Ravishing Char Siu and an Unusual Pairing Idea

A box of wines arrived at our doorstep a couple of weeks ago, courtesy of Toasst, a new business venture based on the wine club concept co-founded by my friend A just over a year ago. Most of the time I do have a good idea what kind of wines I would like to get, but I did find this wine subscription model interesting as a supplement to my usual collection. There are always those odd bottles – either from an obscure region or made using a rarer grape varietal or both – that one often overlooked, or there’s time you wanna be more adventurous. That’s when these bottles sent from companies like Toasst would come in handy as they focused on some unusual choices. 

Okinawa Short Trip: A Couple Casual Pork Meals

One thing on our to-eat list whilst in Okinawa was pork, particularly their famous local breed Agu Pork. It’s not that hard to find really, given pork is the main food stable on this Pacific island.

We were looking somewhere for a casual lunch after our morning road trip, and stumbled across this place called Yakiniku no Ganaha in Nago, the town in the north side of Okinawa island not far away from the aquarium which almost everyone would stop by for a visit (it's fun, but I wouldn't miss it if we ended up not going). The restaurant is owned by one of the meat distributor on the island and has a few branches around Okinawa. The one we went was supposed to be the “original” shop, at the site where the meat processing plant was just right next door with a retail shop below the restaurant – so one could safely assume the meat just came direct from their facility next door.

The Presidential Bun Cha

The staff at Bun Cha Huong Lien seems to be a little puzzled when I attempted to order from their a la carte menu as if no tourist has ever done that these days, but after 5 seconds of attempting to pronounce Nem Cua Be (fried crab roll), I gave up and said the magic words – “Combo Obama, please”. Yup, that’s the place in Hanoi made famous by the former US President’s visit with his foodie friend AB a few years ago.

Middle East Inspired Recipes

Our trip to Jordan and Israel a few months ago didn’t turn us into a fan of falafels but we did enjoy a few new dishes and food ingredients while we were there, and I decided to do a Middle East-inspired menu during our Christmas and New Year celebration at home. And since I realized I haven’t done a recipe post for a while so I am going to share what I did for my main course.

Make-ahead Meat Dishes

From what the names suggest, pork rillettes and gyuniku shigureni sound like two dishes from entirely different worlds, but in reality they were surprisingly similar. Both were meat based and made use of only a small set of ingredients; both involved slow cooking to bring about the intense flavor, and both can be made ahead and served at room temperature (no reheating required!), which made them great candidates as part of a simple home-cooked meal.

At a Hokkien Private Kitchen

When the maitre d’ knew exactly whom our table was booked under and showed me to the room upstairs without me saying a word, it’s almost like they were already expecting us as we walked in to this “random” restaurant in North Point, a private kitchen of sort specializing in Hokkien/Fujian cuisine. Later we came to realize that this restaurant only had 3 tables in private room setting and we were the only group of customers for the evening – that explained why.

Portuguese Wines and Cantonese Cuisine

We were perhaps the only table in the room who cared much more about the dishes to be served rather than the wines that were being poured and passed around at a recent dinner event at Kin’s Kitchen in Wanchai. We always wanted to go back to the restaurant for their old-school Cantonese dishes, and the dinner, with the theme of "Piggy Feast" featuring wines from a Portuguese vineyard held in late August, provided us the perfect excuse to eat together.

When new meets old - Le Ciau del Tornavento

We were somewhat surprised when we found ourselves standing in front of a packed dining room at Ristorante Le Ciau del Tanavento in the commune of Treiso on a Friday evening. After all, Treiso is a small, remote town near Barbaresco and Neive which according to Wikipedia, has only 800 residents, while there must have been over 100 people drinking and eating, not counting numerous front and back staff cooking and serving at the place as we arrived just before 8pm. 

A Friday Dinner Challenge

Hosting a dinner at home on Friday evening is always a bit of a challenge, given both of us have a day time job. That plus we were out most of the evenings this week - that means I had even lesser time to shop for ingredients and prepare some of the food in advance, hence I needed to be much more careful with planning and executing, trying to make use of ingredients readily available at home than those obscure items that were a bit tricky to find, for example, and try to start even earlier for some of the dishes to spread out the prep time. 

Cooking at home: 30-hour "Instant" Ramen

Like many Hong Kong families, I always keep a handful packets of instant ramen at home – whether that be for a quick fix for breakfast, lunch, dinner or midnight snack, or just about any time when I need some value-for-money calories. After all, it’s fast, it’s cheap, it’s easy and it actually tastes okay.

But what I am sharing today is quite different than what you have in mind when we talk about instant ramen. First, it’s not “instant” – it’s cooked for 30 hours; second it’s not cheap – it probably cost as much as you would in one of the many ramen shops in town, but it’s still relatively easy to make, and is definitely close to the quality of any version you can find anywhere sans Japan.