A vegetarian 1-year birthday (Part 2)

In a departure from the CSI Miami scenes of Cafe del Mar, Faith celebrated her birthday with Eve's parents in a much more tranquil and peaceful way.

A day before Faith's actual birthday, Eve, myself, Faith, my in-laws, Nell (Eve's cousin), Richard (Nell's hubbie), Nicole (their daughter), Auntie Lely descended on "Classic Lao Di Fang" - a vegetarian restaurant for Faith's one-year party celeb with Eve's family. We were also fortunate to have Auntie Catherine - Eve's aunt currently staying in the UK, and Aunt "Liz" (Aunty Catherine's friend from the UK) arrive on a flight that afternoon - just in time to join us for the dinner after a shower at the hotel. Eve's brother and sister-in-law had to make a trip back to Malaysia as her SIL's dad was in hospital.

As some of you might know, my Mother-in-Law (MIL) is a vegetarian and Eve and I wanted to make sure that she was included in Faith's one-year celeb. MIL has in the past year, showered time and love on Faith, unfailingly coming over to help Eve take care of Faith 5 days a week, every week. So three weeks ago, at the same time that we had planned the Cafe Del Mar celebs, we also managed to convince MIL to do a "simple dinner celebration". At that time, MIL was insistent that we keep it simple and that we did not call it a birthday celeb. And we promptly agreed because whatever the reason, it was good enough for us that Faith was eating out with MIL and with Eve's extended family.

Classic Lao Di Fang turned out to be quite a nice choice. Ironically, Classic Lao Di Fang wasn't our first choice, because MIL had originally given us some recommendation to another vegetarian restaurant called Happy Realm - also in the same area - in Chinatown. But as luck would have it, during one weekday, Faith, MIL, Eve and myself had a chance to do a rare dinner outside together, and we went out for a vegetarian meal at Classic Lao Di Fang. We liked the food so much that the rest was history.

One of the things about vegetarian food sometimes is the presence of 'mock meats' which are really just flour of some sort, rolled to look like ham, prawn, pork, chicken, whatever would look familiar to a 'meat lover'. I think 'mock meats' literally mean 'fake meats' but it could be taken to also mean making a mockery of one's senses. After all, can one really be deceived by the looks of something that looks like meat, but tastes like flour?

Fortunately for us, the food at Classic Lao Di Fang came with sufficient variety without us having to order much mock meat. And in fact, we had a really nice vegetarian meal consisting of steamboat with beancurd and mushrooms, fried mushrooms in cereal fried with basil, yam ring, Ee-fu noodles, fried "red-brown' rice, as well as veggies like sweet potato leaves and Sichuan french beans with minced 'meat'. Whatever little mock meat that came in the dishes, it was actually well done and not overly "in-your-face" - which was really much appreciated by everyone.

Eve and I also certainly agreed that it was probably the best vegetarian restaurant we've been to - as for the birthday girl - she was just content spending time with Mama - incessantly smiling and laughing at MIL's every move. I don't think she even knew that Mama went to the trouble of getting her a vegetarian cake (without eggs), but I think she certainly enjoyed her birthday celeb - I think possibly more than the 'loud' dinner we had at Cafe Del Mar. :)