Monthly Archives: March 2008

Happy Easter 2008!

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Easter Sunday!  We once again made roast duck.  My mom stuffed them with green apples, adding great flavor and a bit of acidity, which is nice with fatty foods.  The stars of the meal were the Junior’s cheesecake, which I made from a recipe in Molly O’Neill’s New York Cookbook (1992), and my old standard, the 7-up cake.  The cheesecake was exactly as it should be – dense, a bit crumbly and not too sweet.

Jon was over for the weekend and we all had a fun holiday together.  I once again was able to harvest enough duck fat to see the family through the next six months of roast potatoes, and Berry made out pretty well, too.  Happy Easter to all!

jon and berry the akita ready to have easter dinner in 2008

Matt’s visit to Hong Kong

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I’ve been meaning to post more photos from Matt’s 2007 trip to Hong Kong.  Since I have no food news to report today I’ll do that here.  We have: Aaron, Matt’s cousin and host, with his friend, Tracy, in Shenzhen, and next Matt in front of the Hong Kong skyline.  Matt spent his days roaming around all the nooks and crannies of Hong Kong.  He took the MTR subway to get close to where he wanted to be and then went off by foot.  He wanted to be sure to make it to non-touristy sections of town so he could eat authentic, local food, which he enjoyed, apparently being seated with random diners and then pointing to dishes on other tables that he wanted to try but didn’t know by name.  Evenings were spent with his cousin and various subsets of his circle, going out to eat and to the markets and whatnot.  Matt said there was a father and son food cart establishment near his cousin’s apartment that sold snacks, like BBQ pork buns, shrimp rice noodles and fried taro, and that he had something from the cart each day.  I believe it.

Hong Kong Snack Shop in Richmond

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The Hong Kong Snack House in Pacific East Mall in Richmond is pretty good, I can report, for a little bite or even a whole assortment of goodies to combine to make a meal for your brood.  They have excellent Vietnamese sandwiches that come on good, crusty French bread with crispy veggies and a sweet/sour sauce for around $3.50.  Try the combo.  We have not yet worked our way through the entire menu, but are able to vouch for a few other things, like the egg puffs and waffles, but I would advise eating these items while walking around the mall.  The sandwiches travel fine, though.  This place has a display table of brightly colored snack items that we have not yet selected from, and it was decked out in spades for Chinese New Year.

I cooked an Asian meal today

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lion’s head meatballs 3-16-08

Chinese dinner tonight for friends.  I guess I’m just crazy enough to make Chinese food for Chinese guests, but I figure they’d appreciate the gesture as I do when someone serves me up some Eisbein that is less than echt.  I made a couple of my favorite Shanghai-style dishes:  lion’s head meatballs, which are first fried and then braised in cabbage leaves, and pork belly braised in wine, soy sauce, ginger and rock sugar.  For some reason I also served up kare-kare, a Filipino dish of tripe and oxtails laced with annatto oil and peanut butter, just for some contrast.  It’s generally a bad idea to cook something you never made before when company calls, but I saw this in Jeff Smith’s The Frugal Gourmet on our Immigrant Ancestors (1990), and wanted to give it a go.  I love kare-kare, but you can’t eat too much in one sitting or you’ll feel like killing yourself.

kare kare 3-16-08

Yes, I know this meal was too heavy in sum total, and I should have had a veggie or fish dish to round it all out, but we wanted to go for broke.  I didn’t even mention the potato Kugel with blood pudding dip – which sent this nothing-really-goes-together meal into depraved territory.  Yes, yes, I know Jeff Smith has been accused of terrible things and I should never use his cookbooks because that would go against the wishes of the powers that be – essentially to wipe his memory off the face of the earth, but I have no intention of stopping.  His cookbooks are pretty good.  Rip off my arms and legs if you want to.

braised pork belly

Breakfast at Jimmy Bean’s in Berkeley

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Sage in 2008

Our niece, Sage, was here for a visit this month, which was nice since I have not seen her for almost 10 years.  She and Matt are the same age, give or take.  Sage is majoring in environmental studies at the University of Vermont, and currently spending a semester looking at water-related issues here in the West, so this afforded an opportunity to come see us.  She ultimately wants to become a nurse practitioner in the area of women’s health.  Matt, Sage and I discussed all of this and more over breakfast at Jimmy Bean’s (1290 6th Street, Berkeley) today, which was fun.  We all had breakfasty things, like eggs and/or potatoes.  Matt had a goat cheese and mushroom omelet, so he was the most “Berkeley” of the three of us.  On the way to drop Sage off at the BART station for her foray into SF, we stopped so I could use the restroom at the little collection of shops at Gilman and 10th street.  I know, I know, I should have gone at the restaurant.  The delay was fortuitous, though, in that Sage ran into one of her UV professors at the BART station, which would never have happened had we not made that pit stop.