header-photo

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Food Fetish

Uptill now i always thought i was hardly adventurous when it came to trying out different cuisines. The easy excuse was being a vegetarian.
But in Hong Kong, although the choices are limited for a vegetarian, i have learnt to try my hand at different cuisines. So here goes the experience.


Itadakimasu - Japan
SUSHI is a packing of fish with rice.As the fish ferments, the rice produced a lactic acid which in turn caused the pickling of the pressed fish. Ofcourse there are vegetarian alternatives to this ancient culinary art. What we had in a Jap restaurant, is an egg sushi and a cucumber sushi.Apparently these days Sushi is customised and vinegar is added to the sushi rice to produce a pleasant flavour of tartness. Along with Sushi one gets a WASABI Sauce. I say simply beware of this. Extremely pungent, this is the Japanese horseraddish. Unmindful of its flavour i simply ate a chopstick full and in a second my nose was hanging free of my face. It took me a full minute to recover.

Bon appetit THAI.
We walked into a Thai restaurant the other day and was simply taken aback by the ambience. It was pleasant, most restaurants in Hong Kong are noisy and cluttery.
We first explained to the proprietor that we were vegetarians. He was eager to please.The first dish that arrived was scrambled eggs with bitter gourd. One mustn't think of this as a weird combination. Its sinfully delicious.
The main course had the THAI GREEN CURRY and steamed rice. Although many of you would have had this in India, what we had was exquisite. The blend of the coconut milk with the vegetables was just perfect. We almost licked the bowl of the curry.
I was simply bowled over by Thai cuisine.

Sihk Faahn - CHINA
This is the what i eat most of the time. There are some specialites in Chinese cuisine too.
I will start with MOON CAKE. This is a special chinese dessert made during the mid-autumn festival.They are round or rectangular shaped pastries.The egg yolk in the center signifies the moon.(Its a full moon day during which the autumn festival is celebrated.)Traditional mooncakes have an imprint on top consisting of the Chinese characters for "longevity" or "harmony" as well as the name of the bakery and filling in the moon cake. Imprints of a moon, a woman on the moon, flowers, vines, or a rabbit may surround the characters for additional decoration.
As part of the chinese cuisine we get many rice paste dishes similar to idiappam in india. Except that they have a samosa kind of shape and are filled with sauteed vegetables and spring onion. Delicious.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

HongKong was actually a British colony... Right..
So sure they have Britisizied food and stuff to suit them..
And beleive me, a lot Britons prefer a vegetarians diet..
Take care and have fun Meera...

Anonymous said...

My mouth was watering all the while .... Wow ...

Jayasri said...

cool blog gal!