I’m starting this entry five and a half hours into a fifteen-hour plane ride. Technology! This is the first plane I’ve ever flown in with an electrical outlet at every seat, not to mention enough computer games (crosswords included) to make a nerd like me want the ride to go on just a little longer. For the first time ever, on an intercontinental flight, I actually have a surfeit of possible activities: do I read Saturday by Ian McEwan, play interactive trivia with the rest of the plane, build an mp3 playlist from the airline’s reasonably extensive music library (this would be a good, private time to indulge my secret Celine Dion predilection), or watch six episodes of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares? Actually, I already watched six episodes of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on the flight over to Hong Kong. (In a row.)
I don’t understand why people like window seats so much. It’s not as though you can see anything on a long-haul flight, or get very comfortable leaning into the window nook. Nor do I understand why I’ve been assigned one, since I selected my seat online when I booked my ticket. But here I am, trapped in the corner, two passengers away from the bathroom I have yet to visit. Because, you see, my two flight neighbours, communicating telepathically, have choreographed a tight routine in which one dozes off the minute the other wakes up. It really is a wonder to watch, although I would be enjoying it even more if, like them, I had thought to pack a catheter of my own. They’ve got to be wearing catheters, right? Because you don’t drink a beer with lunch and go six hours without getting up for a pee. You just don’t. Unless you’re a pair of catheter-wearing secret agents hired by someone who hates me.
Well, at least I’m not hungry, or I’d be forced to eat the food. The strange appetite loss that I reported at the beginning of the week is still in force. So you ought to feel privileged, dear readers, that I went on something of a noodle soup odyssey regardless, and revisited a cherished place that remains my pick for best mid-range Japanese restaurant in Hong Kong (despite a noticeable drop in standards since my last visit, in 2003), and certainly trumps anything you can get in New York City for twice or even three times the price.
[Ah, it appears that blogging passive-aggressively about the toilet issue has done the trick. Perhaps the passenger to my immediate left read over my shoulder. I am back, and in much better spirits.]
It was not a good week for Michele in the kitchen. My mother’s oven didn’t want to stay lit for longer than twenty minutes at a time. Cooking on a fancy electric stove with a completely arbitrary number-to-heat system was a wild stab in the dark (with a blunt knife, to complete the metaphor). I was so jetlagged that I bought (identically-packaged) active dry yeast in place of baking powder and made the damn mango/dried cherry poundcake anyway. My last full day in Hong Kong saw me wading in beige-coloured high-heeled sandals through a typhoon, to buy two handbags, a bunch of expensive groceries and local produce by the catty. Don’t stand in judgment of the terrible meal I produced that evening until you’ve had to carry a bag of live and boisterous shrimp through a leather goods store, run through monsoon rain to avoid an awkward conversation with your high school principal, and then tried to peel those same shrimp, still boisterous a full minute after decapitation. Holy Mother of God. Yes, that shrimp and garlic chive omelet could have been bigger (and more omelet-like, for that matter) but I’ll be damned if I was going to deal with any more uncooperative shrimp when I’d been up since 2:30 in the morning and hadn’t seen my boyfriend in (count them) eleven days.
I have my mother to thank for much of my noodle soup odyssey. She’s gotten even more into this whole food blogging thing than I have. Before I even arrived in Hong Kong, she was scouring the city’s Chinese-language version of Chowhound, openrice.com, for top local picks guaranteed to satisfy my finicky taste for noodle soups. That we went to Tin Hau to track down Sister Wah’s beef noodle soup is all the more remarkable because she has recently gone vegetarian!
When I say “beef”, I really mean beef tendons and tripe, boiled to unctuous, gelatinous goodness and served in a surprising clear broth (the traditional soup is viscous, five-spiced and flecked with strings of meat) with exceptionally springy rice vermicelli (wonton noodles and hor fun are also available). I don’t approach offal with any of the gung ho machismo that might see one book a flight to London just to eat at Fergus Henderson’s table. In fact, the Western way with mammalian innards (except for their sweet, sweet, delicious sweetbreads) is mostly off-putting to me: Italian or French-style tripe, for example, or Anglo-Saxon liver and onions. Quite simply, I grew up eating soy-stewed pig’s ears, and kidneys boiled in congee. I like the different tripes (each of the cow’s stomachs has a unique texture and appearance), and seeing the dirty-dishrag-like appearance of one of them in its raw state, hanging above an unbutchered oxtail, neither deters me nor sends me on any sort of deliberately shocking organ meat crusade. I am happy to stand aside, allow a professional to cook and clean the ugly things, and enjoy the results.
(I wonder what the passenger to my left must think of me as I lovingly crop, sharpen and zoom in on a massive jpg of uncooked offal.)
No waste chez Sister Wah. The juices and meat scraps flavour sautéed baby vegetables, unremarkable to look at but perfumed with beef drippings. They must make their own chili sauce, so bright and spicy that just flipping the lid open tickles my nose and makes me sneeze. You can see a little bit of it here, just before I mixed in the crimson and compromised the beautiful (if a touch underseasoned) clarity of the soup. I think they make their own soy milk, too: yes, a sweetened, stand-alone beverage, served hot or cold, that doesn’t go in cereal or coffee, for God’s sake.
My mother had a very simple dish of stewed turnips with thick rice noodles in the same clear (and, truth be told, probably not vegetarian) broth. Just one bite of these silken, absorbent things—you can make a turnip taste of almost anything you want to, but hardly anyone but the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans ever bothers—encapsulates the tragedy that is Scottish cookery, which has never asked of this abundant root vegetable anything other than to keep still while being buttered and mashed.
Sister Wah (or Wah Jie)
13A Electric Road
Tin Hau
Hong Kong
(852) 2807 0181
[I’m back in New York now. I’m going to collapse. Further installments of the Noodle Soup Odyssey to come, as well as a writeup of my favourite Japanese restaurant in Hong Kong.]
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COMMENTS / 3 COMMENTS
Ooh, I just love noodle soup. Love, love, love it. Love, I tell you!Mrs.W added this comment on Apr 21 08 at 1:11 pm
On flying, I have often selected an aisle seat for rest room access, myself. After sitting in a security seminar by a UN security expert, however, I learned that the window seat is suggested as one of the safest locations on an aircraft!
Evidently the majority of hijackings where someone was harmed, those people were seated at an aisle seat! I presume due to easy access.
Not that I ever expect such a thing, but hey, I control the things I can.
I think I was 18 or 19 before I realized that other people found beef tendons and tripe to be disgusting, not delicious. I had always loved them in Cantonese noodle soups and pho that I assumed other people did too. Maybe one day this type of offal will get some respect in the West, like Henderson’s dishes.AppetiteforChina added this comment on Apr 22 08 at 10:17 pm
I’ll be honest. I didn’t read your entire post. But, as one friend to another, what ever you do DO NOT read Ian Mckellen’s Saturday. I used to respect Mckellen and his obsession with sexual deviance and the English class system, but Saturday should be considered the after birth of his literary career.atalie added this comment on Apr 23 08 at 7:14 pm
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