Hong Kong with Younger Sister (September 2014)

Hong Kong Island seen from Avenue of the Stars (Kowloon)

I mentioned somewhere that I've travelled quite a bit in the past few months. Not as much as Hub for work, nor as much as this Singaporean GF of another friend who apparently travels to Singapore every month just for a hair cut.

One memorable trip I made recently was with my younger sister D in September. We are Lotus and Phoenix, with 4 years between us. I think we sometimes fail to realise how time truly flies, and how we tend to procrastinate in so many ways, not just in things we have to do physically. Though I try to return to Singapore every one to two years, D and I have not seen each other much in the last 19 years and before you know it, we are fat Obasans with a number of kids each in tow.

The idea was to meet up somewhere for a quick getaway: away from our daily chores, endless duties and routines, away from the grumpy Hubs, the demanding, ungrateful kids and in her case, the cook-the-same-food-everyday FIL.

No, we didn't go to HK to shop. When you have as many kids as we do to feed and educate, shopping is no longer a priority. And when you have husbands who are ready to pounce on yet another "unnecessary" purchase, you prefer to indulge in stuff that you can ingest and digest quickly leaving minimum evidence behind for scrutiny. When you are already padded like us, a few extra kilos at the end of a short trip wouldn't make much of a difference either (there, I caught your thought!).    

Wanchai on HK Island

And of course, the idea really was to spend some precious time together, to catch up and bond. We used to share a room when we were kids and often talked through the night. I guess we didn't imagine then that all that would become just a part of our memories and no longer part of our lives once we leave home.

We met at the airport in HK and  stayed at the OZO WESLEY in vibrant Wanchai. The boutique hotel was renovated in 2013, the room was simple and modern. Hotel lobby smelled of detergent most of the time though which I found disturbing as we all know it could be cancerous. Conveniently located  between Admiralty and Wanchai with a tram stop just in front.

Our room at Ozo Wesley, Wanchai

We took the Star Ferry from Wanchai Pier and crossed the sea to Tsim Sha Tsui. Took in the usual sights (The Peninsular Hotel etc) and then found our way to the Avenue of the Stars. OK, this stretch of walkway on the sea front is fairly kitsch and was filled with Chinese tourists who took pictures of themselves with anything that was standing and which could be used as a background. And if the floor was filled with hand prints of HK Stars (many whom we knew from our lost TV-watching youth), then they could be found almost on all fours for that important souvenir picture. Seeing that it took me months, why not years, to deal with the few photos I've taken on my trips, I wonder how they cope with the thousands of photos they must have taken on each trip, limited only by the memory of their SD cards.

But we were there just before sunset and it was the most beautiful moment of the day for admiring HK Island opposite. I was actually pretty awed by the colours facing me, colours reflected by the buildings as the sun started to go down. And it was always lovely breathing in the sea breeze, knowing that there would be no need to prepare dinner nor supervise the kids' homework nor hurry to make oneself charming for the Hubs.

HK like most important cities is easy to explore on foot and it is recommended that one take in the sights and smells by taking one's time to do so. The island has lots of good things to eat that one would probably discover by chance as one is wandering around.  

Some of our snacks, Sift has great cupcakes!

We came across the famous Mak Noodles as we made our way to Ashley St and needless to say sat down promptly to gobble down a tiny bowl each of the springy egg noodles in its rich broth. A few steps down the street we saw a famous dessert shop and also settled down for a little something - all that before our planned dinner at Ned Kelly's Last Stand!

It's kind of unfathomable when you are Singaporean to make plans and not stick to them, so of course we had our dinner of burger and chips and everything's that greasy in the Australian pub run mainly by Filipinos.

Dinner, cocktails and jazz at Ned Kelly's Last Stand

The highlight of the evening starting from 9:30pm (but Happy Hour finishes at 9) is always the jazz band and I wanted D to hear them play. The English leader works as a manager in Ocean Park in the day (and he's married to a Singaporean, by the way) and sings/plays in the band most evenings. Heard he has been doing this for a few decades now.

On the evening we were there the band was pretty small, but I was told during an earlier visit that at certain times of the year they were perfectly capable of sitting 16 musicians where there were currently 6 or 7!

You don't have to pay a cover charge to hear the band play nor do you have to eat, but you have to order a few drinks, of course, in order to be able to sit in. The food is usually quite decent in the pub so I actually just make a point to dine there before the jazz.

The Star Precinct in Wanchai with its little boutiques and restaurants

D and I speak Cantonese so HK wasn't complicated for us, in fact I welcome the opportunity to practise the dialect as it makes me feel nostalgic for our parents' home. HK seems very modern on the one hand, and also so broken down here and there, like Singapore such a very long time ago. I like this mix very much, the way the old and the new co-exist and I also feel comfortable there because we share a British colonial past with many shared references (not to forget street/building names). However, I think they are also much more Chinese than us. The only darker-skinned folks you see around are the Indonesian and Filipino maids. And under many bridges you find old Chinese ladies hitting photos with shoes and slippers - like in that ghost movie I last watched when I was in Singapore. 

The next morning my dear friend and ex-neighbour J met us in the hotel lobby and took us out for a walk and we ended up having dim sum at the famous Maxim's in City Hall. As usual we ate a little too much too fast, wanting to order everything we saw in the carts. I have to admit that at such a moment, I think the Hub is pretty awesome because I know that he can usually afford to pay the bill. The afternoon was spent walking around Times' Square and we ended up in a diner near our hotel for an almost home-cooked dinner that was quite delicious. We are very fond of simple meals too, you listen to the waiters banter and gossip in Cantonese and you try to remind yourself not to give them any reason to scold you.

With J at Maxim's, the soy bean curd with ginger syrup was divine!

Neighbourhood diner near our hotel

Saturday's highlight was lunch at L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon. Hub insisted on inviting us to lunch there and we accepted his invitation graciously. The Head Chef had left to set up his own restaurant a few months ago and the second Chef was about to leave for Singapore MBS. The food was fine and creative as usual and we even had nice cocktails to go with it. I always make sure to request for a seat away from the entrance as I dislike having my back to the door, and this time we didn't go for the longest set menu as we were hoping to keep some space in the stomach for other stuff later in the day.  Still, the meal was filling and we couldn't finish the petits fours at the end of the meal. Merci, mon chéri!

The CBD (love the trams)

L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon, 3* Michelin in HK

The potato puree was made with ratte potatoes imported from France

Needless to say it was important to walk off the calories, and I think I forced things a little too much and poor D ended up with a very inflamed ankle before the end of the day. We've taken the escalators to the Mid Levels, taken a look at Lan Kwai Fong, walked to PMQ and spent some time looking through the little boutiques there, even took in an Hermes exhibition that was quite amazing. They don't do things in half measures, so you get to touch the fabulous leather, admire one of their artisans at work, and dream your way through all the bags and shoes and gowns. Actually I'm still not at all quite a fan of the famous Birkin or Kelly, though I rather like their leather boots and suitcases.

Around the escalators leading to the Mid-Levels

The red door frame was part of Man Ho Temple,
looked kind of eerie from the outside

The PMQ was apparently a new trendy spot to visit in HK when we were there. They have converted the former Police Married Quarters and Clubhouse into a market place with café. There are floors and floors of small shops and ateliers that you basically have to pop in and out in order to visit.

I am vague about the geography but I know that it's somewhere between Central and Sheung Wan, and it's also on the way to Man Ho Temple which is near an antiques street and the Holiday Inn Express I've stayed in once with Hub. I'm very fond of the Sheung Wan area though recently I read an article about it being kind of haunted because of its past, but well I guess it makes it all the more exciting as such.

PMQ (and one of its toilets)

D was quite excited at one point when we wandered into a room and there was this doll with fat head surrounded by pink at the entrance. I have never heard of Chocolate Rain before that, but well, now I know. I think I've left Asia for too long a time because I don't have this Asian fondness for cute stuff. Can't believe people actually spend a fortune collecting pens, umbrellas, bags, mugs, bedsheets etc etc with this character printed on them.

We didn't buy anything at PMQ because much of the stuff was actually quite expensive and probably too original for us. A French company was selling perfumed underwear for men, for example. Releases the good stuff during contact with perspiration... 

D is crazy about this Chocolate Rain

Hermes exhibition

FOC and very well done

There was a French lady showing off her stitching and I talked to her to find out about her training and career. Pretty interesting and it more or less confirmed what I found out once watching a video about Hermes during one of my plane journeys.

At the same time, what she's doing is a dying art as it costs too much to maintain this kind of standards and systems. All those major houses like Prada, BV, SF all claim to only make their leather goods in Europe, but my Chinese neighbour made his fortune making part of SF's shoes here in China and a friend who used to work for Prada in Shanghai told me she suspected that part of the manufacturing was done here in the South, but all very hush hush, of course.

Under Bridge Spicy Crab in Wanchai

That evening, we met J again for dinner and she invited us to...Under Bridge Spicy Crab!!! So very generous of her as those crabs cost a small fortune. Basically the crab was buried under a mountain of fried garlic, so not exactly the kind of dinner you want to make with a new suitor, for example.

Had a lovely time catching up with her, really miss those days when we would lunch out together almost every week with F as well. J returned to HK last December and F left a few days ago for the USA...I've just lost my 2 good friends in Shanghai, probably almost time for me to leave too.

Voila a quick weekend getaway in HK for 2 sisters and we agreed that we should make a habit of it and do this again.

A New Hobby

My 3rd Hu Yongkai Painting (and my 14th painting)

A couple of fellow bloggers disappeared and returned months or years later with a cookbook, a new baby, why not a younger spouse, designer kitchen and/or house, new body, re-designed face, eventually a more exciting job! 

Unfortunately, none of the above have I accomplished. I'm still fat, still stuck in Shanghai (though I've travelled quite a bit in the past year), still live in the same house (though we moved out for a couple of weeks in November because of a termite infestation) and still have the same hub (though he's now a few kgs lighter after he returned from a month at INSEAD and started embracing a healthier lifestyle that includes jogging 12km every other day)...

I searched far and wide in the neuron network in the past few months and finally woke up this morning with the perfect alibi: I've taken up oil painting a little more than a year ago! With age the circuit is a little retarded, sometimes clogged and bulbs just do not light up as often and as quickly as they used to. But, I did start to paint and have been religiously doing so every Tuesday morning since autumn in 2013.

My younger sister is the artistic one in the family, and I couldn't usually draw an egg to save my life. However, I was told by a number of people that with minimum guidance even an idiot could paint with oil and when offered the opportunity to try, I felt I had nothing to lose and jumped at it.

I think my teacher Yao ZW is originally from Ningbo, but must have spent most of his life in Shanghai. He rents a ground floor flat near Century Park in Pudong and sets up 6 easels so that he could have 6 students in the morning and another 6 in the afternoon. In the week most of his students would be Chinese housewives (usually pretty wealthy), and during the weekend and public holidays he would have lots of children (often children of the same rich tai tais).

My very 1st painting, took me 9 hours to finish

2nd painting, kind of scary having that
mountain range and body of water to paint

Impressionist 3rd painting

Teacher Yao is pretty cool and teaches so that he could feed his only passion which is to paint. His plan is to make a final exhibition of his paintings before he retires so that he could sell them and retire comfortably. At the moment he has bought a house with some land in the countryside about an hour and a half from Shanghai and starting next year will live there during the weekend and remain in Shanghai during the week just to continue teaching. He is actually a pretty well-known painter from some old school, but because his only child is a girl, he had no need in the past to buy a flat in anticipation of her future marriage and as such missed out riding on the property wave that made most Shanghainese rich, see very rich, in the past two decades.

All new students would start out with a series of 6 paintings chosen by Teacher Yao. Once we have completed these paintings and decide to continue with him, we can begin to more or less paint whatever catches our fancy as long as it's within our ability to do so. After the first few paintings, one would somehow start to have "the feeling" and would more or less know what to do, only occasionally asking Teacher Yao to come rescue us.  

4th painting: one of my favourites and now with Anna

 I really look forward to joining this class every  Tuesday morning, I think I've almost never missed a session since I started. I find it calming to spend 3 hours concentrating on trying to get as much painted as I could (and I'm very slow at it) and often spend days leading up to the class planning what I would do when I get my fingers on the brushes.

 We were the same group of 6 ladies painting together, except for my dear friend and neighbour F who gave birth last June and then moved back to the USA a few days ago. My classmates are all wealthy Chinese ladies with only one child each. The children attend the best Shanghai schools, have expensive tutors, go on exclusive school trips to Europe, and these mothers spend quite a bit of their time during class exchanging notes about their progeny. I usually have nothing much to say about mine because when your kids spend most of their time playing, have no exam pressure and no particular talent to display, you have nothing to share with the others.

And I am very slow, Teacher Yao complains about it from time to time (though he should be happy as it means each one of my paintings costs me more than usual), and the others would turn up in front of my easel once in a while to tell me that I pay too much attention to detail blah blah...

5th painting, I can't really do grass

They are all more advanced than me (at least by a year if not more) and are really amazing with their trees, mountains, sea etc. They are also really fast when they paint, often skipping the pencil sketching part, making me look even slower than I already am. So to set myself apart, I try nowadays to paint stuff that require a lot of patience e.g. buildings, figures, furniture...and they would mumble all the time I spend too much time on the details.  

6th painting and the license
to choose future paintings more or less freely

What did I do with my paintings? The first 2 paintings are currently hiding in my pantry, hanging over my shelves of dried goods and bottles of water; the next 5-6 paintings found their way to my several bathrooms (I have 6). One of the more edible ones went to Anna, and my favourite is at this moment making its way (via Hub) to MIL; yet another is currently hanging in the guest room. 

I also like to paint water villages (8th painting)

My 2nd Hu Yongkai painting
that MIL chose to have for Xmas (12th)

A European water village? (7th)

The 1st painting I dared to frame up (9th)

My favourites are the Hu Yongkai paintings (the ones with the Chinese ladies) and I have decided I may paint one between two to three landscapes (which are good for training our painting skills though they are boring) as I gain a lot of satisfaction from doing them. I've already painted all the 3 paintings that Teacher Yao has on photo though, and will have to source for my own samples if I want to paint more of Painter Hu's work. 

My very 1st Hu Yongkai painting (10th)

I like this one but the rocks were tough to paint
and saw a copy on Taobao selling for 12000 rmb! (13th)

Another Chinese water village (11th)

Well, so you know what I've been up to in the past year. 

Tarte au Citron Meringuée

Tarte au citron meringuée

Baby Boy is the only person in the family besides myself who likes this French lemon tart. Occasionally he has a craving for it and would pester me to make him one. I've offered him a few store-bought ones, but he always insists that he prefers mine. At the same time I do not really think that he's crazy about my version of the tart, he just wants to give me work to do.    

I never seem to have the same tart no matter how many times I make this Tarte au Citron Meringuée. Probably because the oven I've used was different each time. But the result was usually quite tasty and from the rustic look of my labour you could well imagine that I've made it from scratch short of growing my own lemons.

The French do not like to waste if they could help it. Hence if 3 egg yolks were required for the sweet pie pastry, then 3 egg whites would go towards making the meringue to cover it. It serves at the same time to prevent the custard from burning.

Depending on how firm you like your custard to be, you can adjust the baking time in the second part of the baking. I've made anything from flowing lava to firm and they all tasted more or less the same at the end of the day: rich, sweet, acidic, very sinful.

Tarte au Citron Meringuée:

A sinful, calorie-filled slice

For the sweet crust pastry:

200g butter

a pinch of salt

120g icing sugar

3 egg yolks

250g flour

For the lemon custard:

1 large lemon (untreated)

60g butter

1 egg

120g castor sugar

For the meringue:

3 egg whites

80g castor or icing sugar

Cut the butter into small pieces and leave to soften in room temperature. Add the salt and sugar and mix (with a whisk or with your fingers) till you obtain a creamy paste. Add the egg yolks and continue mixing. Sift the flour and mix in a quarter first. Finally add in the rest of the flour and finish mixing only with your fingers without overworking the dough. Form the dough into a ball and wrap in cling wrap. Refrigerate for at least an hour.

Preheat the oven to 170°C/340°F. Line the bottom of a round ceramic mould with baking paper and fill it with the dough pressing it well onto the sides. I didn't bother to roll out the dough before I used it so I ended up with a rustic-looking crust. Bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes. As a general rule, I prefer tarts with a thin crust so that one could enjoy the filling, but for this lemon tart, I tend to go heavy with the pie crust because I couldn't normally survive too much of the certes yummy tangy-sweet filling. In any case it's all a question of personal taste.

Lower the heat in the oven to 150°C/305°F. Zest and juice the lemon. Melt the butter and set it aside. Mix the egg with the sugar followed by the zest, juice and butter. Pour into the baked pie crust and bake for 12 minutes. At this point you can decide to increase the baking time by a few minutes if you wish to have a firmer/more cooked custard. Remove the tart from the oven and set aside.

Lower the heat in the oven to 100°C/215°F and do make sure the oven is truly at this temperature before you proceed. Whisk the egg whites till firm and whisk in the sugar bit by bit till you get a shining white meringue batter. Cover the tart with it and bake in the oven for 20 minutes. If for some reason the meringue is not cooked, continue baking till it is reasonably firm.

Let it cool before serving. I personally prefer it chilled.

Walking in Puxi (浦西) Autumn 2012

A Chinese boy in Puxi

Today is Children's Day in Singapore. Or I'm being stubborn because I now live in China and we have just started the famous Golden Week (if you see lots of Chinese tourists where you are you'll understand why) celebrating the PRC's National Day. The security guard just delivered us a bag courtesy of the Shanghai Municipality to mark the occasion and it contained a TCM brochure and a free wooden health comb.

I have therefore decided to do another long due post on Shanghai. We have been living here more than 2.5 years now. Officially the contract finishes in March next year, but with Hub helping the company open up factories in the North plus his having just taken over their Malaysian operations, I suspect that we would be here for a little while longer.

We live reasonably isolated from the humdrum of Chinese life. When we leave our lightly gated community we do find ourselves in the midst of the locals and migrant workers, but Jinqiao in Pudong is still a small (expat) world apart from Puxi - the historic part of Shanghai.

Visiting Puxi was therefore often looked upon as a little expedition for some of us, especially when the traffic jams on the way there seemed to be getting from bad to worse nowadays. Not surprising when you consider the thousand COEs they issue each month to new car buyers and these new cars tend to be those big, expensive imported ones that take up a lot of space on the roads. Foreign car makers used to imagine that cheap, outdated car models would sell like hotcakes in China, only to discover that only the Chinese carmakers could make lousy cheap cars that the Chinese would buy; the majority only want the very best that even many Europeans and Americans could no longer afford. This is an example of the Chinese success story and my Jiangmen cousin's recent purchase of a BMW is a case in point. Rewind to the 1980s when he sent us a photo of his proud purchase : a 3-wheel mini-van/scooter. He has done well like so many of his comrades.

Vegetables, anyone?

Together with my neighbours J and F we finally found a moment last autumn for our walkaround. We asked to be driven to the former French Concession (forgetting the word "former" could get one into trouble with the authorities) and from there explored the surrounding (older) neighbourhoods on foot. They probably had fantastic photos as they brought along their SLRs, but I was too lazy and used my really old Sony. Many things have changed since, e.g. one building we saw being renovated then now houses a French restaurant.

Dancing in Fuxing Park

We walked through Fuxing park (the one where Chinese and dogs were not allowed entry in the old colonial days) and saw the Chinese dancing in it; we walked past street markets and tasted some of the less dangerous-looking wares. We peeped into boutiques, but could find nothing to buy either because we couldn't fit into Chinese sizes or couldn't afford Shanghainese prices. Contrary to popular belief outside China, Shanghai is a very expensive city.

Cloth for pyjamas?

Near Yongkang Lu I walked past a tiny shop selling cloth and the owners giggled when they saw me. When they realised I could speak Chinese they told me I looked like some famous ethnic minority singer in the country. I think I knew who they were referring to; funny enough the singer in question is also married to a European.

Over the summer I've read a few books written by Shanghainese who have fled China in the 1940s and who lived in the Western world after that. It was fascinating learning about the  street names in French in those days (e.g. Huaihai Zhong Lu used to be known as Avenue Joffre), about the prosperity in the city before the Communists took over. As you walked around the city you could imagine (often still see) its former splendour, and sometimes one wonders what things would have been if there hadn't been communism, the cultural revolution etc. Probably fewer ugly towers (like in HK) that have aged badly, to start with.   

However, delayed prosperity is better than no prosperity. I just found out, for instance, that one of my drivers (since August this year we have 2 cars and 2 drivers) is going to become quite rich overnight. His late grandfather owned a broken-down-no-private-toilet old house near People's Square in Puxi that is finally going to be acquired by a developer. The compensation depends on the number of people registered under each address and in Driver J's case, the three (feuding-because-of-incoming-wealth) families "living" under the roof will each receive two new 2-bedroom apartments (choice of 3 locations in Shanghai). At current property prices (e.g. in the Sheshan area where the new flats will be), their old house is worth around 800,000 euros!  

Milk box, letter box, electricity box?

Driver J is now going to be very comfortable like a number of Shanghainese with wealth that just dropped on their laps thanks to the crazy development of their city. He whined that the locals who used to/still own land (本地人) in the near countryside are/will be even richer because the compensation tends to be 2-3 times more important than for small old houses in the city. I've heard stories of road sweepers turning up for work driving Mercedes-Benz because they had become rich overnight but had no skills in life besides farming, for instance.

Quite tasty actually

His daughter's generation will be the most fortunate, I think. The girl will have at least 4 flats to inherit later on in life: her maternal grandparents' flat in Qibao, her dad's current Kangqiao flat and the coming 2 flats in Sheshan! In fact, you just need to rub shoulders with young Shanghainese to know that they will be one smirky-very-pleased-with-themselves generation to look out for. They have comfortable lives, good education, good jobs, good future - and cannot imagine why they couldn't always get what they want in life.

The other day I lunched alone at the Food Opera food court at Super Brand Mall. Left an old folded shopping bag on a seat so that I could free my hands to carry my tray of food. Came back to find a young Chinese girl on my seat. When I told her that she was sitting on my seat, she looked at the bag she had removed/set aside and retorted, "I couldn't possibly not sit where I wanted to because of your bag, could I?"

I freaked out when I heard that because I had expected to hear a brief apology and was getting ready to move on. Obviously she didn't think it wrong to touch something that didn't belong to her, nor did it occur to her to apologise for having done that. A whole city filled with complacent, spoilt brats like that, what future does this country have?  

Anyway, while waiting to see this city transform itself into one of unparalleled wealth, of glittering skyscrapers, megastores and ubiquitous Land Rovers, we are going to try to enjoy as much of what still remains that is charming and interesting. 

I must remember to ask Driver J to check with his neighbours before they move if they have any old furniture they would be throwing out that could be of interest to a karang guni like myself.

I love lanzhou lamian

Pomegranate juice

Hoummous

Hoummous

The first chickpeas I "mashed" probably were the kacang puteh ones back in Kong Chian cinema during those days when I was a kid. A few decades later fancy me being known in close circles for my humble Hoummous and friends have even rejected watered-down versions being sold in popular bazaars by so-called hoummous experts, insisting that I provide them with my recipe so that they would know how to make it even after they (or I) have left whichever city we were friends in.

Many years ago I've blogged about a beetroot version and this should precede it, but for some reason I've never blogged about the classic version. So I'm setting things right today and this could then go into my archives for whoever would be looking for my take on the hoummous.

Hoummous : 

460g canned chickpeas
1-2 tbsp tahini (cold-pressed sesame paste)

1 tbsp dry-roasted cumin seeds
juice of 1 lemon (and adjusted according to taste)
4-6 tbsp olive oil (and extra for garnishing)
3 garlic cloves (grilled)
salt to taste

ground paprika and a few whole chickpeas for garnishing

Drain the water from the can and immerse the chickpeas in a bowl of hot salted water.

Dry roast the cumin seeds in a frying pan with the garlic (roughly chopped) and when fragrant add in some olive oil.

Remove the chickpeas from the hot water and add them plus the cumin and garlic to a blender. Add olive oil, lemon juice and tahini and blend to a roughly fine paste. Add salt to taste and if necessary a little water and/or olive oil if the paste is too dry.

Pour the paste into a pretty recipient and make a well. If not consuming immediately, cover with cling wrap and refrigerate. (Actually the dish is best served chilled.)

Just before serving, pour a little olive oil into the well and add a few chickpeas for decoration. Sprinkle some ground paprika over everything and serve the hoummous with fresh vegetable sticks or corn chips.