HK Art Fair 2010

Dionisio Gonzalez - Nova Aqua Gagosa II 2008 - a blend of photos from slumps and modern, geometric architecture

Yoshitomo Nara - Sleepless night 2007 - limited edition of 300

David Nash - not sure about the name of this, but doesn't it remind you of the Twin Towers in New York?

Yoshitomo Nara - Your Dog 2003

Familiar style from a gallery near Hollywood Road

This may give you the creeps!!

Cappuccino

This simple cup of cappuccino never fails to amaze us. From the different layers of colors, the complex coffee fragrance and even the way milk is frothed.

The other day, dad tried frothing a bottle of fresh milk and it came out completely flat. The first thought was the bottle of milk went bad. That tasted perfect. Creamy and cold, yum!! Only then did dad remember that full fat foams, though fuller in texture and flavor, are much much more difficult to make. Of course, he never had any problems using UHT full fat milk to froth before, since those are never very creamy.

You might be surprised to hear that the scorching hot steam coming out of the steam nozzle on an espresso machine is not an essential ingredient of the cappuccino milk foam. In fact, one can argue that the steam is detrimental to the formation and maintenance of the milk foam. The foam is formed by splashing milk and air together and the steam is just an agent in the process. The resulting water vapor or the condensed water are bad because the foam bubble wall becomes runny and prone to collapse if it is hot and has high water content. Hence frothing is best done with a lot of ice cold milk and the nozzle is only placed just below the milk surface.

Given that the hot steam is not an essential part of frothing but splashing the milk is, there are devices that splash milk mechanically, like the Nespresso Aeroccino. Since high temperature is bad for holding the bubbles, you can even have cold milk foam for cold drinks.

For those of you who want to know why full fat milk is tough to froth into foam, you might want to look up whey proteins, which are essential in stabilizing milk foams and ice crystals in ice creams. It also plays an essential part in body building.

泗益 Si Yik - Hong Kong Style French Toast

After the Eve Felder cooking class mum had in Tai Tam, mum and dad went to their favorite french toast "dai pai dong" in Stanley. 泗益 Si Yik occupies one of the most conspicuous position within Stanley being just off the round-about going into Stanley High Street. It's a tiny stall selling the whole selection of dishes that you would normally expect from a “cha chaan teng", 茶餐廳.
They ordered two cold "yuanyang", 鴛鴦 and the french toast.

The cold "yuanyang" came pretty much immediately. It was a nice treat after a long stroll through Stanley market.

The french toast, 2 pieces of bread filled with "Kaya" jam then coated with a layer of hand-whipped egg fried with a lot of grease, took a while (almost 15 minutes) to arrive. It no longer looked as fluffy as it used to be and when you actually put a piece in your mouth, the burst of different flavors was no longer there. Slightly disappointing, especially after mum raved about it to Eve Felder after the cooking class, telling her all about the french toast in this little stall in Stanley. Time to search for another place or just an off-day by the cook. Where's your favorite "sai dor see", french toast in Hong Kong? After all it is the first item in 40 Hong Kong foods that we can't live without in CNNgo, there must be better places around.

What the Dog saw - by Malcom Gladwell

Would you buy a printed book whose content you can download legally in entirety from the internet? Before buying the printed version of "What the Dog saw", you need to ask that exact question. Of course dad bought his before he knew of such option, as both the front and back cover of the book never mentioned the fact it was a collection of past articles from the New Worker magazine and all these archived articles are available at Malcolm Gladwell's own website: http://www.gladwell.com/.

But even with this useful hindsight, dad would still recommend buying this compendium of articles. It saves you time in retrieving them individually from the internet and then printing them out. He would even argue that it's a better buy then Gladwell's other more famous works Blink, Tipping Point and Outliers, where Gladwell expand an underlying, simple thesis into an entire book.

Blink - trust your gut instinct once you have practiced something for long enough
Tipping Point - exponential increases in activities are often triggered by some events that will be obvious only in hindsight
Outliers - exceptional successes take place under exceptional (lucky?!) timing and inordinate amount of hard work

"What the Dog Saw", in contrast, covered a broad spectrum of topics often with brilliant insights. If you like Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics, you will definitely like this book. Our favorite articles are the following for obvious reasons:
Troublemakers - What Pit Bulls Can Teach Us About Crime
What the Dog Saw - Ceasar Millan and the Movements of Mastery
The Ketchup Connundrum - Mustard Now Comes in Dozens of Varieties. Why has Ketchup Stayed the Same?

Special license plate "5*X 542"

Guess this is banned in Hong Kong!!  Forgive the title...  Had to improvise in order to avoid suggestive ads....

From the simplest of things

They probably don't want to see the 2 pictures together

#12 Meat mountain in  40 Hong Kong foods that we can't live without in CNNgo.

How many layers can you wrap a Castella?

That is before you count the paper bag which it came in!!

High Tea in the Shangri La Hong Kong

People in Hong Kong often plan their holidays months in advance, so that they can all meet up in the crowded airport, only to find out the neighbor next door is staying in the same resort. So during long holidays, Hong Kong suddenly becomes hospitable again. Driving through the central cross harbor tunnel at 9:00pm feels like driving through traffic at early hours in the morning, unlike Japanese who decide to venture out of their homes to face the crowded roads during the long golden week (GW) break.

Alas, if a quiet time enjoying some afternoon tea is all you are looking for during your holiday, you can do worse than staying put in Hong Kong.

A few good noodles

Today, the free Chinese newspaper am730 ran a double-page spread special on the Japanese noodle culture with 2 articles: one written by a Chinese and one written by a Japanese who is fluent in Chinese. The special has some interesting photos and the 2 articles are both well written. And it provides the perfect opportunity for us to talk about a few noodle places in Hong Kong.

Inaniwa Udon Nabe

Situated at one of the quieter corners in the Elements shopping mall in Tsim Sha Tsui, the deceptively small shop front opened up to a spacious restaurant with high ceiling. Well past lunch time during a Saturday, most of the tables were still occupied. Despite the restaurant being quite full, it didn't feel crowded, perhaps helped by the high ceiling and the way tables were spaced out. The menu was simple: a few hot dish selections, udon accompanied by separate bowls of different sauces or soup (Tsuke udon つけうどん) and Japanese hotpot (nabe 鍋).

If you want to know more about tsuke udon, especially in relation to Inaniwa udon nabe, there is a fairly detailed discourse in openrice.com with the link as attached here. But as explained in the am730 article today, "tsuke" noodle was first developed for "ramen" in Tokyo in 1955 and it is still mainly a way reserved for serving "ramen". Wikipedia article in Japanese here.

Suffice to say, this shop made a damn good bowl of Japanese udon. But then if you follow the cooking instructions of the udon you get from Japanese stores here, you should get a decent shot of making a good bowl of cold udon as well. Guess the harder part is to get the sauce or the soup right.

The surprise was actually the sausage which came twirling inside a sizzling hot plate. Well worth going just for that. Delicious!!

Shop 2002, 2/F, Elements, 1 Austin Road West, Tsim Sha Tsui
尖沙 咀柯士甸道西1號圓方(Elements)2樓2002號舖

 一碗麵

HKD150 for a bowl of noodles. This was the most expensive bowl of beef noodles that dad has ever eaten. Situated at the crossing between Star Street and St Francis Street, an open-kitchen style interior with simple wooden tables and benches, this shop offered a very limited menu: noodles with 3 choices of soup (all HKD150) a few snacks and desserts. If it was a blind tasting, dad would never have guessed the price. In Hong Kong, there is enough clientele who would equate a high price to delicious food for this shop to carry on thriving.
G/F, St Francis Street 33, Wanchai.  Tel: 22940426

鼎泰豐 Ding Tai Fung

While super famous for its soup-filled xiao long bao 小籠包, its chicken soup noodle is well worth trying. Somehow the chicken soup tastes the same no matter where in the world you order. The only problem is waiting for a table.

麥兆記 Mak Siu Kee Wonton Noodle
Perhaps the best traditional thin egg noodle in Hong Kong. You can feel the "bounce" on the noodles. But the wonton 雲吞 here are not as good, but the beef tendon and brisket in chu hua sauce is very tasty. Photos to follow, if we get them.
Electric Road 74B, Tin Hau.

香港鏡記粉麵廠
If you fancy making your own wonton noodle, you can get fresh wonton skin and fresh egg noodles here. Photos and recipes to follow.
G/F, Tai Wo St 4, Wanchai.

樹記鮮竹 - the Mecca of tofu skin in Hong Kong

Last Saturday, mum went to Sham Shui Po 深水埗 to look at threads, cloth, buttons and other sewing accessories. Of course food is never far from her mind. While browsing at the mind boggling selection along Yu Chau Street 汝州街,  she saw a few people queuing outside a shop selling tofu skin. Queues are usually useful signs for good stuff around. The shop sells 7 different variations of tofu skin and mum bought 5 of them. Suddenly dad remembered having read an article about the best tofu skin shop in Hong Kong so he was wondering if it was the same shop. They took the name card which showed a tasteful picture of the shop with its metal shutters shut.

Mum and dad have always tried replicating the pan-fried yuba 湯葉 they had in Kyoto by buying packet tofu skin from the supermarket. They never tasted the same, until they tried frying their latest purchase. All you need is a shallow frying pan where you heat up a bit of your favorite cooking oil, fry the tofu skin in low heat until golden brown. The crispy exterior contrasts nicely with the flavorful, soft interior. The secret is all in the fresh tofu skin.

The shop turned out to be featured in an old article in 飲食男女.

Excuse me, where's the shopping paradise please?

Dad often tells us that Hong Kong used to be known as a shopper's paradise. He is probably talking about when our great-great-grand father was still living in the US, ie over 20 years ago, when Hong Kong kids would go to UK boarding schools with their latest models of Walkman and be the envy of all the other boarders. So what happened in the interim years? Both the rise of China as a global export power and the spread of internet have brought down the price in so many things across the globe. Somehow that does not apply to Hong Kong.

Lets just take the water filter we drink from at home as an example. The water filter that comes inside our Samsung fridge costs HK$400, but you can buy 2 for US$65 inclusive of shipping (~HK$255 each) in the US. Not only is the price more expensive and sometimes you might need to wait over 3 to 4 months after you order the item having paid for it in the first place. "We have the water filter in stock now. You might want to order a few extra. The next shipment may not be for another 6 months!!", the customer service assistant so kindly advise when dad called up to check price and availability. The same item ordered in the US was dispatched within 24 hours.

Guess this is nothing new to all the people who have been shopping online for the last few years. But a lot of online retailers insist on domestic delivery only, notably in Japan and the US. That is where package forwarding services like MyUS.com come in. You sign up and pay an annual fee to get a mailing address where all your online purchases in the US can be sent to.

The following 2 water filter replacements are also great value when bought online. In Hong Kong, you pay the US RRP but you can find US domestic online retailers selling them at significant discount to RRP.

And there are even more extreme cases where people happily pay premium to US RRP for goods which are essentially the same. If mum and dad eventually acquire the item online, we might talk about it here. Until then......

Capital Cafe in Wanchai 灣仔 華星冰室

Billed as one of the "40 Hong Kong foods that we can't live without", scrambled egg sandwich is by no means a Hong Kong speciality. Still it is worth noting when there are shops famous for serving such simple dish. Australia Dairy Company 澳洲牛奶公司 earns its reputation from super efficient service and those fluffy scrambled eggs. But if you don't want to venture out to Jordan for such local Hong Kong delicacy and want a quieter time while enjoying it, you might want to try Capital Cafe in Heard Street in Wanchai.

Some recent highlights

Don't touch my roast goose "lai fun" 燒鵝瀨粉!!

Time better spent sleeping!!

Uniquely Chinese - Shanghai Expo Song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggTMfIQoTp8



http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHgQXGUf2m0



http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20100419a6.html
More news broadcasts in YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjBhxaDLkjY

Update
The organizers of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai have asked Japanese singer-songwriter Mayo Okamoto for permission to use one of her songs, which a Chinese composer had been accused of plagiarizing, in its promotional activities.
http://www.japantoday.com/category/entertainment/view/shanghai-expo-to-use-japanese-singers-song-for-promotion
日本語バージョン
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/world/news/20100419-OYT1T01132.htm

Our very own Susan Boyle

Auntie Rita sent us this YouTube clip a few days ago. We shall let the clip do the talking!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0233fqfr7mo

Have you bought your Mark 6 ticket yet?

Hi all! Long time no see! 久しぶりですね！It's so good to be back.
We (dogs) are supposed to have 6th sense and perhaps magical power to pick winning lottery numbers. Mum and dad always dream up different schemes to get us to pick numbers but they never put any of those schemes to practice. Probably the thought of getting the two of us to comply was just too strenuous. Maybe they will try again soon with everybody talking about the Mark Six rolling jackpot to give a potential prize of HKD 68m for a single ticket win.

If you don't have a psychic super dog, is there any magic formula to improve your chance in striking the proverbial gold? The first advice will be don't bother playing as the odds are so stack against the punter. 1 in 54 that you win anything at all and about 1 in 14,000,000 that you pick the winning 6 number combo out of the 49 numbers. You probably have heard all that and HKD 68m is too hard to ignore. You are also feeling charitable ($3 out of every $20 you spent on the computer tickets goes to charity before they get absorbed further by multiple layers of admin charges) and don't want to leave your fate in the hands of the HK Jockey Club computer random number generator. There must be a better way......

Lets start with the Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC) website - http://bet.hkjc.com/marksix/Statistics.aspx?lang=en

 Here you get a summary of how frequent each of the 49 number came out during the last 1,115 draws since 4 Jul 2002, the day when HKJC introduced 48, 49 to Mark Six and removed the cap for the rolling jackpot. You will find that 6, 9, 10, 14, 22, 38 are historically the most frequently drawn numbers and each has been drawn more than 174 times out of 1,115 and 16, 20, 25, 29, 34, 44, 46, 47 are the least frequently drawn and all with fewer than 148 times of occurence. So if you believe in history will keep repeating itself and like to extrapolate analysis like most stock analysts, you would just go and buy the first set of combo or picking some of the other numbers lower down in the frequency chart to enlarge your betting set and avoid the second set of numbers.

You might want to test your hypothesis and see if you enhance your chance of winning by doing just that. There are a few websites which purport to analyze historic Mark Six data but most of them suffer from some sort of data integrity issues. You should not waste your time with the following 2 websites for example:
www.marksixlottery.com
hk.myfreepost.com 
But this http://www.m628.com/en/index.html appears to provide reliable historic data and analysis. As expected, your backtests resulted in much better returns betting on the first set of numbers instead of the second set of numbers. In fact the first set offers 5 times better return than the second set.

zzz......

hmm......

Congratulations, if you still with us while the others went and bought their Mark Six tickets. Our premise was striking gold instead of improving the chance of winning anything. So you want to be selfish and be the sole winner of the jackpot in the unikely event that you pick the right numbers. This has less to do with statistics (which the above analysis frankly doesn't help in any case) but more to do with game theory and folk psychology. Witness the Mark Six drawn on 19 Feb 2009 where the winning numbers were 6, 9 , 16, 26, 29, 36 + (special number)8. 9 people took the 1st prize each taking HK$555,555, 27 people took 2nd prize of HK$19,200 and 781 people took 3rd prize of HK$9,600.

6, 9 and 8 are all auspicous numbers and punters' favorites. Given such a high turnout in that particular Mark Six draw, it was little wonder that HKJC actually need to reimburse HK$7m to top up the prize money for that draw.

The moral of the story is pick numbers that are less likely to be picked by your fellow punters. Popular mines for lucky numbers are birthdays, birth months, street numbers, auspicious  numbers etc. Also punters often believe that consecutive numbers are not random and will deliberately space out their selections. Using this as a guide, you should be armed with a good set of numbers to avoid and concentrate your selection on the road less travelled.

Good luck!!

Toyota recall and the culture of public apologies

No doubt you have been inundated by the daily news on Toyota seemingly recalling every single car that it has ever produced and the resulting damage to its share price wiping out a cool US$31bn (which by the way can feed the 1bn people who live in hunger globally for 6 months)  in market value. A media storm portraying a company, which once upon a time could do no wrong, into a slow moving monster in permanent denial of vehicles having problems. Now it feels like every Toyota car out there is unsafe. But before this media induced hysteria, did you hear anything about any increase in accidents involving Toyota cars or your friends saying their Camrys are breaking down all the time? Probably not.

In fact all we heard about was LPG taxis breaking down and running without brakes after refilling at Petrochina LPG stations on New Year's day. No organization have come out and claim responsibility and investigation seems to be taking forever. And one would not expect to hear any public apologies similar to those given by Toyota's chairman twice since the recalls. The more likely scenario will be for the taxi driver who first reported the incident to be roundup in jail next time he visits his family in the mainland. The logic is simple. The act of highlighting the problem of an SOE (State Owned Enterprise) will destabilize the China government and as damaging as divulgence of state secrets. This may sound absurd from where you are reading but this conforms with the Chinese rule of law and culture, those that Google and any other organizations operating in China are expected to follow. The guy who first highlighted the whole "Tofu Residual Construction" 豆腐渣工程 in Sichuan has just been sentenced to 5 years in jail. He follows a long lineage of subversives destabilizing the government for example the guy who first highlighted the pollution by factories along Lake Tai 太湖 suffered similar fate.
We never hear public apologies in China because there were no wrongdoings and hence there were nothing to be sorry about. "Tofu Residual Construction" is perfectly kosher, as long as there's a need of low cost construction and construction firms can reap a justifiably huge margin. Pollution of Lake Tai was an even more clear cut case where everybody have been dumping rubbish for the last thousand years and was never a problem.

Such a global and massive recall of vehicles will never happen to a Chinese car company because every car leaving the production line will conform to a certain standard and that standard will be adjusted as required. Any claims of sub-standard products from China are simply malicious attacks on the Chinese people.

Mum recently got given some beautiful candies from Japan. The packaging and presentation epitomize products from Japan. While we cannot share the candies, lets salivate over their pictures.

 

The Fringe Benefits of Failure

A funny, powerful and moving speech given by J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Porter series, at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association, almost 2 yeas ago.


J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

Tim's Kitchen 桃花源

Last Friday, mum and dad visited the only Chinese restaurant that was promoted from 1 star to 2 stars in the latest 2010 Michelin guide, Tim's Kitchen 桃花源. This used to be one of their favorite restaurants, when it was located in a smaller shop just next door over six years ago. The seats were cramped but the food almost always lived up to their reputations. At the time, if you did not reserve a table, you still had a fair chance to get a table for two as walk-in customers.

P.S. - Tim is probably the Christian name / nickname of the chef-owner, 黎有甜. And he was the head chef at Hang Seng Bank's kitchen before opening this restaurant.

The intervening years have made a lot of differences. Now the restaurant has a strict time table for two rounds of customers, the first round being from 6:30p.m. to 8:30p.m. and the second round the following two hours. This seating arrangement is strictly adhered to as more often than not, the customers who hold the second round table would often be patiently waiting outside before their time slot. Chances of landing a table as walk-in customers are not good either. The new address is more spacious but if you are looking for hotel style comfort, you would be disappointed. The restaurant still does not own a liquor license, so it is a BYOB arrangement and they now have different varieties of glasses for the different occasions, champagne, white wine and red wine glasses are all available.

Mum pre-ordered a few of their signature dishes several days in advance and was excited about organizing the dinner with her food loving friends. As it was Friday, people were held up at work and by traffic, but they still managed to start dinner shortly after 7:00p.m. Half the table decided to indulge themselves in an extra course of snake soup 蛇羹 and that was served before anything else. Snake soup is one of dad's favorite dish and Tim's kitchen is famous for its snake soup (or more appropriately to differentiate its own recipe of snake soup, it is known as 太史五蛇羹). Unlike some other places, the snake soup here was always less heavy and had a cleaner taste. The soup had kept to its standard and highly recommended for the less squirmish. Dad finished the whole bowl before mum realized no photos were taken.

The first course that everybody had was winter melon crab crawl 冬瓜蟹鉗. The fresh crab crawl was cooked in an essence of winter melon. The refreshing winter melon sauce was a great complement to the full flavored crab crawl. The seasoning wasn't overpowering and never masked the meaty freshness of the crab. This was the most expensive dish, HKD180 per claw, of the night and worth every penny of it. It was delicious.

The next two dishes, crab meat in bamboo pith with egg-white 蟹肉扒竹笙蛋白 and fried asparagus with garoupa were not bad but nothing to write home about. The deep fried chicken 炸子雞 was high standard with crispy skin and tender meat. You would expect nothing less from a 2-Michelin-star restaurant. In fact, you might even expect more if you like to be a "food critic".

The "eight-treasure" duck 八寶鴨 is another signature dish. Mum and dad never had the dish during all their previous visits, since they never bother pre-ordering. The deboned duck body was stuffed full of lotus seeds, green beans, salted-egg yolk, chestnuts and other goodies then deep fried before being slow-cooked in a broth for many hours. Just when you think it's ready, the duck is taken to the steamer for another 3 hours before it is served. The stuffing was flavorful but not heavy and the duck meat was very tender as you will expect with such a long, arduous cooking process. For less than HKD800, with the preparation worked involved, this was a great value dish and definitely worth ordering in advance.

Starting just after 7:00p.m. and finishing before 8:30p.m. was a bit of a rush, and they barely had enough time to order an extra portion of curry crab fried rice and finished the small portion of spareribs. It was an enjoyable evening and a reasonably priced dinner. Mrs Lai, the owner's wife, still remembered mum from the days when she visited the old shop. The "food critic" might cast doubt whether it deserved a second star, but as in the Michelin guide the world over, the star system is often controversial and can never avoid a degree of subjectivity. At the very least, it is a guide that can generate such heated debate that no other restaurant guides can achieve. Compare with many of the Michelin starred restaurants in other countries, the Hong Kong and Macau guide seems to have set the bar lower. The local backlash against the 2009 guide might have been a lot worse if Michelin used the same yardsticks to measure restaurants in Hong Kong resulting in no 3-star (or just one 3-star in Macau) and perhaps half the number in 1-star. Just imagine the righteous backlash that would have stoked saying there's no business in foreigners judging Chinese cuisines in Hong Kong.