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leviathan: what I usually do is to add iced water into the "empty" can of the grass jelly drink, shake it around a bit, then suck out the remaining grass jelly bits from the can.

Pontormo: Take a look at this thread for how to make the chicken hook out of coat hanger and the hooks in the oven: Cantonese Roast Chicken with Nam Yu (南乳吊燒雞) I don't believe Fat Choy is banned. It was advised not to consumer it, isn't that right?

Abra: The packages themselves have no label. The dried oyster I bought in San Francisco China Town. They just scooped up 2 pound that I ordered. You kind of need to recognize the item, sorry. The grass jelly drink that I bought (16 oz can), I drink straight from the can. There are other cans of grass jelly (not drink) you can buy in Asian markets. Those are the grass jelly itself. You can dice them up and mix them with beverages. Or eat them with some honey poured on top (or sprinkle some sugar).

Michael: in Cantonese we wish each other "Sun Tai Geen Hong" - good health. This phrase is often used in CNY. Health is the most important thing.

Thank you Pamela! Same to you! I have seen footages from the Huell Howser's California's Gold (love his shows) that hugh abalones used to be harvested in the Monterey area in California back in the 40's or something. Unfortunately these abalones are very rare now.

insomniac: That's fascinating to me. Have you flown in/out of the old Kai Tek airport? Wasn't that an awesome airport?

As somebody who has a family history of diabetes, I'm curious what changes you need to make. Rice would be a no-no, right? ← Thank you leviathan. I might just show up at your doorsteps to collect that free lunch someday! My MIL is not quite there yet but she has been adviced by her doctor not to eat sweet things and cut down on salt.

No Kouign Aman. That riverboat, I think, is called the "Spirit of Sacramento". It carries passengers for sight-seeing up and down Sacramento River in the downtown area but doesn't have cooking facility onboard. There is a much bigger riverboat "Delta King" which has been converted to a hotel and restaurant. It is anchored permanently at Old Town Sacramento.

Sandy: thanks for the "tea" explanations. Green onions are priced lower and their tastes are stronger than chive. Chinese sometimes use "chive" to label green onion. Thanks. I have been using a Sony Cybershot DSC-W5 model, 5 megapixel. There are people on eGullet who can take much better pictures than I. See Ken Wang's and Tepee's for more beautiful photographs of Chinese food. Professional food photography? I don't think I can make that rank.

Gong Xi Fa Cai, Mei! When we toured in European countries we stayed away from the Chinese food over there. Unless we took my father-in-law along, who won't eat anything other than Chinese.

I have started a collection many years ago: cans of Coca-Cola bought in different countries that we visited. After visiting the World of Coca-cola in Atlanta in the mid 90’s, I was fascinated by that Coke is sold in so many different countries. Why not collecting cans of Coca-Cola with different languages printed on them? So far I have Cokes from England, France, Germany, Japan and China. These three were a gift from a friend who came from Malaysia, a country which I haven’t been to yet. I think it is Malay that was printed on the can? It is interesting that in Asia and Europe, the smaller size (150 ml) is quite common. In the USA, we all settle with a 16-oz drink being the smallest that we would drink. The smaller size is about ½ to 2/3 of the 16-oz size.

A Geek’s World Welcome to my study room, which doubles as a home office, which triples as a computer lab. I have multiple computer set ups. What you see are three 19-inch old CRT technology monitors plus one 17-inch monitor. They are hooked up to different computers, some of which have dual screen displays. The rest… landline phone (2 lines on one phone with speaker phone feature), cell phone, my Palm PDA, a 7-inch DVD player and my two laptops. The laser printer is on the floor, next to my scanner and a color printer. Yeah, this room gets really hot in the summer even with air conditioner on. I have a small fan to circulate the air underneath the desk. The DVD player is hooked up to a wireless receiver to get signal from the main cable set-top box. I spend a lot of time in this room. I watch whatever my wife watches on TV in the living room. We have a 52-inch plasma TV in the living room. I love that gadget. First time we used it to watch the Winter Olympics in Turin and it was awesome. The current keyboard is the one I like very much: a split QWERTY keyboard, resting on a retractable keyboard tray. I use a track ball. Why many monitors? Well… Your Truly likes to keep an eye on the financial markets through out the day for trading opportunities. I need to find some way to afford a 40-foot RV some day! I also like to scan through the on-line news for the latest happening, webcams and look at the weather. What do I do for a living? I am a, quote, computer consultant. Which is just a nicer name for “Jack of all trades, master of none”. I do computer programming, system management, architecture design and stuff. Not full-scale programming as in a commercially available software application. Just enough to automate things and let users access things easily using web tools. My first programming language (if you call that a language) was B.A.S.I.C. back in the late 70’s. Then FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/I, Pascal in college. Later on C, which evolved into C++ and C#. And many of the scripting languages like Bourne shell, C shell, korn shell, perl and later on Java, Visual Basic, ASP, ASP.NET, javascript, etc.. In this field, the learning never stops. Every couple of years you need to renew yourself with the latest technology to remain employable. Those who don’t will be moved to the wayside. I have been tinkering with computers for a long time. I don’t mean just the PC that you can purchase for your home use. We deal with rows and rows of computer cabinets in controlled environment, raised floor, UPS and all that stuff. Setting up computers, wiring them, networking, setting up peripherals, backing up, etc.. The computer industry has gone through leaps and bounds of changes over the past 20 or so years. My first hand-on computer building project was setting up a single-board computer using an Intel 8086 microprocessor on an S-100 bus in college. I had to find a chassis, a bus driver, power supply and hook them all up. That’s what got me hooked to the technologies and the unbound possibilities of what you can do with computers. Now you can find computers used in all walks of life. You know there are a few computers just in the car you drive? Fuel injection, anti-lock brakes, engine diagnostics and the GPS navigation system… all can’t do without some specialized computers. Stacks of spare keyboards. They still work. Every time you buy a new computer, it comes with a new keyboard… So what do you do? Throw them away? Stacks of computer mice. 3 button, 2 button, optical, mechanical, cord, cordless, mouse, trackball, thumpad, joysticks, tablets, even spaceball! I had tried many pointing devices. I settled with trackballs which I like the most. Stacks of old laptops. The technology is advancing so rapidly. Every couple of years the laptop you use is obsolete. The newer operating systems always demand faster CPUs, more memory, higher capacity disk drives. They are chasing each other’s tail. The new Vista may demand a 64-bit chip to run well. I brought a 15-pound laptop on a plane once. Back then they weren’t really called laptops. Just portable computers. The battery lasted only like an hour and a half. Every so often I needed to save a file and could hear the clickily-click of the spinning floppy disk. My older desktop at home. I don’t bother with putting back the cover on any more. Every couple of weeks I might just unplug some boards and plug in new ones to test things out. Why bother? I often see some young guys come up to me and say “Oh, I know a lot about computers” and then show me their desktop PCs in pristine condition. No you don’t! Anybody who has not opened up a computer chassis to see what’s inside and how things are connected should not say they know a lot about computers. I use only one set of keyboard and trackball. They are connected to different computers through a KVM switch (KVM - Keyboard, Video, Mouse). Switching between different computers is just a matter of hitting the SCROLL-LOCK key twice. The one on the top is called the "A-B switch". It is a mechanical switch for sharing the printer, obsolete these days by network printers. The computers are connected via a Linksys router. Some wired. Some wireless. On through the cable modem to the outside world. My other, smaller QWETY keyboard set up in a different room. This one is tiny. I have to watch out for carpal tunnel syndrome using this one. From this tiny keyboard, I can command the shut down and start up of servers all around the world with the pushes of a few buttons. It is really fascinating… that my hand muscles cause my fingers to type on this keyboard, which generates electric pulses, the computer processor stores what I typed into bits and bytes in memory, and the data get sent through my cable modem, going through many analog-to-digital conversions again and again, through the network backbone and transmitted to eGullet’s server. From there, the data once again got transmitted from their server through the many switches, and through the undersea fiber optic cables, half way around the world and got to your computer, which processes the information and display it on the screen for you to see, no matter whether you are in Amsterdam, Oxford, Dubai, Beijing or Kuala Lumpur. Long live the Internet!

Tonight’s dinner: Usually we would go out to dine on a Friday night. But my MIL had called for a family gathering dinner tomorrow for the 7th day of Chinese New Year. It is called “Yun Yuet”, which means “everybody’s birthday”. So tomorrow night we will have lots to eat again. Tonight we settled with making something very simple at home. Something that is very traditional Cantonese: I bought a preserved duck leg (“Laap Ngap Bei”) from the SF Supermarket last week. The back of the package. The meat is salted and preserved. Rinsed two measured-cups of long grain rice. Cooked with water. Added the duck leg on the top. I also added two Chinese sausages (“Laap Cheung”). This kind is made from duck livers. Simmered with the lid on for about 15 to 20 minutes. When they are done, some of the oil from the duck leg and Chinese sausages would sip in to the white rice and gives it great flavor and fragrance. Chopped up the duck leg into smaller bite-size pieces. Cut up the Chinese sausages into small slices. Used chopsticks to fluff up the white rice. Returned the duck leg and Chinese sausages back in the pot. Mixed them up with the rice. Some people would add a few drops of dark soy sauce. We just ate it as is. My portion. Sauteed some Taiwanese Bok Choy with garlic. Very simple, traditional home-made meal.

Agreed. There are a few who can really benefit from online grocery shopping, such as the elderly and the disabled. They pay other people to perform the home-delivery service! Having an online grocery do home-delivery with no additional charge would be so lovely. But treating this as a business though... how a company can maintain such an operation, especially the logistics in a larger regional scale (than just in one town)... I have been baffled by how they could possibly make money. But back then the general public believed that anything that had the name "Internet" would make money.

Lindsay Ann: Dried shrimp are slightly crunchy and a bit salty. They do have a strong shrimp taste. Especially the smell. It may be quite fishy to some. One may not be used to it if not familiar with Chinese food. They are sold everywhere. You can find them in just about any Asian grocery store. They are tiny shrimp, sun dried. I believe they are cooked first before sun-drying, but not sure. Do they add any salt in the shrimp? I don't know. Snacking on them... I do. Some might think it's a bit fishy, but I like it.

Hi Beeds! Thank you! Gong Xi Fa Cai to you too! Yes I understand that in Northern China, the custom is to eat dumpling (jiao zi) right passed midnight in Chinese New Year. In Canton, we eat "tong yuen" (glutinous rice dumpling - shaped like a ball) on Chinese New Year Eve. I have been to Vancouver a couple of times. That were years ago. Back then we didn't have eGullet. I just followed my hunch in picking a Chinese restaurant to dine - look at the patronage. Go to the one packed with Hong Kong Chinese. I had been to a few in China Town area in Vancouver. Agreed, best Chinese food in North America. The ones in Toronto are pretty good too. And so are some that we'd been to in Montreal.

Karen: Horlicks tastes different thatn Ovaltine. Ovaltine is a chocolaty drink. Horlicks is a malt drink. It doesn't have the rich, smooth feel that is in a chocolate flavored drink. And they make Horlicks candies too! I like those.

Hi chocomoo! Thank you. Wishing you "boh boh goh sing" as well (a phrase that means gradually rising, which implies job promotions and academic achievements). Yes the Garden wafers are the favorite of many in Hong Kong. They do many bakery products very well. I like them too. My facorite is the coconut flavor.

Hi internooo. Thank you. Sure. How about a pictorial recipe? Take a look at this: Sauteed Scallop with Snowpeas (油泡帶子) It is this exactly same dish, a home version. The sheen is from the oil. With your wok burner, there is no need to blanch the vegetable first. The starch... just regular corn starch will do.

No Stephanie, I didn't. Hmmm... I need to drive to New Canton and find out. I would love to have dim sum over there again.

Susan: Happy Garden has different prices for different dim sums. Many years ago (in the 70's) Hong Kong restaurants did like you said - count the number of dishes on the table to figure out your total bill. Even back then there were different prices for different items. The waitstaff did the math in their head and came up with the total. And so did some customers. Perhaps the high arithematic skills of Chinese came from those exercises!

Yeah, the old Kai Tek Airport is really challenging to aviators because with your final approach you have to bank right slightly to get to the runway. There hadn't been too many accidents at Kai Tek over the years. We did have some accidents where the plane overshot and fell into the harbor. The water level is not as high this year. Last year it was about twenty feet higher than what you saw in this picture as we got a lot of rain.

Hi Helen! The diakon rice cake is really not too difficult to make at home. Next time I will take some pictures. I love reading instruments. I am a computer geek! IFR would be my next goal once I get the VFR done. Since I was small I have been very interested in subjects like geography, weather, physics, chemistry and general earth science.

Hi Kent! Thank you. Octopuses it is. They are first cookd and then dipped in some marinade. I would love to know their recipe. The red color... probably some kind of food coloring.

Hi Randi! Arrr.... you remember! Just when nobody is watching, I tossed in a piece of bonese chicken breast in the pot! I hid it underneath the drum sticks and conveniently left it out of the picture. I sliced it up to serve her.