KL volunteering day 3, 4 & 5

This morning I got up in time to join Lili, Popo and Leon for breakfast. We left around 7.30 and were taken to a little local noodle stand that was kind of a pick and mix of different noodles and toppings.
Instead of a market, we shopped in a big wholesalers supermarket for ingredients needed for today, and also shopped for ingredients to make a carrot cake. Lili is very relaxed and said we can use the kitchen to cook whatever we like. When I suggested making a cake, she was very pleased and I didn't realise I'd be making a massive industrial sized tray of it!
Walking around the shop, me and Leon did wonder what people thought of us. We kind of looked like a little family. We call Lili's mum Popo, which means grandma in Cantonese ( they are Chinese Malay). Lili says she gets people double taking when they hear volunteers call Popo in public, especially as she has up to four volunteers with her when it's busy, usually varying nationalities and ages.
After baking my carrot cake, I wandered to the local food mall which had a massive food shop at the bottom. I got very excited seeing lots of British brands of food in there, as well as food I hadn't eaten in 4 months. They even had a small section of Sainsburys products which I thought was kind of bizarre. When I got back the restaurant was actually quite full, so I hopped into the kitchen early to help with food service. Lili tends to be in charge of drinks, any cold food, side dishes, rice, basically all the accompaniments, and Popo makes the main dishes, which are mostly curries and stews. They make all the food traditionally, with the original herbs and spices and by using pesal and mortars instead of blenders, so the food takes longer than most places to prepare. I helped out where I could, chopping up bits and bobs and plating up things.
We ended up closing earlier than 8 as we'd run out of quite a few dishes. Lili trys to work on pre orders so it's easier to stock on ingredients from the market, but with lots of walk-ins, it's easy to run out things as the ingredients are bought in small quantities to keep them fresh!
The next day, I said I'd make food for dinner, so I chopped and roasted some veg for a ratatouille in the morning then wandered out. When I came back to help out, it wasn't super busy so I did a bit of cleaning, served a few people then carried on cooking. I ended up making some flatbread too as we had no bread, and dinner went down as a success. After washing up, me and Leon walked to the mall and grabbed dessert.
The day after, during my shift I spent over 1 & 1/2 hours pounding shallots and garlic by hand in a pestal and mortar. Though I think I got off lightly as Leon had spent longer trying to peel them all! We had a table pre booked, so Lili showed me how to make a few of the dishes, then I went out and served for a couple of hours. Popo cooked us up dinner, then we gave the kitchen a big clean as it was the last day of service before they closed for two days (Monday Tuesday). After scrubbing the floors, Lili drove us to a traditional Chinese dessert restaurant. They served sweet soup, which came in four flavours, peanut, black sesame, walnut and almond. If you mixed flavours, they create a picture out of the different colour soups. I opted for almond and sesame, so got a questionable looking black and white panda drawn into my soup. It was very delicious, and a really cute restaurant. We then got taken to another dessert shop down the road, where we tried another 6 different sweat treats, including a hot barely coconut soup, lotus seed pastries and sweetcorn set custard squares (my favourite). It was so nice being taken out by a local who could show us the best spots and buy us foods she thought we'd like.Читать далее