The Food Monologues

Food in Hong Kong doesn't taste as good I as I remember it from my last visits. Perhaps my palate has become jaded or perhaps its because the food that you can get in Hong Kong is similar to the food that you can get in the UK. Ok there might be some exceptions, as there are some foods which are still to exotic, but sometimes exotic things do not taste all that nice. The dim sum restaurants that I went to were pretty dull from previous experiences. You can get the usual har-gaw and sui-mai as you could in the UK, though the prices are a lot less. You can get pork congee with thousand year old eggs, but they don't taste as nice as the stuff my mum makes at home in her kitchen in the UK. The restaurants with the trolley service were actually more difficult to find, we found one , Maxim's Palace in Mong Kok when I went to visit my Uncle, but the restaurant that we usually frequented in Tuen Mun had done away with the trolley service. The fast food places were actually easier to get food from, and when it was just Tim and I sight seeing, fast food like KFC and MacDonalds and Cafe de Coral were where we ate as dai-pai-dons (street food vendors) was not the safest option. KFC serve spicy chicken, which is very tasty and much hotter than the stuff they serve in the UK and there are regional variations. Fish and prawns are very popular in Hong Kong so you can get deep fried fish and prawns in KFC. In MacDonalds you can get MacWings and you can get sausage and egg MacMuffins all day and they serve Fillet O Fish for breakfast. The also had a promotional sandwich, the prosperity burger which is to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Cafe de Coral is something else. Tim calls it the Argos of the food world. Where you order your food at the counter and then you are given a ticket to give to the food counter where you then wait for your food to be called out by number. They do a mixture of Chinese food and some 'westernised' food too. They serve soup with a puff pastry cover that was sweetish. Tim assumes its a way to keep the soup hot.

One of my Christmas presents this year was a blowtorch. The only thing was that it was not supplied with any gas - which is apparently available from many cook shops and hardware stores. So off we went on a cycle trip around town in search of this gas. The first place we went to was Wilkinson and they did supply cans of butane but the canisters came with screw on nozzels, not of the same size fitting as my new blow torch. So the nice people at customer services suggested that we try the Range. We were out of luck there, and tried Sainsburys down the road - and again, no joy there. So it was off to B&Q where they did have something along the lines but we were not sure of the fittings. So we cycled back home (7 mile round trip) and took the blow torch with us to Focus where again they did supply the gas, but the cannisters had no nozzels. So we took the torch round to Tim's parents and his dad suggested we use lighter fluid which we could get from the tobbaconist. However, yesterday was a bank holiday and most of the shops shut early, but Tesco was open and that was where I finally got the gas for the torch. Now if the box has said lighter fluid, things would be easier - doh! But I finally got to make creme brulée and it tasted rather nice.