Scott's Birthday in HK

Ever since our crab incident, we have been trying to stay in a bit more. You know, think more economically. When Scott's birthday came around, I thought he might want to splurge and doing something extravagant but being the smart, economical guy that he is, he told me he just wanted to make a nice dinner at home. So we did. We made a beautiful dinner consisting of shrimp cocktail, steaks with a goat cheese/butter compound, garlic mashed potatoes, and spinach. And for dessert, I made him a homemade carrot cake complete with frosting (even though I don't like frosting on carrot cake).

I know what you're thinking, and yes, chopsticks are my cooking utensil of choice.

The finished products. I know, we fancy.

The cake after Scott already had some of course:

I knew this was all Scott wanted but I couldn't help but want to give him a little something so I thought, what does Scott absolutely love? No, I couldn't fly Mark Sanchez out here or Sexy Rexy - they're busy winning football games. The next best thing would have to be boats - a boat trip. So we went on a harbor cruise where you sit in these lounge type couches, enjoy wine and music, and just enjoy the view of Hong Kong. It was a really nice evening and a way to celebrate that's special to Hong Kong.

Views of the city from the boat. These are taken from iphone so sorry if they're not great:

I think I did a good job considering this was the outcome:

Ode to a dumpling

It was my mom's birthday this past weekend and in her honor, I decided to make some of her famous homemade dumplings. And I don't mean to toot my own horn but....toot toot. beep beep cuz they were awesome. :) And despite all the Chinese food available here, there's just nothing like my mom's homemade dumplings which is exactly why it hit the spot. It made me think of her, miss her, and appreciate her amazing cooking. I hope she knows how much I love and miss her and how much she is still part of my life here despite being 15,000 miles away.

Happy Birthday, Mom! Hope you're having a great time!

First comes the prepping of the filling made of pork, ginger, soy sauce, white pepper, salt, scallions, white cabbage, and my mom's secret ingredient. ;)

Then it comes together and looks a little something like this:

Then you wrap them all which takes a while but is also therapeutic so not so bad.

Then you wrap some more because let's face it, you gotta make extras for a rainy day.

And here's the finished masterpiece. These dumplings also make me think of Suse and how often we'd make these at our apt in college except back then I had a little delivery service called Mom who would drop them off to me every other week. Damn, those were the days...

Yum Yum!! Or in Hong Kong, we'd say "Ho Ho Sek!"

Again, Happy Birthday Mom! Hope you enjoyed these, but probably not nearly as much as I did. ;)

$100 Bucks For A Crab?!?!

I had to share about this story because I'm just so upset. I feel like such an idiot for letting this happen yet I know better and have learned a lot since then.

So I went with Scott to see Inception a couple of weekend's ago. It was my second time seeing it, his first. The theatre was in this mega mall complex so we decided to grab dinner before the show. There were a ton of restaurants to choose from and ultimately we decided on this Chinese restaurant that I can't recall the name of now. So the restaurant's specialty were crabs so when we sat down, we checked out the menu and the first 3 pages were of different crab dishes. And we do love seafood so we decided, why not? So the waiter came over to take our order. We order 3 things - the crab, a squid dish, and some noodles. The waiter recommended we get their famous crab dish so we went with his recommendation. Then he had us go to the fish tanks and pick out the crab we'd like. There were really big ones and really small ones so we chose one in between. After our meal arrived, we were really happy with our decision. It was a great meal, but we had to hurry so we could make it in time for our movie. As we were finishing we asked the waiter for the check. When the check came, it was a lot more than I expected but since I was in such a rush, I really didn't think much of it - I just asked for Scott's card and we paid the bill. When he got the bill back to sign the receipt, he looked over at me and said, "Babe, the bill's $930?" Only then did it start to register that that was a LOT of money. At that point, we didn't know what to do. The card was already charged. We were taken for as rubes! We left feeling completely deflated. This was a Chinese meal which is typically always the cheaper option compared to western meals AND we only ordered three dishes. How could the bill possibly be over $100 US dollars?!?!?! And it's not like the crab was massive. It was one crab and couldn't have been more than 2lbs. We were pissed and upset with ourselves (i.e. me) and I felt like a fool. I didn't understand. They were so nice. It was such a simple meal - how could one crab cost almost $100 US dollars? It just didn't make any sense. After that night, we both learned a big lesson and ever since then, we have been much better. We scrutinize every bill we receive. We take the bill from the waiter and take our time with it. And we'll never buy anything at market price again. We'll always ask exactly how much everything is BEFORE we decide to order it. The thing is, there was no price on the menu for the crabs. And it was  a restaurant in a shopping mall - it wasn't exactly the four seasons we're talking about here. AND here, they never leave you the bill on the table to pay when you're ready. You have to ask for the bill and when they bring it to you, they hold it in their hand and tell you how much it is. Since then, I've had to take the bill out of 3 different restaurant waiters hands so that I could hold the bill and look at it. So I guess they took advantage of the naive overly polite Americans who by the way, can't read a lick of Chinese. It sucked, big time.

BUT the one redeeming thing is that since then I've been paying a lot of attention to prices for crabs and in my neighborhood I've started noticing there are some shops selling crabs for around $400 per crab. So that's the only thing that makes me feel a little better and think, ok maybe, just maybe we didn't get completely hosed. Guess we'll never really know unless one of you try this crab restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui and tell me how much they charged you!