We spent most of our stay in the heart of the city, Bejing. The purpose of our trip was to visit my brother and his family but we also decied to take on the GREAT WALL MARATHON.... The highlight of our 2 weeks besides the yummy food, which I pomise I'll get too:-)
Here is a photo of our start of the most difficult marathon I have ever run!
It was spectacular and the scenery was absolutely breathtaking but the run was definitely challenging. http://www.great-wall-marathon.com/Default.aspx
The first 5 miles were on the wall which went ok but we than ventured out into the villages for the next 15 miles or so and I remember asking my husband at mile 14, do we ever get to come down these hills. He said "what goes up must come down" but he stopped saying that a few more miles into our run. We climbed and climbed ....... and climbed. We entered the square about mile 21 and started up the wall once again. Of course ROUND 2 on the GREAT WALL was much more difficult. After about 2000 steps and almost 3000 to go we had pretty much decided that once is enough for this race. We did finish and acutally didn't do so bad but we were really tired! A couple hours later we were on our way back to the hotel to take a cab back to my brothers..........a cool shower felt like heaven! The food tasted even better since by than it was almost 8 pm and we hadn't eaten since 5 am. Our Shaklee Performance and Energy Chews carried us thru the race. We were happy to have them both! Our bottles of Performance were Strategically placed along the course to keep us well hydrated and our bottles were very cleverly labeled:-) My husband had fun with this!
We had some delicous meals downtown prior to the race however. One of which was at this dumpling place the Hotel Consieir directed our cab driver to take us. As you can see, we're getting accumtomed to using Chipsticks. We had some incredible dumplings there too.........the best food sometimes comes from small quaint neighborhood restaurants. We had some incredible meals and I'd love to share more once we get more pics uploaded.
Upon returning home, I have enjoyed experimenting in my own kitchen as well preparing some delicious Asian food. We've had fried rice, Spicy Thai Seafood, and just the other night I made a Vegetable, Tofu Soba Noodle Dish. My husband didn't even mind the blackened Tofu........
The recipe started out my marinading the Tofu in a sesemae, soy, ginger sauce. After several minutes I fried it till it was crisp in a dry cast iron skillet.
The Tofu was set aside so I could next saute all the prepared veggies and in my opinion, the more colorful the better:-)
So there you have it...........a recipe adapted from the EARTHBOUND COOKBOOK. As you can see, quite versatle.
