Hiphopsideproject

Like last Christmas, we spent a good deal of time in our brand new kitchen in the winter of ’09 creating tastey treats for our families for part of their Christmas gifts. This year we upped the ante a little and added some new things, jazzed up old things and got bigger and better than before!

This year our gift boxes included

• Luxury Christmas Puddings (with walnuts, cranberries and stuffed full of booze and fruit)
• Spiced apple chutney
• Piccalilli (I hate, hate, hate shop bought piccalilli but the recipe we use is sooo good!)
• Green Tomato Chutney (using the last of our home grown tomatoes)
• Sweet Chili Jam
• Lime curd
• Peanut brittle
• Dark chocolate dipped cinder toffee
• Shortbread
• Pear wine (made with pears from my parent’s garden)
• Plum mead (made with plums from my parent’s garden)

Here was the labelling assembly line on Christmas eve, I designed the labels in the morning and we set to packaging everything up in the afternoon…

Hopefully I’ll have chance to write up some of the recipes before summer this time ;)

The other day we wanted a small snack for lunch after having some ‘noodles cantonese style’ in a lovely little place near Jordan MTR for breakfast (honestly, I’m going to get the address of the place because the lady was so kind – she was just laughing at us for pointing at pictures of things, and then took Adams food away mid-meal to put more broth in, so kind!). The noodles were big and flat, I think they could have been ho fun? and served in a basic chicken stock broth with braised chicken (a fatty skin cut) and spring onions (I think!). We had milk tea along side this, which my foodie friend Charmaine told me about before I came out here (you can read her food blog about the process of milk tea here), and we wouldn’t of known to order such a thing if she hadn’t, so thanks Charz!

Anyway, after going shopping for the rest of the morning, we felt a little peckish at about 2pm so headed to the food hall in the mall we were at. Bustling with bunches of different asian food stuffs (vietnamese, japanese, fusion etc etc.) we settled on some steamed dim sum (it was quick!). Another case of pointing at things and smiling like the stupid foreigners that we are, we ended up with chicken feet in a spicy sauce, vegetable dumplings with prawn, and vegetable dumplings with pork (I’m not sure if that’s what they actually are called, but it’s definitely what they *were*).

I have to confess that after trying 1 chickens foot, I decided I wasn’t a fan. For me, I found the texture a little too strange, and the lack of actual flesh a little unappealing. Adam liked them though, and I must admit that the sauce they were in was delicious! I would definitely be willing to try these again in a real restuarant, though, I really don’t want to base my opinion of them on some food hall kitchen!

Today has been super hot (although I do think it’s only around 30degreesC), and we walked up hill (plus around a million stairs!) to Hong Kong park. Blaghgh, not fun. Therefore we were made of fail and had to bail on Beckie, we’d planned to go up to the Peak in the evening but we were more or less dead! Anyway, tomorrow we’ll take it easy, rest up, and then on Saturday we’re going on a hike (I’m told it’ll be not so strenuous! this heat is killing us if we have to do anything more than stroll!). Due to our ridiculous heat fatigue we ended up eating at a couple of chain places again (yoshinoya and cafe de coral), although to be fair it’s just basic rice and meat dishes (at cafe de coral) and ramen/noodles (yoshinoya) which is sometimes all you want. For two ‘rice with roast duck’ and drinks at cafe de coral it was $68 (about £6.50), and for two chicken with kelp ramen at yoshinoya it was a measly $36 (£3.50). Existing in Hong Kong on a budget is super easy… Oh! We also got some sweet buns for breakfast that were less than 40p each!

I also got kinda weirded out by this poster so had to take a photo (this was right by an aviary, so it’s not completely random). The health notices seem to be pretty regular in HK, be it hand washing, preventing flu (mainly swine right now), telling people not to spit ‘please wrap your spittle’, ‘this handrail is disinfected 4 times a day’ honestly, if that was the UK it would read ‘this handrail is disinfected never, in fact, we probably wipe it with a cloth that’s 10x dirtier than it’. I dunno, is it our goverment being kinda lax with health issues? I mean, I know HK is pretty (read, VERY) scared about health issues since the SARs outbreak… or is it a bit over the top? I think we might go look at those people locked in that hotel tomorrow.