hzrt8w

There are many varieties of preserved plums. Some dried and salty, like wah mui. Some moist, fruity and sweet and sour, like chan pei mui. Some with herbs like Gum Cho (sorry, don't know the English name), some with powder sugar sprinkled on top.

Peanut candies and sesame candies are traditional flavors. When I went to 99 Ranch Market, they now make nut candies with sun flower seeds, walnuts, cashews, black/white sesames, pecans, etc.. I like the preserved plums, lemons, olives, apricots, loquets, etc.. They are easy to find, but hard to find *good* ones in the USA.

Indeed, I agree that making Cheung Fun at home is a major pain. In places where fresh Cheung Fun is readily available, don't waste time on the attempt. The rice flour slurry is quite easy to mix. But Cheung Fun needs special steaming equipment to form. If you pour the mixture in a flat plate for steaming, invariably you will have cheung fun that's thick and it tastes "floury". The restaurants make it with rectangular shallow pans with tiny holes (like a coffee filter, except the holes are for steam to get through from the bottom up). Then they lay a thin sheet of wet white cloth on top, use the cloth to hold up the liquid mixture while steaming. Once the rice flour hardens, they take the cloth out (with the rice sheet), lay it on top of a metal counter/board, peel off the cloth and let the rice sheet laid on top. Then roll up the sheet. If you want Cheung Fun with filings (e.g. ground beef, shrimp, BBQ pork), add the filings on top of the rice flour mixture before steaming. It is a lot of work, and not worth it unless you plan to make a lot of them. And you need a big steamer.

Aprilmei: you must be living in the neighborhood of the top one percentile of the population. I grew up in the neborhood of the commons. Still many people don't do serious cooking at home. We may not dine at the high-end restaurants. But in Hong Kong there are always eateries with decent food to fit everybody's budget. I think the easy accessibility to good food at reasonable price is the prime reason why no one has the incentive to cook at home (and having such a small kitchen is also the main factor). No practice, no performance... Gastro888, you probably want to pick dishes to fit the taste of most of your attendees, even at the expense of being non-traditional.

Street vendors have specialized cooking utensils. Basically they need to build everything on top of a small cart (to be mobile). All they have for heating is a kerosene burner. Baking, as in using hot air, is an inefficient way of cooking compared to steaming -- because baking is an inefficient way of heat transfer compared to steaming. I am not sure why the name used is the one usually associated with baking. Perhaps it sounds better in Cantonese. But the quail eggs you get some street vendors are steamed. In the winter time, you can see clouds of water droplets hovering around the cart. The so-called "salt baked chicken" sold in restaurants these days... you think they really bake the chicken in a bed of salt in the oven? Think again. They boil the chicken in a brine solution with things like 5 spices added.

My reversed engineering idea would be: Leave the 2 dozens of quail eggs in the bed of salt overnight, so that the salt can infiltrate a bit into the egg through the shells. (Or maybe a bath of brine) And I would steam the whole bed of salt and eggs in a steamer instead of the oven. The street vendors Aprilmei mentioned used the steaming method. Just theory though. Never tried it with eggs.

There are a lot of people in Hong Kong who don't know how to cook. My brothers and their wives included. Product of the environment. With food available everywhere so conveniently, there was never a need to cook at home (not serious cooking anyway). But the latter case is hard to do indeed.

Please note that Gastro888 is a duda, not a dude! I don't like Neen Goh at all. Since age 4. It will take someone holding a gun on my head to get me to eat one. Having grown up in Hong Kong, I had seen most of the CNY customs and food/etiquette and symbolism. Talk about "must have a live chicken" on the first day of the year, and a vegetarian meal on the third day of the year (plus not to visit any relatives on the third day or else you will get into a quarrel), etc. etc.. I haven't followed any of those customs by choice since I came to the US for college >25 years ago. Not having the family around, CNY became just a regular day. The feeling of it is no longer there. No fireworks, no Kung Hei Fat Choy, no red pockets, and no abalone with black mushroom + lettuce either. Yeah, I miss it. Sometimes. Not every year. Life goes on. CNY meals symbolism: fish = having excess (making more money than you can consume) live chicken = good prosperity lettuce = (sung choy) = making money fat choy = getting rich dried oyster = (ho see) = it's a good market dried lily bud = (gum jum) = "gold" (gold needle) ginko = (bok gwo, aka "silver almond" = "silver" etc etc etc (too many to remember) Restaurants usually put together some dishes with these wealth/health symbolic ingredients and call them CNY specials (run for about a month after CNY). And, of course, charge extra $$$$$ for them. So the ones who got to see the luck (or $$$$$) for sure are the restaurant owners. I was not sure whom to believe (our elders) since I was small. Everybody says something different. And the same person can say things differently at different times, picking whatever that fits the argument at the moment. That's the one part about the Eastern culture that I didn't miss much.

It looks more like Chicken Chili than Chili Chicken. (And chicken is optional)

Break the eggs and do a scrambled or omlette... then use minature knieves and forks to eat them! (Sorry, not very useful. But couldn't resist.)

With so many deep-fried good eats in CNY, be careful to get a sore throat. (Yeet Hay) Better drink some soup or herbal tea to balance it. How do you blow up the dough? You don't mean really blow it up bare lipped, right? Wouldn't the dough stick on your face? How did the ancient Chinese do it?

It's not just in the university. You will find it in the work place too. (e.g. in the company I work at) An engineer/executive making $100K a year saving $5? Yeah. But it's not so much about the money. More of it is about taste. After all, the same person will spend $20 (per person) on dim sum lunch on the weekends and $30/lb Australian lobster at dinner! Hijack! Hijack! Oops...

My gosh, hot pot doesn't require any cooking skill. All it takes is to be good at using a knief to slice up the ingredients. Reminds me of one of my college roommates. For one year we stayed in the same apartment, every night he cooked a Ramen noodle with 3 to 4 chicken wings (raw, no seasoning) just thrown in to the boiling water to be cooked with the noodle. Yikes!

This is a little off the food topic, but useful for the audience. In a former life I had set up a web server for retrieval of technical documents. So I know a little bit about text indexing and searching technologies. The issue is more than "can't search for terms of 3 letters or less", which by itself is detrimental to the Chinese forum discussions because lots of Chinese/English translations are 3 letters or 2. The issue is more on the general approach to providing the search functions. Like most of the website search functions I have seen, Invision's search uses the "OR" algorithm. If you type in more than one word, all the words will be "OR" together to perform the search. This tends to return a result of thousands of threads every time, and thus makes the search function useless. For example, I typed in the terms "Kung Pao Chicken". Invision returns 32 pages, or 800 threads. Each thread contains either the term "chicken" or the term "kung". (Pao doesn't count because it has 3 letters.) On the other hand, Google offers a much better control for the users. The most powerful feature is the "AND" and "Phrase" search. The "Phrase" search is very powerful in particular. When I type in "Kung Pao Chicken" as the phrase to search, it would only return threads that contain the words Kung Pao Chicken, in that order. Not just happen to have the words Kung and Pao and Chicken in the same document. (I wish Google would offer multiple phrase search instead just a single one... on well.) It retuns only 141 threads. The word "egullet" was used to focus the search only related to egullet discussions because Google indices hundreds of millions of pages on the Internet. The more specific the searching criteria you come up with, the narrower the result you need to wade through. So when you do a search, just think of something that's as unique and as specific as possible. If you want to search for all my past postings, just type in "hzrt8w" and "egullet". Using such a unique login ID does have its advantage!

This shows how inadequate the Invision searching function is. Again, use Google advanced search capability with "egullet", "tea egg", "forums.egullet.org" as parameters, the result came up in seconds. Full forum discussions are here: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=53960

It depends on what your concept of a "salad" is. I don't have access to the Oxford Dictionary. But I searched Encarta on "salad" and it said: ========== sal·ad [ sálləd ] (plural sal·ads) noun 1. mixture of raw vegetables: a cold savory dish consisting mainly of a mixture of raw vegetables, whole, sliced, chopped, or in pieces, usually served with a dressing for moisture and flavor. Many other ingredients may be incorporated into a salad, which can be served as a separate course or as an accompaniment to other food. 2. dish of cold ingredients: a cold dish consisting of a particular type of food, for example, a single vegetable or a selection of fruit, cut into pieces or slices, and served usually with a dressing potato salad 3. leafy vegetables: any of the leafy vegetables commonly used to make a green salad, typically the many types of lettuce, watercress, chicory, and endive 4. confused mixture: a confused or varied mixture a salad of ideas ========== So it seems "raw vegetables" is the key in consider something as a "salad". If that's the case, then there aren't too many Chinese dishes contain raw vegetables. Like Ben Hong said earlier, you may see raw lettuce used for meat wrappings, and raw cucumber slices mixed with cold noodles and sesame sauce, etc.. Very far and between. As for the reasons, perhaps it was passed down from generations of beliefs related to the fertilization methods. I think more importantly, as pointed out earlier, is most vegetables grown in China (such as gai lan, bok choy, daikon) simply don't taste good when eaten raw. Chinese name this "cai qing" [Mandarin], means the green grass taste. And how would you like to eat grass? Yes we cook the lettuce too. And bean sprouts, carrots, onions, celery, mushrooms, green peppers for that matter. I really don't think the cold appertizer dishes can be considered "salad". That's things like jelly fish, pig ear, pressed tofu etc. mixed with soy sauce and sesame oil. We have plenty of those. They are more snack food. (No raw vegetables except green onions.) Can you create a "Chinese salad"? Sure. You can use whatever ingredients to create whatever dish and call it whatever you want. If I mix some flour and yeast together, make a dough. I don't use any cheese or tomato sauce or garlic. Instead I use fermented bean curds as a spread, some "Chinese" ingredients such as lap cheung and salted fish as a topping and bake it. Can I call it a Chinese Pizza? Absolutely! (But just why forcing the culture?)

You are the one who said unlike French cooking which has 5 basic sauces, in Chinese cooking there is only one basic sauce - soy sauce. What happened to that theory?

itch22: Congratulations on your duck. I admire people who take on challenges! And your reward is a satisfying and delicious meal. Well done. I had attempted to make Cantonese fried chicken at home a while back. I always am astronished by how crispy the skin is (those that you ordered in restaurants). I follow a recipe. Marinated the chicken (inside) with salt and five spice powder. Precooked the chicken in a pot of red vinegar (to about half cooked). Hung the chicken to dry (for about 6 hours). At dinner time, deep-fried the chicken to fully cooked. The skin, when you make this way, is nice and crisp. My theory is the vinegar extracted a lot of the water moisture from the skin, so when you deep-fry it, the hot oil carmeralizes the remaining skin. Of course, Peking Duck follows a different process. As for duck bone soup, Chinese style: First boil the bones in a pot of water, then turn into simmer for over 1 hour. Then add sliced winter melon (peeled first, cut into about 1 inch thick, 3 inch wide each piece), reconstituted black mushrooms, a few pieces of dried orange peels (presoaked for 2 hours), some salt. To jazz it up, you may use some dried scallops (may be 1/2 dozen, presoaked overnight, save the water to make soup). Simmer with the other ingredients for a good 2 hours or so.

Not all bean pastes are created equal. There are plain bean pastes. And there are chili bean pastes. What's shown in the picture is chili bean paste. The taste is a bit on the hot side. Not to be used in most Cantonese cooking.

You use it to cook szechuan or Northern style dishes. e.g. Ma Po tofu, braised fish with brown sauce, eggplants, cashew chicken, etc.. e.g. Braised Fish: - Fry a whole fish with a bit of oil, sprinkle a bit of salt on top, brown on both side, remove. - Add a bit of oil, saute some chopped garlic, a bit of sliced onion. Add 2 tsp bean paste (what you bought), 2 tsp hoisin sauce, a bit of salt (or skip if you don't like it too salty), stir... dash in 1 tsp white vinegar, 1/2 cup of chicken broth, 1/2 cup of water. Bring to a boil Add corn starch slurry to thicken sauce. - Readd the fish. Cook for a few more minutes in sauce. Done. Transfer to the dinner plate and sprinkle some chopped green onion on top. In Thai/Vietnamese cooking, they add some Thai basil. [in Chinse again] You can also add some sliced bamboo shoots and sliced brown (fried) tofu. Some other dishes are similar. Using the chili bean paste (what you bought) with sweet bean paste or hoisin sauce (also sweet), along with garlic/onion/shallot/green-onion is a good combination for making a few dishes. Don't use too much of chili bean paste in one setting. The paste is very salty by itself. But each brand is different. Just open the bag and taste the saltiness. It is advisable to put it in a jar and keep it in the refrigerator. Not new year stuff. Just day to day.

Then a pocket English/Chinese dictionary may be handy for you. I haven't used mine for a while. I remember it has English->Chinese translations shown in traditional character set. There are different ways of inputting Chinese characters. One of which is phonetic, which means it lists out all the Chinese characters with the same pronounciations. It was handy for me because when I write Chinese essays, I could remember the sounds but not the characters. That helped. Now that I hardly write anything in Chinese any more... no need to use it...

Cantonese is my native tongue. I agree that Mandarin is easier to learn than Cantonese for non-native speakers. However, Cantonese too has standard pronounciation for every word. Though it sounds very different from Mandarin pronounciation. The Pin-Yin system can guide one to pronounce very close to standard Mandarin. But such phonetic system doesn't really apply to the Cantonese dialect. It is true that there is a formal use of the Chinese language (with Cantonese pronounciations), and the informal use (that's the daily conversation and dialogue which cannot be used in writings). It would be extremely hard to learn the Cantonese language/dialect by only accessing an online dictionary. Imagine how one can learn English by just given an Oxford dictionary? And again, the Cantonese pronounciations are very difficult to be represented phonetically. This is an online dictionary I use. It is not really a dictionary, but someone's translation project. It only offer pronounciation in Mandarin Pin-Yin, no Cantonese. It does use the classic character set. http://chinese.primezero.com/ Some gadget manufacturers in Taiwan produce some pocket English/Chinese dictionaries. I bought one in Hong Kong back in 1999. They are pretty good, with Mandarin and Cantonese pronounciations and Chinese (classic) character displays. Now it's five year later, I am sure they have more advanced/comprehensive models. Just shop for them in some big Asian shopping malls (e.g. one in San Gabriel) or online.

I used to buy bags and bags of dried black mushrooms every time I went back to Hong Kong. But... prices of black mushrooms (dried Shiitake mushrooms) came down in prices and up in quality quite a bit in recent years. In the U.S. Asian grocery markets, a big bag of black mushrooms is priced at only about US $3.99 (the same item used to be over US $12.00). Therefore, I concluded that it would not worth my luggage space (and the energy to shop them in HK) to bring back black mushrooms. On the other hand, I found what's worth buying and bringing back are those pickled/dried fruit snacks (e.g. pickled/dried plums, pickled/dried olives, pickled/dried lemons). I have shopped all over California's Asian markets and haven't discovered any that carries quality pickled/dried fruit snacks. Not sure which country you are from, if it is the U.S., you are not allowed to bring in meat products. Dry squids are okay. (In general, dry seafood are okay). Or else I would buy and bring back some beef/pork jerkey.

Ben: I think that gorgeous young lady is waiting for you, along with the Dan Ga Nui in Causeway Bay in Hong Kong, longing for your return!

That makes sense. Thanks. (My wife and I feel eerie seeing fat. Couldn't help but to get rid of it...)