Full moon

To all my Chinese friends and readers, have a great Moon Festival tonight!

Today is a fun holiday and actually the second most important holiday in the Chinese tradition. It has been around for over 4,000 years and celebrates the harvest moon and the beginning of fall, plus it honors the woman on the moon (not the man) Chang'e.

Last weekend, Leo and I went to Chinatown to buy the traditional moon cakes for tonight. Moon cakes are interesting things, being round pastry-covered cakes about four inches in diameter filled with sweet white lotus root paste and with a whole duck egg yolk in the center. They're good, but they're very rich! They came in a beautiful decorative box with a magnetic hinge and ribbon stays that contained four decorated square tin boxes in yellow fabric-lined compartments, each box containing an individually wrapped moon cake. There was also a special red and yellow sack the box went into so we could carry them home.

Today I ran around all over D.C. and northern Virginia in quest of the traditional fruits for tonight's dinner. I found some starfruit, but I went to several stores and couldn't find any pomelos. Alas.

Tonight we had pad thai, red curry beef, green curry chicken and white rice for dinner, plus starfruit, moon cakes, and hot tea (I broke out the "good" Prince of Wales tea). Yum. We've also lit candles—the festival is also sometimes called the lantern festival.

I love celebrating holidays!