Char Siu Fahn
My staple meal at the Hong Kong PolyU was Char siu fahn
(叉燒飯), a simple dish
with steamed rice, barbecued pork, some steamed greens (varying types), and
usually a fried egg.I ate it
probably twice a week at the faculty cafeteria. It was cheap, tasty, and
plentiful. And recently I had been craving it -- a symptom of homesickness for
Hong Kong. (Who woulda
thunk?)Mary learned to cook in
Hong Kong. Not Chinese food, as you might expect, but American food. In Hong
Kong, all "Western food" is kind of lumped together in one category (much as we
lump all Chinese food together, whether it's from Guangdong, Szechuan, Shanghai,
or wherever), and it's usually a bed of rice, a meat cutlet, and gravy poured
all over it. It's not home cooking to us, but it's western food to them. So I
craved normal stuff, and since we couldn't go to a restaurant to get it, Mary
had to cook it, and teach our maid to cook it. So after a year in China, she's
now a good American cook.So now
that we're home, I craved Char siu fahn. So Mary cooked it, and it was good!
Now that we're in America, she'll have to learn to cook Chinese. Go
figure.And I do miss all my
students and the faculty at the MIC. I've been trying to talk them into flying
me over to do some seminars.
Filed Mon - November 14, 2005, 02:43 PM in
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