Cosima Underwater

Thank you all for your comments for the burglary post. We have ordered fake surveillance cams. Going forward I will call the police when I see assumed banana thieves. I have installed a timer for one of the living room lamps, it goes on at 3am.  Sticks are jammed into the sliding doors, window bars are ordered, although I hate them. Charles, we don’t live in Sai Kung, that would be too convenient :). We live on the seventh island, over the seventh hill. The police wrote a very detailed report, found fingerprints, and I hear helicopters flying over the hills behind our house. Still, I don’t think we will get our stuff back. APJ, women’s intuition is widely underrated.  We Are Doomed, we were barely coming to know our neighbors when the burglary happened. They are as freaked as we are, and I hope everyone of us will be bit more careful going forward. Lime, Dubai wasn’t pleasant but it taught me valuable lessons.

Still it is beginning to be a home.

We have a car, but not yet a license to drive it on the seventh island. So, I took the bus to the third village north where they have a “supermarket” (cough… laugh… five short aisles stuffed to the ceiling). You learn to concentrate on the essentials  (that’s a good thing), if you have to take the public bus home, still four very heavy bags had to be hauled home.

Once through the door, I cooked Chinese winter melon soup and Jamie Oliver’s beef stew with guinness (yep, I watched TV last night). Both were a first and both are keepers for cold winter days. I love Chinese winter melon. It’s completely tasteless on its own, but in a soup it takes on the flavor of the rest of the ingredients.

I got the second last winter melon slice in the snow-white supermarket. My competitors were seasoned Cantonese grandmas… I had to grab quickly. I cooked it together with pork spareribs, sliced smoked ham, ginger, and wolfberries. The recipe also calls for red dates, but I didn’t want to buy them because of bad Dubai associations… ok, the truth is I wasn’t sure they were needed. Still the soup turned out yummy. I am a big fan of soups, especially if it’s cold and wet. One of the strength of German cuisine is its soups or “eintopf”. Like most of the best dishes around the world it’s poor men’s recipes, but oh so good. I can’t get all of the German ingredients here (does anyone have a cheap and reliable source of celeriac in Hong Kong?), so I am going for local recipes. Winter melon soup was yummy.

Jamie Oliver’s stew had to cook for two hours in the oven. The original recipe puts it into a pie with puff pastry. I am not that English, so I just made the stew and salt potatoes to go with it. It was very rich, smooth, and just what I needed today:

2 large sliced onions fried to gooey, sweet perfection

half a pound of marbled beef

3 cloves of diced garlic

stick of fresh rosemary, hacked to small pieces

1 stick of celery or two

a diced carrot or two

mushrooms ( I took local Chinese ones, not the tasteless, white Holland variety) and half a dozen dried ones (soaked in hot water for an hour)

pepper, salt

1 tablespoon of flour

a can of guinness (even the five-aisle supermarket had it ?!?)

water so that all ingredients are covered with liquid

at 180 degrees Celsius (360 Fahrenheit) for two hours in covered (oven-proof) pot

Jamie, you are the man!

I will also start a new sourdough production. Bread selection in Cinderella’s supermarket is pitiful, stuffed with preservatives, and I won’t buy it. Expect pics of burned sourdough bread in the future.