Steak Frites

The hot-sour-sweet tomato-corn salad is a good accompaniment to steak and home fries. The steak is a cheap cut pounded lightly and cooked medium rare. A very nice home meal.

Sweet Salad II

The fun thing about heirloom tomatoes is that they tends to go against expectations. Usually green tomatoes are unripe but his green tomato is ripe and sweet.

Sweet Salad

This is time for tomatoes and corn and they make a great sweet salad. I have tomatoes, fresh corn, cilantro, walla walla onion, fresh hot chili, lime juice, salt and pepper. Fresh and refreshing.

Old Fashion Curry

I usually make my beef curry in the pressure cooker, but this time I did it the old fashion way. I wish I had some carrots, but as it is--beef, tendons, potatoes, garlic, ginger, curry powder, curry paste and onion--it is pretty tasty.








With an old fashion dish, it is best served the old fashion way.

Nutty Mooncake

This is, I suppose, what may be called nouveau Suzhou-style mooncake--seaweed and seeds wrapped in flaky pastry. Fun

Heirloom Tomato

This is the time for tomatoes and I got these crazy looking heirlooms from the farmers market. They are meaty and very flavourful. This is a good example of the good of biodiversity, I think.

Balacan

Balacan is one strong smelling thing made from salted fermented shrimp pressed into a hard paste. And it is honest too, particularly when you cook it--smells just like what it is, strongly. Most commonly it is combined with garlic, dry shrimps, a little sugar and sambol to flavour vegetables like spinach, or, here, water spinach.

Unusual Mooncake

The Mid-Autumn Festival/Harvest Moon is coming soon and Chinese stores are filled with mooncakes for sale. Here is one rather unusual one--it has extremely light pastry on top, sweet paste made with mung bean is the main filling and a little savory pork is in the very centre. Interesting cake.

Back Home

Well, I am back home and back to the same olds. This time I have a funnily named vegetable: mucus vegetable 潺菜. It is so call because after cook there is a smooth creaminess texture on the leaves. It is actually a good thing. Here I make a soup with it and a couple of salted eggs. Very simple, very traditionally home cooking.

Dad's 70th

I went to Hong Kong for my dad's birthday and I cooked him a dinner. These are his orders.

He wanted seared foie gras. It so happens that it is wild mushroom season in Yunnan and some good selection available at Sogo. Here I sautéed four different kinds, boletus and chanterelles, with some shallots, red wine, salt and sugar, and added the oil from searing the foie also. The asparagus is there for colours only.





He also wanted oxtail. I stewed it with garlic, onion, carrot, red wine, tomato, rosemary, thyme, and sage. Served with a little wide egg pasta.

The meal was very good but everybody was so full that dessert--blueberry soufflé was called off. Pity.

Lei Yue Mun 鯉魚門

Lei Yue Mun is a great place to have seafood. The live seafoods are sold in shops and the restaurants only cook them. Here are a couple other dishes I had there. This is a giant razer clam steamed in spicy black bean sauce. One of my favorites.








This is one odd creature, oddly named too--Pissing Shrimp! It sort of looks like a cross between a shrimp and a termite. Taste wise it is a wonderful mix of shrimp and lobster. Here it is prepared with garlic, chili, and salt. Very tasty.








Steamed fresh abalone is a crowd pleaser. The mildly sweet meat is great in this simple preparation.

黄油蟹 Yellow Oil Crab

'Yellow Oil Crab' is one of those rare delicacies that is created by a freak event of nature. When the female crab are fat and ready to mate they sun on the beaches on the mouth of the Pearl River near Hong Kong. If they meet extremely hot and sunny days, the fat in the liver breaks up and seeps into every bit of the body. Yellow fat then shows in the meat and under the shells turning everything inside yellow. If the summer is not hot enough or if the heatwave does not arrive at the right time, there is no YOC at all. And even when the weather is right, only few come to the market.


I was in Hong Kong this August and was fortunately enough to have this true wild Yellow Oil Crab at Lei Yue Mun. The fat under the shell is creamy and rich, and the oil penetrated well into every bit of the crab. I was sucking flavour out of the tips well after I finished with the meat. The price is scary but definitely worth it.

There are a lot of YOC in Hong Kong these days but most of them are female crabs 'baked' under hot lamps. They don't achieve this level of penetration and the fat does not break down as well. Not really the same thing.