homecook food

Homecook food! There's no food better than homecook food. The best cook is Gee Kim but mum's food is way better than any food Ping have eaten for a long long time. The vege is "or kui tau" , which literally means "black ghost bean" but it is actually French bean. Mum stir-fry it with "hae bee" (dried prawns) and a bit of sambal. The soup is lotus root soup with chicken bones - leng ngau t'ng. In the States, chicken bones are only available at the Oriental market or if you were to buy whole chicken. Here, we commonly use chicken bone to make the soup tasty as we don't like to eat the chicken meat after using it to boil the soup. Lotus root are not always available at Oriental Market. In fact, Ping has only made this soup once in the States.

The black dish on the left is "or bak" - blackened pork. That's one of Ping's favorite. It is lean pork meat marinated with dark soya sauce and stir fry with pepper and light soya sauce. Mum used to make them when Ping was in high school. She would freeze them and when Ping comes back from school, heat them up with a microwave and have that with rice. Yum yum! The shelled dish on the bottom right is "la la". That's another popular seafood but it seems to be rare these days - extinction??? When Ping was a little Ping, we could just go to the beach with a little basket, sit down at the area where the water comes up to the sand and sieve out the water. We used to be able to collect enough for the entire family of 15. That was a long long time ago...

What could be a better meal than this?
Oh yeah...mum even made us snack! This snack is a Beijing local delicacy. Dad introduced it to us while he was in Beijing. The preparation takes forever as the potato has to be sliced to very thin strips. Can't remember what exactly it is called..something "tu dou xi" (potato strips). The potato strips are dipped into hot oil along with dried chillis until the color turns golden brown. Unlike the long preparation time, eating it is really simple. *grins*.