took us out for a vegan meal. This wouldn’t have been easy for them to do. When adopting from China you’re assigned guides who work for the state and they take you around, help you with translation and dealing with all of the administrative issues.  The state also treats you to a complimentary meal for families adopting and the usual fare is Peking Duck, since it’s a specialty of Beijing.  Since we don’t eat duck, Peking or otherwise, our intrepid guide Lily found a vegan restaurant via the internet (a feat in itself, if you recall our earlier difficulties while posting from Beijing). It was a tiny hole-in-the-wall place off of a hutong near the Forbidden City.  There were 6 of us (including Lily and our driver whose name, I’m embarrassed to say, escapes me at this time) and we sat around a couple of tables with benches while they served us two hot-pots:  one was a tofu-fish hotpot and the other was a simulated chicken, also made from tofu. The hot-pot is a shallow stainless-steel vessel that sit on a butane-powered burner, simmering and bubbling with veggies, spices, and a dark rich broth to die for. The ‘fish’ was an actual fish-shaped tofu that was spiced and textured, flaky and seared as though a real fish. It was incredible that something so delicate could withstand the boiling temperature of the soup.  In similar fashion, the ‘chicken’ had the texture and flavour of chicken. This ‘simulation’ might not be for everyone but we’ve had similar fake-meat meals in Buddhist-Chinese restaurants and one cannot deny the art of producing tofu that mimics the texture and flavour of meat, especially while it sits in a pot of soup broth that bubbled and boiled, becoming hotter and more flavourfilled the longer we sat.

How do we duplicate the Chinese hot-pot, and most importantly, where to buy these things in Toronto?  Well, at T & T Supermarket down on Cherry Street, natch (should’a bought some dragron fruit while we were there).  We picked up a pot and a butane burner for less than $40 and soon after we had our own hot-pot a-boiling and roiling, and since we were celebrating Earth Hour, we didn’t need any electricity to keep that baby going.  I have to say that the ambience of the little restaurant in Beijing was missing, as was the celebratory mood of that day (we’d received all paperwork required to bring baby home), but there was something intimately nice about sitting around with our loved ones, eating our hot-pot soup, playing board games and listening to music by candlelight.  We pulled the blinds down lest the glaring lights from everyone else filter in.

And glaring lights there were:  from our vantage point we couldn’t see a dark window out there.  I read that the power usage in Toronto during Earth Hour 2012 went down about 6%.  Really?  Is that all?  Come on people, let’s do better next year, ‘kay?  Come on over to our place and we’ll eat in the dark.