Husband cake

Tried this HUSBAND CAKE which is a savory version of the WIFE CAKE, it tasted the same with a hint of savouryness but I still found it too sweet.

A wife cake is a traditional Chinese pastry with flaky and thin skin made with winter melon, almond paste, and sesame, and spiced with five spice powder (Chinese spice blend of fennel seed, star anise, licorice root and cloves).

Weird fish with teeth : Saurida tumbil

Chinese coconut sweets

I hardly eat Chinese sweets but I just realised they have changed the sweet wrappers, they used to be wrapped in brightly coloured waxy paper wrappers.

Although coconut is white, the colour of these coconut flavoured sweets are brown.

McDonalds: China "All of the germs will die if you just fry the meat in oil,"

http://news.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne%2BNews/Asia/Story/A1Story20120317-333998.html

Beijing McDonald's restaurant closed for rule violations

By Zheng Xin and Jin Zhu

China Daily/Asia News Network
Saturday, Mar 17, 2012

A McDonald's restaurant in Beijing saw its business suspended and itself placed on rectification on Friday after a China Central Television program reported the day before that it had sold expired food.
The restaurant is in Sanlitun, a popular restaurant and entertainment area in the city's Chaoyang district.
"We are undertaking a systematic investigation of our quality inspections," said Weng Xiaomeng, manager of public relations for the McDonald's.
She said she didn't know how long the rectification will last.
Officials from the State Food and Drug Administration asked McDonald's franchise restaurants in China to examine their food-processing procedures, according to an announcement posted on the administration's website on Friday.
The Sanlitun restaurant, which failed to follow food-processing instructions, will be dealt with severely, the announcement said.
McDonald's has also been asked to apologize to customers, it said.
In the video, restaurant employees are seen changing the expiration time on packages and resetting timers on food warmers so they could keep expired food for a longer time.
One of the instances involved cheese that turns bad after it has been out of its package for more than 4 hours.
Despite that danger, such cheese was still placed on burgers and other meat, some of which had fallen on the ground and were later picked up and served in the morning.
"All of the germs will die if you just fry the meat in oil," said a worker at the restaurant.
According to McDonald's food-preservation regulations, the meat served in its restaurants is supposed to be discarded at a certain amount of time after it is cooked.
"It (throwing away expired food) is impossible to do, and no restaurant would do it," said another worker. "We've just been turning a blind eye to it."
After CCTV's program was aired on Thursday night, many reporters went to the downtown restaurant.
When a China Daily reporter was there on Friday morning, the once bustling fast-food restaurant had been shut down.
Instead of customers forming lines as they waited for food, the restaurant contained only one or two employees, who were in its dark and empty back kitchen. A sign at the restaurant's door read, "business suspended".
In a statement released by McDonald's on Friday, the restaurant said it will carry out an investigation and further tighten its business practices.
McDonald's also issued an apology for violating operational standards on its website.
The CCTV program, "315 Evening Gala", has aired on March 15 every year since 1991.
Coming in conjunction with International Consumer Rights Day, the program is intended to reveal business misconduct and to help consumers protect their rights.
The supermarket chain Carrefour has also been accused of deceiving consumers by selling expired meat and chicken stripped of feathers that it misidentifies as free-range chicken and then sells at a higher price.
Those misdeeds are alleged to have taken place in one of the company's stores in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province, according to the program.
A reporter from China Daily did not see any decrease in the number of customers coming to Carrefour during her visit to one on Friday morning.
But in response to the public outrage, the supermarket has decided to separate the two types of chicken to "avoid similar scandals in the future", according to Wang Shangwu, director of Carrefour's public relations department.
Carrefour also apologized on its website by promising to work with local industry and commerce departments to conduct an immediate investigation and by vowing to eradicate fraudulent practices and further tighten the process for managing food quality.
Among the companies reported on during the gala were some large Chinese brands, including China Merchants Bank and China Telecom.
"Most international companies have strict regulations on quality and management," Dong Jinshi, executive vice-president of the International Food Packaging Association, said on Friday.
"Their services and products always can be trusted. Problems, such as food-safety scandals and service complaints, are always happening in local franchise stores since the regulations cannot be carried out effectively.
"It (the latest McDonald's scandal) is a good lesson to international companies and stricter supervision of local stores is needed."
Xiang Mingchao in Zhengzhou contributed to this story.

Chinglish hilarious dishes finally get a proper English dish name

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2012/03/13/no-longer-on-beijings-menu-chicken-without-sex/

After a city-wide effort to scrub embarrassing English translations from street signs ahead of the 2008 Olympics, Beijing is embarking on yet another linguistic rectification campaign – this one aimed at restaurant menus — that’s bound to leave foreigners a bit disappointed, if better informed.

Associated Press

The Beijing Foreign Affairs Office and the Beijing Speaks Foreign Languages Program have jointly published a book offering official guidance on the translation of Chinese restaurant menus featuring “proper” English translations for 2,158 Chinese dishes, the state-run Beijing Daily reported on Tuesday.
Gone are the days of “four glad meatballs” (四喜丸子), which the book says should be henceforth known as braised pork balls in gravy. And as for “tofu made by a woman with freckles” (麻婆豆腐)? From now on, the iconic Sichuanese dish should be simply indentified by its Romanized Chinese name, mapo dofu.
Many restaurant menus feature English translations so strange they confuse, not only foreigners, but even English teachers well versed in “Chinglish,” the paper quoted an unnamed official with Beijing Foreign Affairs Office as saying.
“The names of Chinese dishes are rich in meaning,” the official said. “It’s not always just about the ingredients. Sometimes it’s a mixture of culture, historical events, peoples’ names, etc.”
Mangled translations have long been a source of amusement to foreigners visiting Beijing – and an embarrassment to city officials eager to present China’s capital as a sophisticated, global metropolis. With the Beijing Olympics looming, city officials launched a war on Chinglish in 2006, aiming to eliminate non-standard translations of everything from hotel names to traffic warnings. Though some of the worst examples were corrected – a cultural attraction once infamously identified as “Racist Park” was eventually renamed “the Chinese Minorities Park” – restaurant menus have remained stubbornly resistant.
Debate was unavoidable during the compiling of the list, according to the Beijing Daily. Professor Chen Lin of Beijing Foreign Studies University, one of the experts involved the effort, said many names of dishes sparked heated discussions. According to Mr. Chen, considerable discussion was devoted to the translation of one poultry dish (童子鸡), sometimes translated as “chicken without sex,” with the committee eventually agreeing on the less colorful but arguably more appetizing “spring chicken.”
In other cases, the group appears to have been more concerned with potential misunderstandings arising from stereotypes about Chinese eating habits. In the case of giant meatball dish “red-braised lions’ head” (红烧狮子头), for example, the book recommends “braised pork ball in brown sauce” instead. “If foreign customers found a lion’s head in the menu, I’m sure they will complain it at animal protection organizations,” the newspaper quoted Mr. Chen as saying.
Exactly how Chinese restaurants come up with their translations – some of which cannot be mentioned on a family-friendly website – is unclear, though one widely noted photo of a Chinese restaurant called “Translate Server Error” suggests online translation software might play a role.
Regret over the potential loss of charming menu missteps is not limited to expats. Reacting to news of the new book, some users of the Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo posted photos of their favorite translation errors. Others said the best solution was for restaurants to provide photos of the dishes to help foreigners order because, as one user put it, “some of the Chinese names are just too meaningful to express in English.”
Whether Beijing’s restaurants will forgo the risky convenience of online translation tools in favor of the government’s recommendations remains to be seen. Beijing Daily quoted the Beijing Foreign Affairs Office official as saying local restaurants would be encouraged to use the book as a reference when making their menus but would not face punishment for going their own way.
Have a favorite Chinglish menu item? Let us know in the comments below (bearing in mind, once again, our website’s family-friendliness.)
– Stefanie Qi

Oh..Nugget chicken flavoured with seaweed Sze Hing Loong

Again, Chinese snacks are not my cup of tea. I knew how it was going to taste, but still tried it.

It was just sweet! Thats all I can say, no taste of chicken or seaweed at all!

Taipan's abalone cookies

These cookies are packaged in a tin that resembles a brand of tinned abalone sold in Hong Kong.

Source: Phoebe Wong/Taipan Bread & Cakes facebook page.

7-11 exclusive assorted lo mei and roasted spring chicken

Got two products from "Tang Shun Hing" packaged exclusively for 7-11.

Although they are designed to be heated up and eaten at 7-11, it proves to be messy and a sticky task.The contents of the food are packed in a vacuumed sealed bag, with a plastic tray and a pair of gloves, you need to open the inner bag, empty the contents into the dish and simply microwave it.

Hence very troublesome to carry out at your local 7-11, also the tray is not really deep enough.

I got the Lo Shui purely because it was pre-packaged, it horrifies me to get them from restaurants from metal trays by the windows with oil dripping off, flies buzzing around them and the exposure to sunlight through the windows.

The Lo Shui mix contains duck wings, ducks feet, ducks liver, ducks gizzard, and peanuts, and the spring roasted chicken was just half of a spring chicken. I thought it would be a whole chicken, but it was just half a bird.

After microwaving it, it was ready to eat.

The Lo Shui mix was quite nice, although for the ducks feet and wings, it only contained one piece each.All of the items were quite soft, except for the duck’s liver, which I was quite looking forward to, it probably got dehydrated during the heating process.

The gizzards, which I do not usually eat, were the best that I have had, the texture was a bit like baby pork shanks.They were evenly sliced, not looking like shrivelled up gonads from Chinese medicine places.The only thing that let it down was the saltiness of all the lo shui items.

As for the spring chicken, it just tasted ok.

Calbee Grill-A-Corn Lobster Supreme soup flavour

I hardly ever buy Chinese snacks because they all taste the same, the main taste is Sweet, sweet and sweet!

I was surprised that Calbee came up with this lobster supreme soup flavour.

Although the idea sounded good, it had no lobster taste.

The taste was just sweet corn flavoured Niknaks.

From my experience, the Chinese are good at coming up with all these wonderful flavours but the taste does not match up to it.

The British pot noodles and crisps have a better and more realistic flavour.
Also the packaging is rubbish, they have used a really tough plastic that you cant open it like a normal pack of crisps and you need to rip it open.

Sze Hing Loong Green Pea Snack

http://www.shlhk.com/

Some well established brand in Hong Kong that still uses an old commercial.

Although attempts have been made to copy Western products such as the sultana biscuits.

In an expats point of view, it still tastes Hongkie!

Anyway tried these green pea snacks which were wasabi flavoured.

It has a similar texture to Nik Naks but without the grounded wheat bits.

Papier mache FAKE watermelons in China

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksFsC7tymKg
Papier mache FAKE watermelons in China! I want to know how they made the watermelon skin! You don need to listen to the audio to understand!

Leaf wrapped rice dumplings in memory of Confuscious

In Hong Kong, Confuscious is remembered by these rice dumplings in June.
I can't be bothered to write about it because I am going to write about the food.
I never buy these wrapped rice things, but since this one was hygenically sealed and had many flavours I bought one to try.
The flavour I got was curry with meat, mushrooms and abalone.
The curry wasnt that strong in the glutinous rice!
The abalone tasted like plastic, I am sure it was plastic!

As well as that I found a piece of FAT!
Website for this company: http://www.nfh.com.hk/Products_Comprehensive.html

Product shot:http://www.nfh.com.hk/images/Products_Comprehensive_pic05.jpg

Sensa Cools 清熱酷

Just for fun I got this drink, before I bought it, I checked the labels to see what was in it.
I was not drinking it for cooling purposes but just as a drink.
It tasted like TaoTi's honey green tea, but it contains green tea, honeysuckle, Chrysanthenum, momordica grosvenori, Houttuynia, licorice, jasmine, honey, vitamin C and other stabilisers.



Madam Pearl's version - HerbalCool
http://supersupergirl-food.blogspot.com/2012/01/madame-pearls-herbalcool-drink-with.html