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In my family’s grocery-shopping heyday, Costco was a regular stop on our supermarket tour. We went way more than was reasonable for a family of four; considering they sell most of their stuff in bulk, it says a lot that we sometimes went thrice a week. In our defense, though, having a store located a mere traffic light away facilitates this kind of nonsensical behavior. As a child, I have very fond memories of the place, with its soaring metallic ceiling, aisles like corridors, and liberally-distributed food samples giving it the appeal of a Willy Wonka factory. Even as things have changed — the checkout lines don’t snake the way they used to, and no longer for sampling are the gourmet sausages and spinach pastry puffs — I still enjoy a leisurely stroll through the warehouse whenever I return home. For a single person, Costco does not hold much practical appeal, but there are the occasional items I do enjoy purchasing in excessive amounts. Like blueberries, by far my favorite berry and up there for fave fruit — just the right size for popping by the handful, with a mellow sweetness and the occasional tart explosion. Certainly, a pint will not do, especially if I am to get all the baking juices out of me before I go back to HK. These muffins came out looking more like chunky cookies and tasting more like dense, dryish cake, but the sight of all those bursted berries more than compensated for my lame baking skillz.
Healthy-ish Oatmeal Blueberry Muffins
Adapted from this recipe
Ingredients:
1 1/4 cups quick-cooking oats
1 1/4 cups AP flour
3/4 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
1 t instant chai
1/3 cup sugar
1 egg
1 cup low-fat yogurt
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 1/2 cups fresh blueberries
1. Preheat oven to 375F. In large bowl, stir together the rolled oats, flour, baking soda, salt, sugar, and instant chai mix.
2. In a med bowl, beat the egg with a fork, then stir in yogurt and olive oil. Make a well in the bowl of dry ingredients and gradually pour in the wet ingredients. Stir until just combined, being careful not to overstir. Gently fold in blueberries.
3. Spray muffin pan or silicone muffin cups with nonstick spray if desired. Fill muffin cups about 3/4 full.
4. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until tops are starting to brown and a toothpick inserted comes out clean. I baked mine for exactly 20 minutes.
Room for improvement: dissolve chai in boiling water first; 1/2 cup sugar instead of 1/3; bake at 400F instead of 375F for crispier tops; throw in a few tablespoons of melted butter for added richness and flavor.
At our desserts night event earlier this week, the students made tong yuen, a traditional Chinese dessert of glutinous rice balls in a ginger-infused, lightly sweetened broth. However, instead of getting stuffed with the classic crushed peanut, red bean paste, or black sesame fillings, some of these ballers had maltesers tucked inside, to my amusement. That’s right, maltesers!
Tong yuen filled with rock candy: my first time eating these, and I quite enjoyed the way the sugar liquefied so that you could catch a bit of it in every bite.
Maltesers getting the glutinous rice dough treatment. I didn’t particularly like the malteser-tong yuen, but appreciated the efforts at creativity/hybridization.
Babies in the hot tub:
All this talk about maltesers has gotten me on a craving — off to 7-11 to pick me up a box 
As part of a “desserts night” event for our dorm, s’mores were the obvious choice to represent the American dessert tradition. While roasting the marshmellows would’ve been ideal, we had to settle for the inferior microwave method to get the marshmellows appropriately gooey, though the marshmellow poofing did prove to be exceptionally entertaining for much of the night.
The ingredients: digestive crackers (graham crackers were not to be found), lindt swiss milk chocolate, white marshmellows. Could it be less complicated?
[This is the second in a series of posts on tea time buffets in Hong Kong.]
“Chocolate afternoon tea” at the Mandarin Oriental — hell yes.
My weekend in Macau was more or less an eating marathon. Restaurant meals are forthcoming, but in the meantime, here are some of the snacks I indulged in during those glorious 36 hours.
I know this is a repeat shot from the last post, but I couldn’t help myself: the custard in this portuguese egg tart was delicioso.
Word on the street is that the latest manifestation of David Chang’s genius, Momofuku Bakery and Milk Bar, is no pushover. As a baked good fiend, ‘David Chang’ and ‘bakery’ in the same sentence is sweet music to my ears. But for now, I suppose I can only salivate from afar and live vicariously through you lucky bastards who trod its hallow ground.
While I’m sure he’s not the first person to employ the compost cookie concept, that particular one stuck out to me the most when I glanced at the menu (check this review out for some solid pics). Momofuku’s compost cookie supposedly contains foodstuffs like pretzels and potato chips, to go along with butterscotch and chocolate chips. While I unfortunately can’t vouch for the cookie’s taste (Ed Levine seemed underwhelmed by it), I at least find the concept attractive for its hypothetically economical-environmental use of ingredients.
As such, I was delighted to discover that I had a number of ingredients on hand that would work well for a batch of cookies I planned to bake for my students: I thought, proudly and a bit smugly, that these could be compost cookies in theory as well as in practice. Since the ingredients produced a beautiful banana, chocolate, and coconut riff, I anointed them my “bananonut” cookie creation.
An approximated recipe (is that an oxymoron?):
3/4 stick butter
1/2 cup sugar
3T coconut milk
2 ripe bananas, i’m told that’s about 1 cup
1.5t vanilla extract
2 eggs
2 cups flour
2t baking powder
1/2t salt
100g chocolate, broken
1.5 cups oats
for topping:
desiccated coconut
Mash bananas. Whisk in vanilla extract and two eggs. Cream butter and sugar and combine mixture with banana-extract-eggs. Combine dry ingredients except for oats and chocolate. Stir in dry ingredients about 1/4 at a time, until just incorporated. Toss in oats and chocolate, or whatever else you have on hand. 1T drops on baking sheet. Bake at 375F for 10-15 mins. Makes ~36 cookies.
Pre-baked:
Post-baked:
Sorry for not coming up with a remotely creative title.
Being abroad is no excuse for not celebrating Thanksgiving. Like most Americans, I instinctively associate this holiday with two things: family and a buttload of food. Many buttloads, actually. Being the upstanding cultural ambassadors that we are, my ETA cohort and I thus set forth last Thursday to recreate to the best of our abilities the gloriously gluttonous feast that is practically synonymous with the fourth sing kei sei (Thursday) of every sap yut yuet (November).
We decided to host a potluck dinner with some ~50 people (many of them students experiencing Thanksgiving for the first time). Thankfully, I was not responsible for hosting/organizing the event, leaving me free to focus on my two cents of a contribution to the food extravaganza. I had some Chinese sausages lying around and figured they would be great in some cheesy scallion scones. Oh, genius am I.
I figured a combination of Cheddar and cream cheese would lend the scones some pleasant creaminess and tang, and I loosely followed this recipe from Farmgirl Fare. Since I’m a novice with bread, I had no idea how sticky the dough should have been (esp considering the cream cheese). I ended up with a mixture that did not really resemble what I think of as bread dough, but it pulled relatively cleanly from the sides of my mixing bowl, and I figured that would do. The cheesiness went well with the combination of onion-y scallions and sweet sausages, and though a few scones ended up more well done than I would have liked, I really enjoyed the trio of flavors. I wish I could’ve eaten more. Using about 4 cups of flour, I ended up with something like 45 small, loosely heart-shaped scones.
A moment of sheer narcissism:
Here are some of the other dishes made by my partners-in-crime:
A’s jam tart (lemon-lime on the left, black currant on the right):
Prepping some greenery:
Stuffing:
At a special request by yours truly, blueberry pie! Without question, my favorite fruit pie 
An ad hoc brown sugar pastry made using leftover pie dough, for pre-dinner nibbling:
W’s sweet potato bake with brown sugar and marshmellows, or, death by sugar OD:
Gots to have the mash:
More of G’s pies:
A’s cornbread with bacon:
G’s beloved, hot out of the oven:
G’s crusty pecan pie. I am generally not a fan of pecan pies, as the gooey, nauseatingly sweet innards don’t really appeal to me, but this one was money. Crunching through the top crust layer, I found a pleasantly sweet, almost cake-like interior, which eventually gave way to a dense, rich, buttery finish…pure deliciousness.
Meatloaf and mashed potato ‘cake’:
The dessert table (from top left, homemade whipped cream, jam tart, spiced bread loves, pumpkin pies, and egg custards hiding inside the box):
Good and plentiful food would be nothing without good people to share it with, and thankfully, those were also in abundance that night. While prepping and helping out was time-consuming and mildly stressful, the event was well worth the effort. Alas, I enjoyed whittling the night away with individuals whom I’ve come to see as dear, and at the same time, felt extremely fortunate for my large, eccentric family back home. Happy belated Thanksgiving all!
All I had been thinking about for much of last week revolved around planning and preparing for my first private kitchen event. I began entertaining the notion of doing such a thing about a month ago, when I discovered that there were a number of private kitchens in Hong Kong. Dinner parties have always appealed to me; a lowkey, well-cooked dinner in a cozy atmosphere over one or several bottles of wine, in the company of people one enjoys, makes for an ideal evening any day of the week. Since my experience with cooking is spotty, I thought hosting a private kitchen would be a great challenge, especially without my own kitchen space. But I figured that the experience would also grant me a new perspective on food and a richer appreciation for it. And mostly, I just get a huge kick out of sharing my passion for food with others: of spreading the foodie love.
I wanted to create a menu inspired by my own palate, one that made honest attempts at coherence and creativity. Disparate foods kept popping up in my head (salmon head and blue cheeseburgers, for example), but they all stood firmly on common ground as foodstuffs I thoroughly enjoy. Slowly, ingredients, random ideas, and recipes came together, and in gratuitously circuitous fashion, I committed myself to this menu for the night:
appetizer: steamed salmon head over buckwheat noodles, served with soy-sesame-scallion dressing
course 1: bulgogi-rice patty ‘burgers’, served with sugared tomatoes and japanese cucumber relish
course 2: a variation on asian lettuce wraps, served with sweet potato noodles
course 3: classic blue cheese burgers
dessert: rice crispy treats with coconut milk
To my delight, I ended up with something that reflects my trifold fondness for Western, Asian, and somewhere-in-between cuisines. And while I hadn’t made a single one of these ‘dishes’ before last week, I felt relatively confident that my culinary genius (more like my heavy hand with seasonings and a generous dose of luck) would, at the very least, not flat out embarrass me.
On the big day, I managed to escape a potential predicament or two (rice stubbornly resistant to binding) and had a wonderful time with my private kitchen guinea pigs. It helped tremendously that they were an encouraging and supportive bunch, and I thank them heartily for their daring in agreeing to subject themselves to my experiment.
Here’s how the dishes turned out (thanks to g for being the fill-in food pornographer ).
I wanted the appetizer to feature the absolute deliciousness that is salmon head, so I simply seasoned the heads with some salt and pepper and steamed them, then stripped off the meat and served it over a bed of buckwheat noodles. The dressing was equally simple: I heated until boiling a mixture of soy sauce, scallions, and sesame oil, and threw in a dash of ground ginger. See that piece of meat sitting on top? That’s the fish cheek — in my humble opinion, the best damn part of the fish. It’s soft as a baby’s bottom, tender, and insanely succulent. For me, this dish was all about channeling Mark Bittman’s minimalism, and I was extremely pleased with the outcome.
The bulgogi patties were my Asian interpretation of the classic American burger, and though the execution on the rice patties was lacking, the bulgogi received thumbs up all around. I loosely followed this marinade recipe, which served me well. I also think the sugared tomatoes, a traditional Northern Chinese preparation, were a strong complement to the bulgogi, as was the cucumber relish.
For a riff on Asian lettuce wraps, I minced a bunch of oyster mushrooms and cabbage, some preserved Chinese sausages, and dried turnips. I also wanted to use bean curd skin, as I am partial to its chewy texture, so I threw some of that in as well. All this was sauteed with soy sauce, chinkiang vinegar, brown sugar, and sriracha. I originally used the brown sugar to dull some of the heat from the hot sauce, but it ended up being a bit overpowering. Nevertheless, with some tweaks, I think this one is a keeper.
Then the BURGERS!!! One food I have been consistently craving since coming to HK. Though I wasn’t able to taste one, my guests robustly approved, which was good enough for me. Again, I channeled some of MB’s minimalism, and just seasoned the beef with s&p (here I realized that high quality ground beef does make a difference) before tossing it with some mustard and an egg. Having no grill, I opted to cook them over high heat on the induction cooker while the buns were toasting, and then finished it all off with a few minutes in the oven. These ended up more cooked than I would have liked, as I was being overly cautious, but they looked and smelled fantastic.
Finally, I decided to serve a classic American dessert, rice krispy treats, but substituted some coconut milk for butter to keep things interesting. I tested out this whim earlier in the week, and ended up with soggy and overly coconut-y rice krispy treats, so I adjusted the proportions, and this time ended up with glorious results. The finished product is topped with toasted coconut and peanut m&ms. Rice krispies are ridiculously easy to make, and at the end of a busy night, they really hit the spot. I would just make sure to give them at least a couple hours to rest before digging in — your tastebuds will be duly rewarded.
However time-consuming and draining it was, the evening far exceeded my expectations. I pestered my diners for suggestions (and got some compliments along the way), experienced a genuine sense of accomplishment, and felt deeply connected to both the people and the food in a new way. I am currently planning another private kitchen session in two weeks, and my hope is that this evening was only the first of many of its kind.
On your average weekday night, we went out for Vietnamese in Tai Po Centre. This was my first Vietnamese meal since coming to Hong Kong, so of course I had to order some pho.
The simplicity of pho is largely what makes it such an appealing dish to me. In the States, I’ve had ‘pho’ that’s been unnecessarily complicated with tripe, tendon, and an assortment of other body parts. While some of these things can be quite delicious at other times, I prefer my pho to contain only those paper thin, fat-lined slices of beef steak. I don’t eat beef regularly, and pho is one of the few dishes in which I prefer having beef, so I want my pho experiences to be as unadulterated with non-muscle meat structures as possible.
I enjoyed my noodles — the meat, cooked to a nice medium in the steaming, fragrant beef broth, was tender and succulent. The combination of the noodles and soup, though nothing to write home about, induced a fuzzy warm feeling my stomach (but I did get a slight headache from the msg), and the textural contrast between the soft noodles and the crunch of onions and bean sprouts made the dish all the more enjoyable, as it usually does.
Owen got the pho with shredded chicken. Looked tasty.
Alice posing dutifully with her Vietnamese spam(?) spring rolls. I think these got a thumbs down.
Afterward, Owen, Shari, and I weaved our way to Tai Po Market, as I owed Shari (due to reasons too humiliating to disclose online) a joint sesame ball-eating session.
At Tai Po Square, after securing these oily, wonderballs. Sesame balls are deep-fried glutinous rice balls coated with sesame seeds and stuffed with a sweet paste (traditionally red bean, although were of the lotus seed variety). Shar shar is having a toothpaste commercial moment:
Cheers! Communal dining at its finest:
