happiness is authentic hong kong style chow mein

This is one of my favorite Hong Kong restaurant dish. It is a Cantonese fried noodles called chow mein. Even in Hong Kong this dish is often too oily and lack adequate and quality topping. A Google search on chow main returns a lot of images of the supposedly chow mein. Most I would not touch with a ten feet pole.

authentic hong kong style chow mein

Out of all the noodles I had tried in the greater Portland area there is only one that I consider good for making authentic traditional Hong Kong tea restaurant style chow mein (a style of fried noodles).

little clay pot rice - still more variation

Blog is dead. No one read blogs anymore. It is all social and videos now. The reason I continue my blog is the photos that I take alone do not adequately document some of the subtleties especially when it comes to food preparation. Sometimes a few words of annotations help me remember years down the road of the progress I make over time.

miso wasabi vinaigrette

It was Sunday and the first of three club days at Oregon Raceway Park. I was catering the lunch for 30. I had done enough of preparation work at home as well as the night before so I knew at least I could drive for an hour before preparing the lunch.

hong kong style stir fried noodles with seafood 港色三鮮炒麵 - part 3

From making Hong Kong style stir fried noodles with seafood 港色三鮮炒麵 I have about two serving worth of cooked toppings that I saved. I knew that I can improvise a couple of dishes from it. I used up all the stir fry noodles. My option is to drive to the store to pick up another pack or be versatile and use what I have at home. I chose the latter.

hong kong style stir fried noodles with seafood 港色三鮮炒麵 - part 2

I made Hong Kong style stir fried noodles with seafood 港色三鮮炒麵 again. I often would make the same dish a number of times consecutively because of the leftover ingredients. In this case is the mung bean sprouts and a bit of stir fry noodles. Even making the same dish consecutively there is always something to be learnt. I often refer back to my older posts and see the progresses that I have made over time.

hong kong style stir fried noodles with seafood 港色三鮮炒麵

I made this stir fried noodles with seafood 港色三鮮炒麵. You can call it Hong Kong or Cantonese style. While I call it a stir fried noodles, the noodles was fried separately from the toppings. I used three kinds of seafood for the toppings, which include cuttlefish, shrimps, and scallops. All came out of the freezer.

daikon cake 蘿蔔糕 - part 4

With the momentum of my first serious attempt to make daikon cake 蘿蔔糕 only a week ago, I want to improve upon the firmness and density that I had in mind. I like my daikon cake 蘿蔔糕 firm and dense. When it is firm it cut easier and has less drags on the knife blade. It is also easier to lift the cut slice out of the steaming container which tends to be deep and has steep near vertical sides. So I went and bought 3 pounds worth of daikon. I even made a point to buy a pack of Chinese sausage.

hong kong style stir fried noodles with julienne pork 港色肉絲炒麵

I have a small portion of mung bean sprouts left in the refrigerator. It is on the verge of going bad but I thought I can salvage it in making another stir fried noodle dish with all the ingredients I have. I only need to pick up a bag of stir fry noodles.

yang chow fried rice 揚州炒飯

I have been really into making some lunch time favorite dishes in Hong Kong Cantonese restaurants. Today I made Yang Chow fried rice 揚州炒飯. This is a simple dish but does has its challenges. The ingredients are quite simple and inexpensive. There are two most important attributes in a successful execution. One is achieving the fluffiness and the other nutty tasting rice without being oily.

slow braised red grouper in sake 紅燒紅石斑 - part 3

It is time to rotate back to the slow braised red grouper in sake 紅燒紅石斑. It takes some preparation but the result is a pot full that would last for many meals.

asia trip, 2011 - hong kong

It is such a distant memory now. As far as I can recall this was my last top of my Asian trip in the winter of 2010 and 2011.

asia trip, 2010 - macau

Just a short stop in Macau.

clay pot rice aplenty - 很多煲仔飯

The air is getting damp and cold. It is near the season for clay pot rice. Clay pot rice is one of the most versatile dish once you master the fundamentals of the preparation. It is very fast to prepare and involves only one cooking vessel. I have written about clay pot rice in many posts over the years. In recent weeks I have made many meals of clay pot rice, each time with some variations of the ingredients.

braised eel 紅燒白鰻

When I was an young adult living in Hong Kong. I worked in an appliance and electronic store. The hours was long and there were no weekend off nor paid holidays. Well may be a few days off. A few pastimes including going swimming at a beach at night after the store closed at 9pm. One time before a typhoon made landfall we decided to drive to Clear Water Bay to snorkel.

cantonese noodle with oyster sauce 蚝油撈麵 - part 3

This is third installment of my recent posts on Cantonese noodle with oyster sauce 蚝油撈麵.
Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.

cantonese noodle with oyster sauce 蚝油撈麵 - part 2

This is a continuation of my recent post on Cantonese noodle with oyster sauce 蚝油撈麵.

Having been on a diet of Western dishes recently I begun to crave some Asian food. Most of the Asian dishes I like to make tends to provide a lighter diet. I actually dislike the word diet (to DIE with a Tease) for it's common connotations. I believe if you eat real food and eat sensible proportions cuisines from different cultures prepared from fresh ingredients can be equally healthy.

cantonese noodle with oyster sauce 蚝油撈麵

Most people that have explored Chinese food in the West know about wonton soup noodle. A very good bowl of wonton soup noodle in Hong Kong typically can be found only in stores that specialized in it, at least that was how it was during the golden era of Chinese food in Hong Kong. I would put the period between post war and the nighties. These stores typically had a very small menu.

macau - 2008

I was browsing through my old photo albums today. I found some photos that I had not posted previous and here they are. These are from my trip to Macau in 2008. While Macau is very small many of these photos were taken off the beaten paths of tourists.

asia trip - winter 2013 part 8

Still more photos of the old part of town in Macau.