Category: En Chine 2009 / In China 2009

Eating local in Hong Kong is a rather hard thing to do. The most local food usually gets are fruits and vegetable from over the border in China’s Guangdong province.

However, if you are living in the “countryside”, like on Lamma Island, chances are that you might be finding a small farm next to where you are living. This is what I discovered when my friend who has been living on Lamma for some time took me to this small chunk of land, in the small valley at the entrance of Tai Peng village, cultivated by an man maybe in his 60s. With his peasant hat, tool in hand, he seems to be straight out of some old movie, growing his vegetables on this island that is better known for its seafood, great outdoors and hippie culture.

(Next to their field, they are going to be developing new houses… so who knows if the farm’s going to last.)

For one HKD (13 Canadian cents), you can get about three branches of choy sum (菜心), with gigantic leaves. For the same price, you can also get more than enough of green onions (蔥), for what would cost 2-3 times more in Lamma’s grocery stores, and 4-5 times more in my hometown in Canada.

The next day, I came back for some yeen choy (莧菜), a kind of Chinese spinach with red pigmentation on its leaves also called Amaranth, a lad tougher than the regular kind of spinach. A portion for that evening’s dinner cost me two HKD (about 25 Canadian cents). They were delicious, fried with garlic and salt.

The lettuce, the man said, were going to be plump enough at the end of November…

A view of the field as dinnertime approaches…

…and my sink at dinnertime

Edit (2010-01-02):

First off, I’ve no idea of the exact address. My host for the past week, who took me to Lung Kee Wonton (龍記招牌雲吞), said that it was a well-kept secret (according to him, has the best wonton in the whole city) that only Japanese publications have covered so far outside of Hong Kong.

Why are its wontons so special? Because they are all-shrimp. That’s right: just the skins tightly wrapping bits of shrimp. My friend was himself taken there by a Muslim person. Wontons are usually pork and shrimp in the Cantonese tradition (those pork-only multiple-skin layers wontons at Chinese buffets are nothing but pale imitations).

Lung Kee’s wontons are almost like boiled har gow, so much the shrimp flavour was dominant.

Your wontons are served as wonton mein 雲吞麵, so wontons with noodles of your choice, which are the classic egg-based thin noodles , in a clear broth.

Better yet, you may also choose thick noodles, also egg-based. Aside from this, there is also the lou min 撈麵 or dry mix version, which is the wontons on noodles and veggies, without the broth and with oyster sauce on top. It’s slightly more expensive but it’s also for a slightly larger portion. So for the second serving, I had a combination of these two options. 🙂

Lung Kee is located somewhere on Carnarvon Road, across from The Masterpiece in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon side. You may find another restaurant of the same name in Jordan, but that’s not the same one (pictures of its wontons also don’t match)… So, good luck finding it!

In the meanwhile, here is the menu.

Every time I come to Hong Kong, I notice some new “alternate” flavour of a familiar product. One time, it was McDonald’s ice cream sundae served with red bean or mango sauce (in place of strawberry or chocolate, which are also available). This time, I was eating at a Japanese chain restaurant called Yoshinoya (吉野家) and one of the dessert options for HKD$3 was… tofu ice cream, distributed by Nestlé!

It looks a lot like a vanilla ice cream. Now, what does it taste like? I would say that it was as if cow milk/cream was replaced with soy milk. So, maybe it tastes like tofu. In a land where tofu is considered as much a dessert (as doufu fa or 豆腐花), the flavour name does not sound weird at all. The other available flavour? Black sesame! (zi ma woo or 芝麻糊, the base of a well-known Cantonese dessert)

However, the one time I checked in a grocery store for these flavours, I did not find any of them under the Nestlé brand…