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Ha1 (蝦) = shrimp Dip6 (碟) = dish

What's your cutoff for "authentic" here? ← Umm...whether it exists in China? ← Then yes, it's authentic. You can get it (usually made with pigeon, I think) at many restaurants in HK serving typical Cantonese food, alongside the roast chicken and suckling pig and sweet'n'sour pork. As for whether it's a US-inspired invention (similar to deep-fried walnut shrimp in mayonnaise with broccoli), I don't know.

What's your cutoff for "authentic" here?

It's just bad pizza.

Satay Marinade This marinade can be used on any meat for satay. Cut the meat into small pieces and marinate it for at least two hours before grilling. 1 T corriander seed, ground 1 qt fennel seed, ground 2 stalks lemongrass, tender parts, sliced thin 5 shallots, chopped roughly 3 cloves garlic, chopped roughly 1 inch piece of galangal, peeled 2 inch piece of ginger, peeled 1 T tumeric powder 1/4 c palm sugar 2 T oil 1 tsp salt Combine all the ingredients in a food processor and blend until smooth. Keywords: Appetizer, Easy, Chicken, Beef, Lamb, Southeast Asian ( RG2132 )

South Indian Style Broccoli Serves 2 as Main Dish. Broccoli isn't a traditional Indian vegetable, but I designed this recipe to use up leftover boiled broccoli in the style of cauliflower. 3 c broccoli, cut up and cooked 3 T oil 2 T cumin seeds 2 tsp tumeric 2 tsp corriander powder 2 green chilis, sliced thinly 1/2 c chopped cilantro salt, to taste Fry the spices in the oil until they smoke a little. Add the broccoli and chilis and fry for a couple minutes to get the flavors mixed. Add salt to taste and stir in the cilantro before serving with chapati. Bonus recipe: just before adding the cilantro, crack 2-4 eggs into the pan and stir them around. Keywords: Main Dish, Side, Easy, Vegan, Vegetables, Indian ( RG2107 )

Chicken Chettinad Serves 6 as Main Dish. 4 chicken legs 2 large onions, roughly chopped 4 tsp tumeric 6 T oil 2 tsp corriander powder 1 T Kitchen King or other commercial masala 3 small tomatoes 4 whole star anise 8 whole cardamom 10 cloves 3 cinnamon sticks 1 T fennel seed 1 T cumin seed 1/2 tsp fresh grated nutmeg 3 T ginger garlic paste 4 small green chilis, sliced thinly salt, to taste 1 c water With a cleaver, cut the chicken legs into about 8 pieces each. Add most of the tumeric and half the oil, and mix well by hand. This mixture can be marinated for a few hours if you like. Heat a small amount of the oil in a deep, heavy pot and brown the chicken in batches, pushing down on the skin to get it rendered. The pot will fill with chicken fat. Reserve the chicken. In the pot of chicken fat, fry the chopped onions, the ginger garlic paste, the rest of the tumeric, the corriander powder, and the commercial masala. Cook, stirring, until the onions are a little soft and glossy, but are not quite done. Place the contents of the pot in a food processor with the tomatoes and puree until smooth. Add the remaining small amount of oil to the pot and add the whole spices and nutmeg. Fry until a little smoke rises, then immediately add the water. Scrape the bottom of the pot to remove all of the browned bits, then add the chilis and the onion-tomato puree. Add salt until the sauce tastes fairly salty and the raw onion flavor is not apparent (adding the chicken and cooking it all down will dilute the saltiness). Add back the reserved chicken and its juices. Simmer on a low flame for about 90 minutes, stirring occasionally. Keywords: Main Dish, Easy, Chicken, Indian ( RG2105 )

Are you sure it never has any flavor? The one time I had it, it was in a dish with lettuce (at least, those were the only two ingredients I saw) and some kind of typical-looking brown sauce. The maw (yu tou) had the most awful flavor... very reminiscent of a tropical fish tank that needed cleaning. I never tried it again, assuming that was a characteristic flavor. Maybe it's worth trying again...

A bit of casual googling for "蛋花湯" seems to point me to an awful lot of Taiwanese websites. I wonder if it's now "popular" there (as a thing on its own) and no longer in HK. I maintain my claim that the complementary soup popular in HK is a close relative of what we'd call "egg drop soup," though.

I've had something that was basically indistinguishable from the common American chicken/egg-drop type soup in at least a couple white-tablecloth places in HK (as the soup course for the whole table). It may have had some kind of shark's fin substitute protein. That's where I see the similarity- that kind of goopy texture and mild flavor is shared by both, and maybe having a buttload of egg chunks in there is more of an American thing, but there isn't a huge diffrence.

CXB- I visited Ping Kee last time I was in Tai Po, thanks to a review you posted a couple years ago. It was pretty cool seeing the dude on TV and remembering I had seen him at his stall, making me food. I got won ton noodles and fish ball noodles. I thought that although the noodles were good, these dishes weren't good showcases for the noodles. The broth was nearly pure water, and the won tons didn't have much flavor. On the TV program you ordered some dry noodles- is this the best way to enjoy those noodles? Are there any other dishes there you'd recommend?

The selection of eateries was like a best-of-Chaxiubao but that's OK. The one surprise in the episode was the trip to the North Point cooked food center. I'll definitely be eating at that particular stall the next time I'm in HK.

It's not a particularly scientific explanation, just hand-waving. What are these contaminants exactly, and in what quantity? We'd need to know some specifics of the manufacturing process before we could really hypothesize about potential contaminants that appear in pure MSG, but not in other purified food-grade products like salt, sugar, corn starch, and so forth. This Italian gentleman loses some credibility when he says that we should be worried about contamination by "peptides." As for the claim about D-glutamate contamination: this is an easy enough hypothesis to test with a simple derivitization/LC experiment. And even if it turns out that off-the-shelf MSG consists of 10% D-glutamate (similar to an E. coli cell), then what? Meat, dairy, and vegetable protein products can easily contain 20-30% of a given amino acid as D-amino acid, and D-amino acids have not generally been shown to posess any greater toxicity than L-amino acids (Man and Bada, Ann. Rev. Nutr. 1987, 7:209-25).

Patel Brothers (at least in NY and MA) got them this week.

My favorite recipe for masoor (yellow-pink) dal: Heat black mustard seeds and curry leaves in oil until spitting Add dal and water Add salt and your favorite ready-mixed dry spices (Kitchen King, etc) Simmer until dal is done Add ginger-garlic paste (not as much as you'd need if you'd browned it first) Add kasoori methi to open up the flavors a bit Lime juice, lemon juice, or wine vinegar are also good for brightening the flavor