Hong Kong is a port city, located on the southeastern coast of China between the Pearl River Delta and South China Sea, so obviously seafood is a serious part of the cuisine there. You wouldn't believe the variety offered even out front of restaurants for you to take home to cook. I couldn't believe how bad I wanted to cook on my vacation.
To pay tribute to the glorious seafood I saw I chose these jumbo prawns that I've been wanting to use for a long time now from Viet-Wah, an amazing store in the International District. These things are HUGE!! they're called 2-4s, meaning that there's 2 to 4 prawns per pound, or an average of 4 ounces each. Not your typical salad shrimp!!
Probably the best dish I had was at the Night Market, the area where you can get everything. My wife and I stopped at a sidewalk restaurant that had an amazing cuttlefish dish that was obviously steamed until tender and lightly breaded like a tempura batter with an interesting dipping sauce that I deciphered to be a mixture of shao-xing, a typical Chinese cooking wine, rice vinegar, sugar, and five-spice powder. I feel like I nailed the flavor of the sauce, along with a few of my own special chef touches... ;)
Another major aspect of our trip was (of course) dim sum, and the most predominate dish is glutinous rice wrapped in lotus leaf, though I used Chinese sausage and dried black mushroom as a filling to make the little package of rice burst with flavor like any good dim sum restaurant would!
Hong Kong had a lot of alcohol, but nothing made locally other than beer, so I had to take my inspiration for this week's cocktail from the heart of the luscious fruits that are available there, like mangoes, so I decided to make an infusion of green tea and vodka to flavor a martini shaken with mango puree and simple syrup to create a tropical drink that reflects a trip to the South China Sea!!
With Love,
Cheffrey
glad the trip was both fun and inspirational. those are some big a** shrimp.
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