Sledding & Siopao! + the Many Faces of Elora

Our friends from the Philippines told us about this awesome food cooked in a steamer like our favorite Nepali food Momo, which we’ve blogged about previously. It’s called Siopao. Prounounced “Shoe-Pow”. Which is what we will refer to it as from here on.

After hearing all about it, we insisted that Christine and Elcid come over and show us how to make it. To start, we chopped up 2 onions, cried a bit, chopped up a few cloves of garlic and sauteed in oil. Then cooked a mixture of chopped pork, soy sauce and seasonings.

Meanwhile, Elcid and Christine worked on the dough, which was 1kilo of flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup oil, 1 teapson yeast, 470-500ml of water and 1tsp baking powder + some salt. They kneaded the dough and while it was rising we took them sledding. It was the first time Elcid, who just moved here from the Philippines, went sledding.

We swiped the extra sled, sitting in the closet downstairs that our 75 year old neighbor probably never uses… Christine has only sledded once, 10 years ago, so we were glad we got to introduce them to winter sports. When we got home, we also showed them some ski videos.

The kids loved it of course. Elora did a much better job of hiking up the hill this time too. Having to trudge around in ski school for 4 hours a day in skis and ski boots seemed to help build up her snow muscles!

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

We love this picture because you can just hear what Ollie is saying by the look on this face. Yeeeaaaa.

On the way home Elora kept eating snow, so we told her we’d make some snow cones. We scooped up some nice clean snow, carefully avoiding the “pre-flavored” yellow snow, and flavored it with pomegranite syrup. This was also Christine & Elcid’s first snow cone. Today turned out to be a cultural exchange for everyone! Christine wasn’t sure if she should trust us and eat the snow… (considering it came from dirty nature) We think she finally did so out of courtesy… Elora gave Ollie her flavored snow and went back to eating the plain snow.

Now the dough had enough time to rise and we started rolling it out. Palm-sized balls of dough we filled with meat in the middle. Then we placed the balls on wax paper, flattened them a bit, and put them in the steamer for 10 minutes (no baking!)

Mmmmm…. culture tastes good.

Elora saw Mommy taking pictures and started posing. Here she is showing off her “MTV rapper” pose as she busts a cap in someone…. we have no idea where this pose came from or what she is doing…

More rapping? What’s going on with our little homey girl?

Elora imitates the Predator.

And finally she proves that she’s still a cute little girl as she reaches up to grab the camera so she can admire her faces in the pictures.

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365zion

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2 Comments

  • That's awesome that you know what Shoe Pow is! I had never heard of it. You can use other kinds of meat, like chicken or beef or you can just use meatballs for the filling. We're going to experiment with fillings next week!