Little Chicken Eggs Gai Daan Jai 雞蛋仔

Published: 2014-01-29

Alert, all food lovers! Street food hawkers coming out in force just in time for the Chinese New Year!  Yeah!  Yummy street food for all!  Hurry, hurry!

But wait...we should explain first.  Hong Kong used to be a wonderland for eating street food about a decade or so ago.  But then the Hong Kong government decided to shut down phase out pretty much all the hawkers and late night food stalls.

Nowadays there's nary a street hawker in sight and man, I gotta tell you, it's booooooring!  No more sudden savory scents drifting your way as you rush down  busy Hong Kong streets, no more stopping for a quick bite here and there, no more standing at street corners with sauce dripping skewers held carefully out and away from your clothes, no more turning a dark alley corner to a cheery scene of fragrant steam rising up in the midst of fold out tables under hand strung lightbulbs.  Why, I ask you, why take away something that speaks to the essence of Hong Kong?  But I digress...

Chinese New Year Tray of Togetherness 中國新年攢盒

Published: 2014-01-27
It's that time of the year for the most important Chinese Festival of the whole year:  Chinese New Year, or 中國農曆新年!  A festive time filled with wintery skies, red packets (紅包), relatives (and more relatives!), feasts (and more feasts!), the all important color Red and visiting old friends.  Yay!!  

We are already starting to do our preparations including a favorite ritual of mine, the Chinese New Year Tray of Togetherness!   The Tray of Togetherness, or 攢盒, is a lovely (red!) chinese candy box with compartments that you fill up with all different kind of chinese new year candies, all of which have symbolically lucky meanings.  Then when your Chinese New Year visitors come a'calling, you can offer them some lucky nibbles.

Belly Button Biscuits 肚臍餅

Published: 2014-01-22
Dear readers, do you remember these candies?  Does it not bring you right back to playgrounds and playing all day and dirty hands and mommy's tender kisses?  These adorable biscuit candies are officially called Iced Gem Biscuits, or 花佔餅, but my favorite name for them is the local nickname for them: Belly Button Biscuits, or 肚臍餅.  What a cute name!  Only the Cantonese, who are fanatical about giving everything a nickname or two, could think of a name like that!  

These tiny sweet biscuits have been a favorite of children for many generations now in Hong Kong.  Kids and their mommys and daddys are all fans of the Belly Button Biscuits! How cool is that!

Chinese Style Coarse Liver Pâté 中式雞肝醬

I love pate.  Or Pâté.  Or liver paste.  Or edible brown stuff.  Ah!  How yummy it all is, whatever the name!  For those in the know, liver is to be loved.  And yet, while I too love pâté, it is unfortunately too expensive (for me, anyways) to buy on a regular basis.  So one fine day, having made a delicious loaf of bread, I decided, enough is enough!  I must have some pâté!  To go with my delicious bread!  Life is too short to not have pâté!

So it was thus that I began to make my own pâté.  With a chinese twist, of course...and so we present to you a Chinese Style Coarse Liver Pâté, or 中式雞肝醬.

Lotus Leaf Steamed Chicken 荷葉蒸雞

We love Macau, the Real Macau that is. Not the new fake cardboard Macau that has appeared, Quite literally, out of the blue sea these murky past few years, the gracious but rather charming old city that has survived by crook and nook for over 400 years. This is the Macau that began as a Portuguese colony and first major European settlement port and trade in Asia. What an incredible richness of history is implied! And you can feel it when you walk through the old streets in Macau which, thank goodness, have been left largely untouched: the secrets, the hidden stories in the twists and turns, surprises around every corner.

And, a-hum, most importantly for us, the food in Macau is fantastic! Our favorite Chinese Restaurant, Tou Tou Koi 陶陶居**,  is in Macau. We go to Macau and eat, eat, eat!  Yumm! And then eat some more!!  Psst...at Tou Tou Koi the dim sum is something else too!  This time upon returning to Hong Kong after a short trip to Macau we came down with the 'food blues'.   So...to help heal our blues and as an ode to Tou Tou Koi's wonderful traditional Chinese food, we decided to make our own version of Tou Tou Koi's Lotus Leaf Steamed Chicken, or steamed lotus leaf which is soooo delicious!

Ahhh...I miss Macau already...

Chinese Salted Egg 鹹鴨蛋

You want to know why homemade food is worth your time and effort?  Because it tastes so incredible, that's why!  Since we have started making more and more things from scratch I have discovered that it's not really about money saving, but about super taste!  Which is great if you love food and eating like we do.  Very consistently homemade foods taste waaaay better than than the crappy commercial stuff you pay for.  

We recently tried making our own Chinese Salted Egg and 'Wow!' were we happy with the results!  The bright orange yolk was lusciously greedily oily while the egg whites were salty, yes, but also permeated with the scents of star anise, cinnamon and szechuan pepper used in the brine. Chinese Salted Egg is super easy to make, you just have to find a source for fresh duck eggs (chicken eggs can be substituted, I've heard), brine the eggs and then wait for 20-30 days.  What?! So long you say!  All good things come to those who wait...we promise!

Chocolate Birthday Cake | Kid Project

I always try to bake and frost a cake whenever family birthdays roll around.  Birthday cakes are always so happily received so I don't mind the time it takes to produce them.  As my little girl has gotten older she's always buzzing around me in our teensy tiny kitchen, wanting to lend a small but messy hand to my culinary endeavors.  Especially around cake baking time.  

So recently, when her daddy's birthday came around, she begged and begged to help with his birthday cake and I thought, why not?  My plan was simple.  Divide the cake batter into three smaller pans, thereby ending up with two cakes for me to stack and frost and one small cake for my daughter to frost all by herself.  That way, I reasoned, my little girl could have fun and we would still have a decent looking birthday cake (mine) to celebrate with.  Little did I expect that my cake effort would pale in comparison to my little girl's cake!

Christmas Sugar Cookies

This year for Christmas we made our first real sugar cookies, my daughter and I.  These Christmas Sugar Cookies were not perfect looking by any means, but looked adorable and tasted really great (not too sweet, just right!).  And most importantly, my little girl had a blast "helping mommy" with the all important task of painting the cookies.   These christmas sugar cookies are a great food project to do with kids because, as I discovered, they will look great no matter how they are painted!

Steamed Salted Sun Dried Fish 蒸南倉鹽鮮魚

For a long time I have fantasized about making my own dried salted fishes.  (Very sexy, I know!)  My 媽媽 keeps tantalizing me with stories about when my 爸爸 used to make his own dried fishes (which for some reason I can't remember at all).  She always describes my dad's homemade dried salted fishes as incredibly tasty!  All one would need is a simple mesh structure of some sort, with a door that you could latch securely.  Then, bam!: you could have an endless supply of tasty (and cheap!) gourmet adventures in dried foods.  

Alas for the one simple, sad fact:  we don't have a garden!  Not even a balcony, not in cramped Hong Kong where real estate is at such a premium.  Just a shoebox sized apartment bursting at the seams already with all of our stuff and a teensy tiny, itty bitty kitchen.  So we were very excited recently when my 老公's mother discovered this Salted Sun Dried Fish at the Aberdeen Fish Market.

Hairy Crab Vending Machines?!

Published: 2013-12-03

Continuing in the spirit of our last post on the delectable Steamed Hairy Crab, we wanted to share some funny news that has been circulating.  There are now Hairy Crab vending machines!  Truely, I kid you not.  These vending machines are showing up in China, in the subways I believe, and they sell live hairy crabs!  Check it out in this video (in japanese):