Tai O

We decided to start our mini break close to home yesterday with a trip to Tai O. It's a small fishing village on the western tip of Lantau island and it's renowned for its stilt houses, streets lined with dried fish and sea creatures, and the elusive dolphins that precariously inhabit the local waters.

On the surface it looks like a very traditional Chinese village, mostly untouched by Western influences but it is very much geared towards the hordes of tourists who visit every week. Rumour has it that a local film or soap opera was filmed there and that alone brings a lot of people to the village! Tai O is about 45 minutes by bus from Mui Wo and Tung Chung. There are a number of fantastic hikes down into the village from a few points on the island. It's also a 20 minute drive from where we live, so we drove, but parking is pretty limited. You could also charter a sampan and arrive in style!

Our first priority was lunch. While we drawn to some of the local restaurants offering fresh fish and local delicacies, with two kids in tow we weren't as intrepid as we could've been and when we stumbled across Melt, a western style cafe with a very kid-friendly menu, we sat right down. The boys split a sausage sandwich and an apple juice and we shared a plate of nachos and lime sodas. If we didn't live here we'd feel a little guilty not indulging in local food, but since it's an option all the time we didn't feel so bad! Melt was clean and fresh and the food was just what we needed. It's located next to some pretty cool little cafes and local shops selling food. The Chinese pizza, directly opposite Melt looks delicious, and if the queue was anything to go by, worth a trip to Tai O! The Tai O Bakery sells delicious egg tarts and Chinese donuts, local delights we simply couldn't pass up.

Next up was a wander through a fascinating little village. The boys loved looking at the tanks of fish, crabs, and even eels, for sale along the streets. The smell of incense and dried fish made me feel like I was very far away from home, and took me back to the time I first fell in love with Asia. The click-clack of mahjong tiles and the chatter of everyone around us provided a nice soundtrack, and a relief from the city noises of traffic and construction. There are no cars in Tai O, only boats, and a boat ride is a must. We piled into a small sampan with a handful of other "tourists" for a tour of the village.

The stilt houses are quite remarkable, and after being here for a few typhoons myself, I marvelled at how they manage to withstand such weather extremes. The view was completely lost on the boys but they were both pretty excited to be on a boat!

Before heading out into open water, the boat passed by the Tai O Heritage Hotel. Built in 1902 as a police post, the building was restored and turned into a boutique hotel and granted heritage listing in 2009. We haven't had a chance to visit the hotel, or its famed glass-roofed restaurant, The Rooftop, but we will be making a special trip back for dinner soon. It's only accessible by boat, and is yet another glimpse into a different time and place.

We wound up the boat tour with a brief stop offshore where the local pink and white dolphins are known to hang out. Very few people that we know have actually seen them, and we weren't confident that we were going to be that lucky. There are a number of boat operators taking tourists out to see the dolphins all day, every day, and the spot is littered with debris from the boats. There are also markers in the water so the boats know where to stop, but it is disheartening, especially with the airport not far away and the spectre of the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge rising out of the sea mere kilometres away, threatening to destroy the dolphin's habitat. Then suddenly we saw a disturbance in the water, a splash and flash of silvery white in the distance. All ten of us onboard gasped in delight, and again when one of the dolphins leapt out of the water, putting on a show just for us. We saw 2 of them playing and one rose out of the water a couple of times, quite close by. It's impossible to take photos as they move so fast but I felt like I was watching something very special. The boat ride costs $20HKD for 20 minutes and Charlie rode for free. Some operators also guarantee that if you don't see a dolphin you'll get a ticket for a free ride next time.

We had a fantastic day but we did get a little sunburnt. Despite the weather being wet and grey in Cheung Sha, it was sunny and clear in Tai O, so my advice for anyone planning a visit is go prepared for all seasons! All in all it was a great day out, and were home having a cup of tea by 3pm. Rediscovering the place we call home is off to a very good start!

Staycation

After our recent trip to Australia, we've spent a lot of time planning our exit strategy. Our time in HK is limited and we have a lot of options available to us, but we want to make sure we really get the most out of living here while we can.

I always felt like I left Sydney before I was ready. I don't have closure and I want to live there again one day until I'm "done."
I have no doubt it'll take 6 months to drive me crazy and then I can get on with living happily ever after elsewhere!

So, with that in mind, I made a list of all the things I wanted to achieve before we leave Hong Kong for good. While "taking advantage of living here," may sound quite vague, it's top of my list. Part of that involves seeing the places we haven't seen yet, and showing a few of those that we have seen to the boys. A ride on the Star Ferry holds a lot more appeal when you're watching the face of a very excited 3 year old! We haven't really experienced much of the local culture and there is still so much of the city we haven't explored.

Dave has 3 weeks leave coming up, and after our very expensive trip down under, we can't afford to go anywhere. So, we're seizing the opportunity and we plan to be tourists in our home town. Join us on our adventure, as I blog, tweet, and update every step of the way - starting next week!

Jamie Oliver and the Busy Mum

I have been a Jamie Oliver fan for a while now. He's not as snooty as some of the other celebrity chefs out there, and I feel like not only would he be supportive of my tendency to adapt his recipes, he'd probably encourage it. It's not that I have the cheek to try and improve on a recipe by one of the world's most famous chefs, but those of you who have read my gripes about the availability of fresh produce here would know that adaptation is often a necessity.

While I was working I found it really tough to come home every night and think of something to cook for dinner. I tried desperately to be inventive and make meals that we could all eat, but most nights we turned to the old standards - spaghetti bolognese, curry from a jar, or some form of scrambled eggs. My husband, frustrated by my sensitive pregnant digestive system, refused to be responsible for important culinary decisions, after I shrieked for the dozenth time "Euurgh, I can't eat that!" And that was the status quo until one night when we happened to catch an episode of Jamie's "30 Minute Meals." I was captivated by the promise of a decent home-cooked meal on the table in half an hour, and motivated by Jamie's faith in me that I could do it too. The other books of Jamie's that I own have never let me down yet; his recipes seem do-able, and he taught me the basics of awesome pizza and simple, but oh-so-good risotto. So I bought the book and after a few trial and error attempts at one or two of the recipes, I decided to jump in feet first and planned our whole week's worth of dinners using meals from the book. I have to admit that I have yet to cook any of the meals in the promised 30 minutes, but I do not have a food processor, or a proper kitchen for that matter, and there is usually a small person hovering around my knees wanting saucepan lids to bang on while I'm cooking, so things will inevitably take a bit longer. It also helps if you have all of the main ingredients ready at the time of cooking, so you're not rushing over to the neighbour's to borrow mustard for the Mustard Chicken recipe.

My fellow Hong Konger's will know that the most ambitious part of this project of mine isn't the cooking part, it's the grocery gathering. Last night I sat down and made a list of everything I needed for the 5 or so meals I plan to cook this week, and the cupboard is pretty bare, so it was a long list! I only had time to visit one supermarket today and I knew deep down that it wouldn't be enough, but I valiantly hoped that I could at least get everything for one of the meals, for tonight's dinner. I was disappointed when I flicked through the book and found a gentle warning from Jamie that it was probably best not to mess around too much with the recipes when you first started making them. He said that they had all been tried and tested by his team and worked exactly the way they were printed in the book. Well, I'm sorry Jamie, but there was no way I was going to get my hands on Creme Fraiche today, and chicory? Forget it! I was disheartened, knowing it would be impossible to find some of the ingredients here, but I was determined to give it a shot and make it work with what I had.

I walked out of ThreeSixty with maybe two-thirds of the items on my list, and even though I knew there would be at least 2 more shops to visit this week to get everything, I was pretty pleased with that phase of the delicious dinner production process. D is away and I hate cooking for one so tonight I made Cauliflower Macaroni (sorry, couldn't find the recipe online to share it), hoping J would eat it with me. I didn't make the salad (no chicory), or the dessert (block o' chocolate will suffice), and I had to substitute bacon for pancetta, and cream for creme fraiche, but it was delicious! My 2 year-old chose chicken nuggets instead but the whole time we were eating I kept telling him he was seriously missing out, and I went back for more (and there is still a lot left over). I didn't time myself while I was cooking (I didn't need the pressure) but I have to say dinner was ready pretty quickly. Even though the whole point was to cook something tasty, quickly, cooking feels like less of a chore when the end result is that good. I figure if I can cook a decent meal on a two burner bench-top oven, in a tiny Chinese style kitchen, with equal parts enthusiasm and improvisation, in around 30 minutes, then anyone can. The most time-consuming part is the shopping, and the washing up as my husband will attest, but it's definitely worth a shot if you're super busy and looking for something a lot more interesting than spag bol for dinner during the week. And if Jamie can forgive me for messing with his recipes, and I can tolerate 3 trips to 3 different supermarkets to buy most of the required ingredients, we may just have a food revolution in our house (and more time for lazing on the sofa after dinner!).

PS: Thrilled to get a plug this week on http://digitalparents.com.au/ as 'Blogger of the Week,' Yay!

Food For Thought

After parenting and blogging, the other love in my life is food. I love cooking, and baking, and planning meals, and shopping for  food, and I especially love eating. I wrote about how important food is to me in a post last year, Love and Lasagna, and my battles to find good quality produce here in Hong Kong here. Today I'm hooked on Masterchef and seriously considering a foray into professional cooking - if only I could study something other than Chinese cuisine while I'm here. I could write a dozen different posts about food at the moment but since this isn't a food blog, I thought I'd give you a quick summary of what's happening in my kitchen and what's inspiring me lately:

Delicious Magazine - I love this magazine! A subscription is the only thing I ask for when Mother's Day is coming up, and if the postal system here wasn't so random I would be waiting by the mailbox on delivery day. I make a point to cook something from every issue and I have them all organised in chronological order next to my cookbooks. Yes, I am a food nerd.

DIY - Fed up with trying to find decent bread, we invested in a bread maker when we first arrived in HK. It spent a lot of time gathering dust in the cupboard until we realised that bread was one of the few things J will eat. We now make our own on a weekly basis; no nasties, no fuss. Our $500 HKD, second-hand Princess bread maker just bit the dust, so we're upgrading to the Kenwood BM450, a bread maker that's bigger than our oven - that's how serious we are about our bread.

We've also started making our own yoghurt. It can be messy and getting a good batch requires patience and exact measurements and mixing, but it's worth the effort, especially when you see how much added sugar goes into some of the more common commercial yoghurt brands. It's the kind of cooking once reserved for hippies, but everyone's doing it these days. DIY yoghurt is cool, people.

GIY (grow it yourself) - Our rooftop kitchen garden has taken off with the heat and humidity of the last few weeks. It's resembling a jungle more than a garden at the moment but we're loving it. So far we've only managed to harvest herbs, zucchini flowers and some rock-star quality beans, but we'll soon have a bumper crop of tomatoes and the pumpkins won't be far behind. I'm excited about food in a way that I haven't been in a long time, and there's nothing more rewarding than sitting down to a meal with ingredients that you've grown from scratch on a hot rooftop (where, by rights, nothing should grow).

Going Vege - We've been talking for a long time about eating less meat. All the meat we can buy here is imported from somewhere, and it's hard to know what's ok to eat and what's full of hormones, antibiotics, and animal cruelty. I also have to wonder how long it's been sitting at the airport or on a truck, between leaving its country of origin and arriving on my supermarket shelf...  When we buy Australian beef I think about the good quality beef I used to buy at Coles, and I know they use the crap stuff for export. When we buy beef from South America I think about the swathes of Amazon rainforest that have been cut down for farming, and I can't stomach the thought of anything other than free-range, organic, corn-fed chicken. I spent 10 minutes in the egg section of the supermarket last week, trying to decide whether the 'free-range' eggs were better than the 'vegetarian' eggs. Were the corn-fed chickens kept in cages? And what were they feeding the free-range chooks that made them not-vegetarian...? Not to mention how expensive imported food is in general. I grew up in the country where we would see the sheep in the paddock one day and be served a roast lamb the next. I've always made an effort to know where my food comes from, but the process involved in getting it from the paddock to my plate has always made me squeamish, and more than a little uncomfortable. My husband bought a vegetarian cookbook recently and we've been enjoying coming up with new ways to eat our favourite dishes without meat. Until now I haven't quite been able to completely make the break from steak, but over the weekend I caught some of the footage of Aussie cows being slaughtered rather inhumanely in Indonesia, and finally decided my meat-eating days were behind me. I feel better for it, physically and morally, but I'd probably be laughed out of any professional kitchen if I rocked up for an apprenticeship and told them I was a vegetarian, "sigh".

Finding Familiar Favourites - When you're an expat you find that the things you once took for granted are the things you miss the most. Every month one of the local supermarket chains has an international food week, and this month happened to be Australian Food Week. Yay! So I was thrilled to find Arnott's Shapes, Scotch Fingers and Assorted Creams, Brookfarm muesli, Caramello Koalas and Vita Brits on the shelves, and they're now in my cupboard at home. I also discovered a range of gourmet cordials that I'd never heard of, which are great mixed with soda water on these hot summer nights. I've tried a lot of great, new products from all over the world since living here, but nothing beats having a tin of biscuits in the cupboard that are exactly the same as the ones you used to sneak from the tin at Nanna's house.

Family Dining - Our J bird is a fussy eater sometimes. He has his favourites, but like most toddlers, he's not all that keen on vegetables. I've had to get creative to get him to eat well, and most of the time that involves hiding vegetables and meat in things like baked beans. I've also made sure that everything that's available to him (with the exception of Scotch Fingers) is relatively healthy; whole grain bread, organic baked beans, natural yoghurt etc. I've also brought in a new regime this week, with the three of us eating dinner together at the table, with the TV off. He's more inclined to eat something if he sees us eating it as well, so it's a no-brainer really. I haven't forced him to adopt vegetarianism, because that would be irresponsible I think, so dinner last night was vegetable bolognaise with spaghetti, and a few meatballs thrown in for the blokes of the house. After some subtle persuasion, and much ignoring of his protests about the TV being off, dinner went down a treat. J does love his fruit and having so much of it in the house means that we're eating more of it too. I still sat down, after J was in bed, and tucked into a packet of Pepperidge Farm Cookies, but I'd had at least 2 pieces of fruit during the day and a salad for lunch, so I felt like I'd earned a treat. And because food should be fun.

Being Inspired - There are a lot of foodie websites out there, and some great recipes online. If there's something specific I want to cook and my Delicious collection doesn't have the answers, I hit the web.

Here are some of my favourite food sites (in no particular order):
http://smittenkitchen.com/ - she's a foodie and a mum, I love this website!
http://allthingsnice.typepad.com/tastebuddies/ - loved her zucchini flower recipe recently
The Cook and The Chef - a great show, and Maggie Beer is one of my food idols
http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/ - a huge catalogue of recipes from some of Britain's best chefs
http://www.taste.com.au/ - should be on everyone's bookmarked list

and for the parents:

http://www.annabelkarmel.com/
http://wholesomebabyfood.momtastic.com/

Have a great week everyone, and please check back in tomorrow for a brand new regular feature - Top Tip Tuesday.

* Photo courtesy of Suat Eman, FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Kung Hei Fat Choy

I've struggled this week with a form of writer's block. I've actually been working on a few posts but I haven't managed to finish any of them, at least not in a way I was happy with. We've got a lot going on and my head is full of the things happening out there in the big world as well as in our little world. The last few months have been great and we've had a lot of time together as a family, but it hasn't all been fun and games. Looking at the bigger picture there are many who have had a worse time of it; there has been political unrest, war, tragedy and heartbreak. Not to mention the natural disasters that recently had us glued to the TV, the flooding and cyclone that hammered Queensland weighed heavily on our minds as we worried about family and friends.

Foremost in my mind this week is my sister-in-law in hospital in Melbourne. She has been waging her own private war for two years now and we're flying to Manila on Monday to entertain her 2 year old daughter. It's always lovely to spend time with family but it stinks that it's not under different circumstances. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else at the moment but I know we'll have our work cut out for us. If I'm a little distracted and a bit slack with the blogging in the next few weeks it's because I'm suddenly in charge of two toddlers, in a foreign country, and my capacity to form sentences is compromised.

I can't complain, like I said, we've had a great start to the year but I can't help feeling like we need a do-over. Chinese New Year is the perfect opportunity to start again, again. If you've had a crappy January or you've already failed at your New Year's resolutions you can just put it all behind you and have another go at it in February. I have to admit that after three years in Hong Kong I'm still fairly ignorant when it comes to the traditions surrounding CNY, and I felt like I was missing out by not knowing more about it.  So I've spent a lot of time this week with my friend Wikipedia, researching this huge cultural festival, and I'm definitely going to embrace the holiday wholeheartedly from now on. The timing of the start of the new year is based on solar and lunar cycles and coincides with the beginning of spring; in China it's called the Spring Festival. It's steeped in tradition and superstition and there are rules and rituals for every day of the 15-day festival. The lead-up to the end of the year is a time for cleaning your home and removing all the 'bad luck' that's accumulated, literally and metaphorically. It's mostly about family and getting together to eat and give gifts - much like Christmas but on a larger scale, if you can imagine that. And instead of turkey there are lots of dumplings! There's something so organic and hopeful about the new year and the celebration of spring tying together like that; it really does feel like a clean slate, and a chance for something new to blossom.

This year, being the Year of the Rabbit, has a good vibe to it too. The Year of the Ox was about hard work, and the Year of the Tiger was a constant battle. But the Rabbit inspires fun and romance and is apparently a "placid and indulgent" year, a time to sit back and let the good times roll. The sun has been shining in Hong Kong this week, and it's warm again after the coldest January in 35 years. That fact alone is enough to make you feel positive and hopeful, given that it's normally so damn cold over the CNY weekend. Clever marketers are also cashing on the cuteness of the bunny and the abundance of chocolates in the stores and connecting CNY and Valentine's Day. It's all very sweet and romantic and, with all the love in the air, it really does feel like there are good times ahead.

So while the Chinese families around us are sitting down together and wishing for good health and prosperity, I'm thinking of the families who are now homeless after Cyclone Yasi, the parents of the young Aussie soldier killed in Afghanistan this week, the people fighting in Egypt for a better life, and all those who have experienced tragedy or hardship recently, including those in my little world, and I'm sending my share of the new year's blessings their way. I have hope that this year will be better, and I think that's a really good start. Kung Hei Fat Choi, or Happy New Year everyone!