More oatmeal and dinner at another old Beijing restaurant

I slept horribly last night. Maybe it was due to the fact that I was watching Buffy before bed (ANGEL. IS. SO. HOT.) or maybe because I was attempting to go to sleep before 10. I can feel my swimming suffering, and I really want to get more sleep. But instead it took me ages to settle down, and when I finally fell asleep I dreamed about hiding from monster trucks that were trying to drill out my teeth under sand dunes.
But I did have a great breakfast this morning! We had an overripe banana, and I decided, after reading about this method on a few other blogs, to mash it into the oats before cooking them. Banana raspberry hazelnut oatmeal

• 1/2 cup oats
• up to 1 cup milk (or water, or a mix)
• 1 banana
• a handful of rasberries
• 5 or 6 hazelnuts, chopped
  
• a spoonful of the most divine hazelnut honey i bought in Paris! This is not honey from hazelnut flowers (do those exist?), but rather a combination of honey and blended hazelnuts. So basically, a very sweet hazelnut butter.

Mash the banana into the oats and milk, then microwave or cook on stovetop until done. Add the rasberries and hazelnuts and dip your spoon in the honey so you can get a little bit with each bite.


Last night we wandered for ages through the park by our house (see very cheesy but nice picture of our building through the lotuses) to find somewhere to eat. We finally ended up going to this gigantic (it takes up an entire block, that's how long it is) Beijing noodle place. They almost try being deliberately un-fancy, like shouting how many people you are as loudly as possible as soon as you enter the door. We had been taken here by a friend last year, and I remember that my parents ordered zha jiang mian, noodles with a soysauce and pork sauce, and I ordered ma jiang mian, noodles with sesame paste. When you order noodles, they bring you a tray with your noodles, sauce, and chopped vegetables, then all of a sudden they flip each condiment dish into the noodles so quickly everything is literally a blur.
My mom ordered zha jiang mian and my dad ordered some noodles with an egg, pork, lily stem and tree ear sauce. I decided that I was really sick of noodles, so I ordered a kind of corn pancake topped with chinese chives, and just a little bit of egg and dried shrimp.
We also ordered stirfried spicy green pepper in a vinegar sauce that was delicious but a bit too cornstarchy, as well as a stirfry of a kind of chinese sauerkraut with glass noodles. This was GREAT, but unfortunately its picture makes it look disgusting.
My pancake was great! Very thin and almost like a corn tortilla. I got a bit scared by the shrimp, since they're tiny little shrimp with black eyes, but if I didn't look, all they did was add some extra saltiness to the pancake, which you were supposed to fold and eat like a taco. I suppose that's what it was-- a soft taco.
The only thing about this food was that it was SO EXPENSIVE for what it was! The food we had at our rustic place was so much better-- and do you know how much it was for 15 people? 180 yuan! that's less than 30 dollars. Last night's meal was 120, but I think that's also because we ordered chrysanthemum tea.
PS. check out what I saw on the way to the restaurant in a bakery window: FRENCH moon cakes! I don't know exactly what they would be like, but according to the poster, some of the flavors were hazelnut coffee, "seductive strawberry," and some kind of chocolate.