Two years ago, on Jacob's first trip to Hong Kong, we stayed with my great aunt in North Point. On the first morning my aunt dashed downstairs to her favorite congee stand, and came back with a big take-out tub of plain congee and you jia gui, or Cantonese fried dough. We instructed Jacob to dunk a piece of fried dough, and sprinkle some white pepper on the congee before eating. One mouthful later, he was hooked and couldn't stop talking about congee for the rest of the trip.
This simple rice porridge is a staple at the Cantonese breakfast table. It's cheap, filling, and available wherever you go in Cantonese-speaking areas. (Dim sum is more of a weekend and special occasion treat.) And as many expats and visitors to Hong Kong and Guangzhou have discovered, congee is also a great hangover cure on Sunday mornings. I can't think of any other breakfast that is both as light and as filling.
Of course, sometimes the best congee (or jook, as it is called in Cantonese) is homemade. It's easy to whip up and endlessly adaptable. Chicken congee, pork congee, seafood congee, you name it. Most Cantonese home cooks use chicken stock as a base, but you can just as easily make a vegetarian version with good vegetable stock. Add carrots, broccoli, and some shiitake mushrooms for that nice umami flavor, and you're good to go.
Along with lucky red envelopes, I received a gift for Lunar New Year that I could use immediately in the kitchen: a package of water chestnut flour.
Water chestnut cake (ma tei gow in Cantonese) is another snack, along with turnip cake, that is eaten all year round but especially during Chinese New Year. It's also much easier to make. While the main ingredient, water chestnut flour, may not be a staple on Western grocery store shelves, it is readily available in large Chinatown markets. When I lived in Boston we had a few varieties to choose from. The best kind has a coarse pebbly texture, as opposed to finer dust.
I love how the translucency makes the cake look like marble. I also love tasting the crunchy chestnuts with the jelly texture of the steamed cake.
From a Chinese-American kid's perspective, Chinese New Year is a holiday as cool as, or even better than, Christmas. You get lots of red envelopes full of money, big boxes and tins of candy, and big meals for at least 3 to 5 days straight. You don't have to pretend to like any of the re-gifts or fruitcake you receive. And if your mother has free time, which she somehow always finds during the New Year, she'll whip up batches of snacks for you to eat and to give to relatives.
One of these snacks, eaten all year round but especially during the New Year, is turnip cake. It symbolizes prosperity and growing fortunes, but a kid's main concern is how good something tastes. (Even many years later, turnip cake is one of the first foods I associate with Chinese New Year.) Although this is a staple on dim sum menus, no restaurant turnip cake compares to the homemade version, which bares the aroma of just-cooked mushrooms and pork even days after it's made.
Hong Kong may not be under snow and ice like Hunan province, but it has its fair share of winter weather. After seeing some wild monkeys at the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery, we trekked back to North Point to meet up with my relatives for dinner. Even incessant rain couldn't dampen my spirits, because I knew my relatives always pick out the best places for Cantonese specialties.
Fung Shing Restaurant at the South China Hotel is one of those clean, brightly lit banquet halls where Hong Kongers go for both special occasions and no-special-occasions. And of course, we ordered a bunch of dishes to serve family-style.
I've had Cantonese roast chicken more times than I can count, and tonight's was one of the best I've ever tasted. The skin was amazingly crisp, the meat amazingly juicy. Usually you get skin and meat of this caliber only on a duck, but this chicken was prepare almost the same way. By repeatedly spooning the sugary sauce over chicken as it roasts, you can get a glistening, perfectly crisp skin.
Sī guā is a common vegetable used in Chinese cooking, but comes with a rather sinister English name: snake gourd, for the long, spindly shape. Despite the exotic name, I've seen it in both New York and Boston Chinatowns. (Sī guā is the long skinny gourd with bumpy ridges running the length of the outside.) The flesh is about as soft as a winter melon's, which means that any cooking method longer than a quick stir-fry will render it very soft.
Snake gourd goes well with a red meat that also cooks quickly, like lean pork. I add some green peppers, onions, and scallions, but keep the companion veggies to a minimum so the sī guā and pork stand out.
Even with a rough exterior, sī guā peels easily. So no need to exert more force than peeling, say, a carrot. My mother likes to cook sī guā with a concentrated abalone extract, which has the smell and texture of oyster sauce. Of course, good 'ol oyster sauce always works too and is much easier to find. Just don't cook melons or gourds with soy sauce or else your finished product will have a sour flavor.
Pork and Sī Guā Stir-fry
Serves 4 to 6, as part of a communal meal
The Cantonese often go ga-ga over Hainanese chicken, a dish prepared by boiling a whole chicken in pork and chicken stock. It originated on the island of Hainan, became a national dish of Singapore, and is enjoyed anywhere on the globe where the Cantonese dine.
Chicken without sauce allows you to taste the freshness of the skin and meat, much like eating shimp with nothing but a spritz of lemon. But no offense to Hainanese chicken - sometimes your tastebuds just cry out for something savory that just melts off the bone.
Soy-braised chicken is a simple casserole dish can be whipped up within 30 or 40 minutes. An earthenware casserole dish is ideal, but a medium sized pot also works. (My mother once said that moist-cooking methods with a lot of soy sauce is bad for metals...maybe any food scientists would like to explain why?)
Soy-Braised Chicken
Serves 4
500 mL (2 cups) soy sauce*
750 mL (3 cups) water*
1 piece ginger, peeled and sliced
45 mL (3 tablespoons) sugar
10 mL (2 teaspoons) cinnamon
5 mL (1 teaspoon) star anise
4 pieces chicken, thighs or wings or combo
1 scallion, roughly chopped
*More if needed to cover chicken at least 3/4 of the way, but maintain the 2 parts soy sauce to 3 parts water ratio.
Wontons, if made well, live up to their Cantonese name, which means "swallowing clouds." Whenever I have wonton soup, it's an exercise in self-control to not eat all the wontons first. These little parcels of pork in wrapper steal the show, even if vegetables and noodles are present.
Wonton soup is available at just about any homestyle Cantonese restaurant, both in China and abroad. Making them at home is another story. Home cooks who didn't grow up making wontons find the folding intimidating (but this is true with all sorts of dumplings.) Many also think making wontons at home is a hassle, especially when going down to the local noodle shop is such a breeze.
I've found that by making big batches of wontons, I can freeze them and take them out for a rainy day. The Cantonese mainly put wontons in soup, and that's the context in which I knew them for most of my growing-up years in China. Then after moving to the US, I discovered the greasy guilty pleasure of American Chinese food, and subsequently the deep-fried wonton. Wonton soup may be awkward to eat if you're out with friends, or throwing a party, but munching on a big basket of fried wontons is as much fun as sharing popcorn shrimp or french fries.
As promised, the video of the big fried balloon-like puffs at Zhongshan's Shiqi Lao. Bonus: a fish flopping out of a bucket.
The first thing we saw in front of Shiqi Lao were two cooks frying what appeared to be big balloons of dough. They repeatedly turned the giant puffs in their woks so that they would be evenly fried and crispy. In front of the cooks were finished fried puffs, waiting to be brought to expectant diners.
The fried puffs are one of the many local dishes served at Shiqi Lao, which specializes in food from Zhongshan's surrounding villages. The restaurant's rather gaudy exterior, with a 10-foot cartoon pigeon, disguises the fact that it is a foodie haven. Hong Kongers flood the dining room on weekends, taking a 3-hour bus ride just for great inexpensive eating. My family and friends in Zhongshan know to go on weekdays, when they can eat with slightly smaller crowds.
As eyesore-ish the outside was, I was impressed by what the restaurant did with the interior. From the tin panels on the ceiling, I guessed the space used to be a factory or warehouse. Overhead lights were woven like elaborate wicker baskets. You could choose between regular tables or booths in boat-like structures. 
Ever since I was young, whenever my mother asked me what vegetable I'd like for dinner, my answer 99% of the time was "chao ong choy", the idiomatic Cantonese term for stir-fried water spinach. (In non-idiomatic Mandarin it's 炒空心菜 cǎo kòng xīn cài.) I don't know what made me love it from an early age on, but it always tasted meatier than other stir-fried greens. Maybe because the hollowness of the stalks - hence the "kòng xīn", which means "empty center" - cradled whatever seasonings or sauce it was cooked with. Many many years later I still love water spinach, although I now dabble in other greens from time to time.
Chinese water spinach is usually in season during the summer, but here in Zhongshan, where warm whether stretches well into October, I can enjoy my leafy green for a bit longer.
My mother's recipe for stir-fried water spinach is simple and hasn't changed much since my days of single-veggie-fanaticism. Most Cantonese restaurants and other people's mothers will make a very similar version of this dish, which is why, apart from using old stalks or over-cooking, it's hard to make a bad plate of water spinach.
Recipe after the jump.
