HK Day 3

Got up kind of late and so didn't eat breakfast today. We headed out to the Cityplaza mall near the Taikoo MTR station to look around at residential life in HK. There are tonnes of restaurants there, ranging from typical Cantonese places with dim sum for lunch to Indian places to Pizza Hut. We decided on Ashima Yunnan Restaurant. We started with a green onion pancake (chong yau dai beng) which was thicker than the chong yau beng that we usually eat. It's a sweet dough filled with green onions and some pork floss that is deep fried. Tasty.


Next up is a noodle dish - "Yunnan noodles" or something. They brought a hot chicken broth to the table, to which was added a few thin slices of raw chicken and pork. The meat cooked in the broth. They also added noodles and some green onions. You could then add some preserved vegetables to the dish, adding a bit of spice (bottom right in the picture). In the picture is my own bowl, not the dish itself, which was huge. This dish was very flavourful, which I suspect is a result of a liberal use of MSG.


Mushrooms are supposed to be a staple in Yunnan, at least to some of the tribes there. We ordered a mushroom pot which came with maybe 7 or 8 different varieties of mushroom in a broth flavoured by some ham, lean pork, and a chicken leg. The mushrooms were definitely the highlight here, with many different textures and flavours. The broth itself was kind of bland and the meats were dried out. They put the chicken leg on a plate for eating later, but we were too full. It wasn't quite what I'm looking for in a chicken leg anyway.


Finally, the piece de resistance: deep fried bee pupae, something which we had to have once we saw it on the menu. The dish was nicely spiced up with a somewhat sweet and salty coating. The pupae themselves were crunchy on the outside but kind of soft on the inside, almost a bit powdery. Mushy, yet firm. There isn't much taste to the pupae. It's something that I enjoyed eating, but not something that I would crave for - other than the texture, it's pretty much like eating french fries.


So that was our foray into Yunnanese cuisine. Actually, I've since realized that goat cheese is another famous Yunnanese dish, so I might have to look for another Yunnan restaurant to try some of that. This particular restaurant was unique, but I think they were a bit strong on the MSG - we noticed afterwards that our throats were quite dry and scratchy.

We had dinner at a relative's place in the Kwun Tong area of Kowloon. No pictures, but we had BBQ duck (drier than I'd like), steamed chicken (really yummy, with a good sauce created by the steam and chicken fat, along with ginger and green onion which flavoured the dish), some fish air bladder, and veggies. It was nice to have a home cooked meal after the restaurant eating, particularly with the MSG bomb at lunchtime.