Current Category: Dishes (8 entries)
Posted by Trudi on July 12, 2006
In Chinese, Wonton literally means “swallowing clouds”. This may have to do with its irregular shaped pasta skin. The filling is traditionally made of minced meat, diced shrimp and small bits of vegetable, typically onion although there are numerous variations in the filling and the proportion of meat/vegetable used also tends to vary depending on which part of the world you are in.
Wonton is similar to other filled pasta such as Italian ravioli, Jewish kreplach, Swabian maultaschen, Turkish manti, Korean mandu or Japanese gyoza. The deep fried variety of Wonton is more popular in America and Europe than in Asia. In Hong Kong, noodles in wonton soup is definitely the people’s choice in the local café.
One thing that distinguishes wonton from other filled pasta is its ultra thin lye-water pastry wrapper. The 4”x4” wrapper (shown at the back of this picture) adds the needed smoothness to the skin so that boiled wonton is easier swallowed than chewed. Many restaurants, however, substitutes the ultra thin wrapper with the larger and thicker spring roll wrapper which is less expensive and easier to use.
Posted by Trudi on July 24, 2006
There is quite a number of recipes for Drunken Chicken. The beer-can version seems to be a popular choice for BBQ. Although people in other parts of the world will tend to argue which brand of beer is best suited for the grilled bird, we do not have to bother ourselves with this on-going debate – there is only one choice in Ireland.
The real Drunken Chicken dish (also commonly called Drunken Empress Chicken 貴妃醉雞 or Drunken Poet Li Bo Chicken 太白醉雞 in Chinese Cuisine) has over a thousand years of history. It is made not with beer but with a special Chinese Shao Hsing Hua Tiao wine - a dry sherry would be a close modern day alternative if you cannot find Hua Tiao in your local supermarket (Shao Hsing Hua Tiao wine should be served warm similar to warm Japanese sake). For me, a warm bottle of Hua Tiao is as good as a bottle of Remy Martin LouisXIII. Do try it and it goes very well with any types of meat dishes. It uses broiler but not fryer chicken. In fact, grilled or fried chicken will spoil the main appeal of Drunken Chicken which is its transparent and crispy skin.
Being one of the few cold dishes in Chinese cuisine coupled with its romantic association with a drunken empress and one of the two most revered poets in Chinese history, Drunken Chicken should be a must-have in your next visit to a Chinese restaurant.
Posted by Trudi on July 25, 2006
Although this is not strictly about food, it is equally delicious.
Flickr API facilitates the use of a set of callable methods to make requests and to receive corresponding formatted responses from its fantanstic photo archive. There is a good number of open-source applications making use of the Flickr API to enhance our browsing experience.
The above thumbnails are made using phpFlickr - a wrapper for the API translating the Flickr response XML into some meaningful data.
There are some very useful documentation in Flickr Services and Yahoo’s UI library if you are interested to develop your own Flickr tool or you may try out some of the cool stuff in the 3rd party application list in Flickr.
We have made two simple pages for your enjoyment:
Posted by Trudi on August 02, 2006
Simple ingredients, easy to cook and healthy to eat. As to taste, it all boils down to the sauce.
Add some red pepper flakes and grated Parmesan to taste.
fn1 “tomato sauce” tends to be a confusing term. It may mean very different things depending on where you are in. It generally means tomato ketchup in Britian, Ireland, India, Australia and New Zealand. In North America, “tomato sauce” refers to “marinara sauce” - a simple quickly-made tomato sauce for pasta without meat. But in Italy, marinara sauce actually refers to seafood sauces for pasta, risotto, or pizza (with or without tomato sauce).
Posted by Trudi on August 17, 2006
Mantou and wheat noodles are the mainstay of the Northern Chinese diet (as compared to rice in the southern Chinese provinces). It is made with milled wheat flour has a soft and fluffy texture. Mantou is very similar to white bread and is typically eaten by dipping into condensed milk. Both steamed and deep-fried mantou are available in many Chinese resturants although the former seems to be more popular.
Mantou is also a common diet in Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Turkey, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Posted by Trudi on November 26, 2006
A gourmet food journalist is stuck by stomach cancer and forced to have her stomach removed. Yet she decides to continue writing her food blog to convince readers to slow down and enjoy their meals and their lives.
Shu Wei Cao (鼠尾草) was the winner of the best Chinese Blog for the BOBs award. You can find some great recipes for vegetarian dishes. Take a look at her blog even if you do not understand Chinese. The dishes are pure art!
Posted by Trudi on December 12, 2006
Kau Kee is not your upscale restaurant but its patrons includes almost all the rich and famous in Hongkong. I have no idea when it became a tourist attraction but now, it has even made it to the Wikipedia.
The picture shows its “new” shop situated in an old district in Central, Hongkong. The “new” shop was in operation since mid 90s. Prior to that, they were operating just across the street as a sidewalk stall. When I was a small kid back in the early 60s, my mom would go out every night at about midnight with a little tin pot to buy my dad’s favourite Beef Brisket Noodle in Clear Soup – that was the earliest Kau Kee I can remember.
Kau Kee is renowned for their Beef Brisket
First, the food. Kau Kee only do one dish – Beef Brisket. There were two choices for the noodle Soup - clear or curry. They also offered a special higher priced variant called
During lunch time, there would always be a long queue outside the shop. Many of these people were well dressed and working in one of the most expensive commercial districts in the world (Kau Kee’s location is just outside the Central business area). If they would spend 30 minutes of their one hour lunch break queuing up, cramped into a seat designed for two small kids with another full grown adult, wait 10 minutes for a bowl of Beef Brisket noodle, consume it in 5 minutes, walk from and back to their office in 15 minutes and still find it worthwhile, maybe it does tell us something about the food. In the evening, there would be another queue. Although not as long as the queue during lunch time, this queue would be mainly made up of Mercedes, BMW and Lexus with a few Porsches and Jaguars in-between and occasionally a Ferrari or two.
Second, the service. Simply put, you cannot find any restaurant, shop, food stall anywhere in the world that offer a worse service. Yes, “worse”. If you find the service at their “new” shop appalling, bear in mind that they did already make some improvements after the relocation. During the days when they were operating as a side-walk stall, they didn’t even bother to put a pair of chopsticks on the table after you had taken a seat. I didn’t know what to do when I first ate in their stall and had to watch and learn the beef brisket etiquette from others. Here what should be done: grab a pair of chopsticks from an open container in the middle of the table, get up and go wash the chopsticks in a pot of boiling water besides the guy who is making the noodles. Why wash? The chopsticks are in an open container and have likely been attracting some flies, bugs, dirt since they are put in place. Why the hot water pot? Not 100% sure but the water is for the soup and maybe this is why the soup is so delicious.
And seriously, one of the reasons why Kau Kee is so successful lies in their selection of brisket. The beef brisket used by Kau Kee is always with good marbling – white fat and a deep color in the meat. The layer of fat is important as it tends to eliminate the tough and gristly texture often associated with beef brisket. The special higher priced version of Kau Kee brisket contains a greater amount of fat evenly distributed throughout the meat.