Ben Hong
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Posts posted by Ben Hong
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Pearl River Bridge Mushroom Soy Sauce is the only dark type that I use. We have a long history together
. Back in my youth when I was a grill cook at a restaurant, sometimes the most junior member didn't get to eat with the boss and all the Chinese staff. My favourite quick meal was an inch thick pork chop, white rice with the aforementioned soy sauce, a few drops of sesame oil and a sliced ripe tomato. I still do that if when I have to eat alone.
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Ching Bo Leng soup when I'm feeling guilty about my dietary habits. Dejah, after reading your list, it seems more and more like I'm "comig home" when I visit in November.
Wanna adopt a 62 year old lo wah kieu orphan? 
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Haum ha, belly pork bits, scallions, ginger slivers, makes for killer fried rice
So does haum yu.
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Ditto what lannie said. Actually I found that the hawker centres like Lopasat very clean compared to the unorganized, riotous, willy nilly groups of peddlers and hawkers in places Bangkok, Guangchou, even Hong Kong of a few years ago. I also found good food and good bargains in IndiaTown. Oh, Nonya food is GREAT.
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KD=Kraft Dinner
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Canned dace and black beans was to my son in his student "starvation" days what KD was to most of his friends. Another great comfort food.
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Sue-On, My Grandfather's generational indicator name was "Yick", my father's was "Sai". Each family clan uses a particular series of names which are written in a rhyming poem. These names are completely different than the names given at birth, and from my observations, they are not used among people in the familiar sense, only in the formal sense. It is a way of keeping generations and geneologies straight. I am trying to get my clan's poem, before all my elders and contemporaries die off and we are left only with "jook sing"
Jeeze, the way that our respective backgrounds have such similarities, are you sure you're not the "moi-moi" I didn't think I had.
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Sue On, your story about touring all the small towns and eating in Chinese restaurants remind me of my youthful days in the military. I used to bet my buddies whenever we visited a small town in Ontario (especially North) that I would be recognized and greeted as a long lost relative in any restaurant or laundry we went into. I got a lot of free meals and won a lot of bets.
You see, my grandfather was one of the fortunate ones who was literate in both Chinese and English. A lot of the Toisan lo wah kieu in the mining and logging towns of North Ontario and Quebec barely knew one language and when it came time to bring family over after 1947, my grandfather did a lot of the correspondence and form-filling work for these men.
I learned early on that mentioning that I was the grandson of such and such brought "immediate rewards".
I am counting off the days when I'll finally get to meet your family. Cheers.
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Gary, Dejah is our own true "Churchillian" Woman, and I don't mean that she comes from Churchill, Manitoba. Stand and be in awe.
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400 hundred year old eggs? Why not indeed. gary, it's the younger generation's obsession to time shift or shorten the time for everything
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Dejah, I believe that the great province of MB has another toothsome fish called the whitefish. Neither can be surpassed for the Chinese palate, especially steamed or poached. Because of the purity and sweetness of taste (umame in Japanese), I only use the "toppings" very sparingly. Oh yes, in my house, the cook always has first dibs on the cheeks.
And I always scale the fish. -
The Harvest Moon was big and round on the eastern horizon last evening, the colour of a salted duck egg yolk. I was coming out of the woods after a couple hours of woodcock hunting with my dogs and I had to stop to grab a stump and do some serious moongazing.
It made me very nostalgic, as the whole scenario always brings forth a childhood memory of stting with my YenYen on the edge of our village pond watching the moon rise as she told the story about all the stories of the moon. Moon cakes are more than just pastry to me.
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Tomalley is the word used to describe the guts of crustaceans.
Surprisingly, I don't eat much lobster or crab, although I love the flavour. Usually I eat a couple of meals of lobster (gorge) a year and that satisfies my craving for the critters. Same goes for crab.
Favourite styles? I love lobster split live and steamed with scallions and ginger, then add a splash of soy sauce and sizzle with a hot splash of good peanut oil. The locals know only three ways to cook and serve lobster; chowder, boiled or in a hotdog bun (lobster roll), absolutely boring. I like crabs chowed with ginger/scallion. Btw, the quicker you do "it" the less pain for you and the critters.
Prices? Here in Atlantic Canada, we pay marginally cheaper prices than elsewhere, ie: not much less. Today's "special" on lobster at one of the supermarkets is $7.99 lb. for market sized (1-1.5 lbs.) Generally it's around $10. lb. Last summer I brought 20 lobsters to treat my large family in Toronto at a certain price. While strolling through Chinatown a day or two later, I saw that one of the fish merchants were blowing them out the door at $2. less per pound
On my first trip to Newfoundland to visit relatives in 1961, we were paying 25 cents apiece for 1.5 pound lobsters from barefoot kids at the roadside. Different times.
While I'm on a roll, here are some numbers for you. If you eat the tomalley and roe of lobster and winkle and gnaw out the meat from each of the eight legs, you would consume 40% of the total weight of the lobster. However if you don't do so and only eat the tail and claws, you would only net 30% at the most. At $10/lb that's expensive protein.
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Nah, I can take or leave Spam or Prem or Klik. In my impoverished youth, luncheon meats were Prime Meats
. Now, I can't remember the last time I went near the stuff. Now, you can give me canned corned beef any old day, as long as it's the "Hereford Brand" made in Brazil. Ya ain't et nuttin' 'til ya had a slab of corned beef on rye with hot mustard. Also corned beef hash to me has always meant Hereford corned beef, onions, green onions, cold mashed potatoes, fried in bacon drippings. Topped with a couple of eggs lightly over and some chow-chow relish = instant flashback to the CPR, cookshacks in northern Quebec lumber camps, hardrock goldmines in the Abitibi, 3 mile portages while cutting lines in Mattagami as a summer job. Homemade canned moose is almost equal to hereford corned beef.
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I believe that Marina is speaking of the unspoken but darker side of the discussion. I'll leave that to the readers' imagination.
But this is not the forum to discuss "that which must not be mentioned here".Just for the record, I speak unaccented English and I get the same reaction from a certain type of monosyllabic speaking people.
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Dejah, if you thought being the female half of a biracial couple was tough in the 60s, you have no idea of the problems a Chinese male encounters in small town, bucolic New Brunswick when he walks out with his round-eyed girlfriend
. It seems that it was the duty of every red blooded white person to protect the purity of his race. -
I met my wife 33 years ago - two "immigrants" who got attracted to each other very slowly. She was from England and well, I came from a village about 50 miles from whence Dejah came. My wife did not have any experience with Chinese food other than a few times with the normal take out stuff. When we moved in together, it was such a struggle for her to make supper every night following recipes, that it frustrated me all to hell, knowing that I could do in 20 minutes what it took her an hour to do (growing up in Chinese restaurants helps) . So eventually I took over that department, except for desserts and baking, at which she is a master. Except for the traditional Holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, etc. where she does admirable roasts, we have lived with this arrangement successfully for 32 years. I would say that a good 95% of our meals are Chinese...by popular choice.
My first Chinese meals were a revelation to her! The broccoli was actually green and shaped like broccoli, not some greenish grey mush that she was used to, the steamed fish was actually delicious without being fried, the bbq pork was nothing she had experienced. In short, every meal was a new discovery, and much to her credit, she relished everything that was put in front of her, including haum yu fried rice, fuyu chow green beans, doufu dishes, belly pork, etc. Just last week by accident she had some of my salmon bellies steamed with haum ha and ginger( a comfort dish I made for myself one evening when she did an evening shift). Well, she asked me to make it three times since
. Oh, did I say she was a fantastic dessert and bakery cook? -
Die, Nasty Divisive Thread, Die
I think we can all agree that Chinese food, regardlees of regional bias or style is DELICIOUS.
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I am of a certain generation of Canadians to whom hunting is second nature. Although I have done my share of hunting, and killing, of four legged game, I don't do so now and concentrate on wingshooting gamebirds and waterfowl over dogs. My friends, family and I eat our share of duck, woodcock, grouse and geese, but are always interested in hearing about other peoples' recipes, as there may be some that we haven't tried yet.
So, post away...please.
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Confusing? Yes. Delicious? ABSOLUTELY! After all what's in a name?
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Bear with me, as I am going to post a parable
Food, like music, is all about the senses and taste. In music appreciation, one progresses from nursery ditties to campfire songs, to teenybop, to light rock and roll to heavy metal, etc. And, depending on your background and training, you might want to sample, and love, the blues, jazz, country or bluegrass. There are those of us whose tastes get refined as we go through life and come to appreciate the upper reaches of the musical universe, eg. the works of Puccini, Verdi, the three Bs, Stravinsky, Handel, Dvorak, etc., etc. The works of this class of people are called classics, for good reason. And these works endure.
My take on Szechuan food and all other heavily spiced and complicated cuisines is that it is the heavy metal of the Chinese food world, it is about as subtle as a sledge hammer. But judging by the popularity of rock and roll, people must like to be hit over the head with sledge hammers. (Btw I treasure each one of my 1000 vinyl albums of rock as much as I do my 1000 albums of other music. ) Cantonese food requires a more discriminating palate to appreciate the nuances and subtleties. Everytime I eat a Szechuan meal, I always think the question: "What is the cook covering up with the chilis and the spices?"
There endeth my parable.
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Salted black beans, haum yu, haum ha, choong choy, fu yu, ...BLAND.
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Hzrt8w, simple . According to my friends in the Hong Kong Consulate in Toronto, the best of the best (with matching prices) can still be found in HK, along with the cheapest street food. But, for overall standard for Chinese food of all regional styles, Toronto is it.
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One word: TORONTO.
Bi-racial partnerships
in China: Cooking & Baking
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Dejah, lobsters are only one half of the story. You and your family's tremendous hospitality offered to a couple of old coots whom you've never met before is the real story. It was Paul's and my highlight of the trip. Thanks again.
PS: Dejah (Sue-on) can cook!!!!