foodtourist.com
Credit Cards: MC, Visa, AE
Open: Lunch and dinner daily
Price: Moderate
Score (/20): 13
Reviewed By
Sue Dyson and Roger McShane
Make sure that you get out at the right floor at this restaurant otherwise you might find yourself in the middle of some entertainment that is different to what you expect!
You need to be aware that many of the waiters here speak little English. Nevertheless it is worth persevering.
When you sit down you will be given a tray with a number of small containers of beautifully rich, oily tea. These are a perfect starter to the meal and also a perfect foil to the food.
You will also be given a small plate of pickled sweet cabbage. This is a wonderful way to stimulate the appetite and prepare you for the dishes to follow.
On the night we visited we tried the soyed goose one of the classic dishes of the region. We wanted to compare it with the similar dish served at the Mask of China in Melbourne. As it turned out, the Hong Kong dish appealed to us more. This was probably due to the excellence of the basic ingredient - the goose! Here it is quite fatty but very flavoursome (if you want the flavour you’ve got to have some fat).
But probably the most interesting dish of the evening was the steamed eel with preserved plums. The eel was cooked perfectly and the accompanying plums were the perfect foil to the main ingredient. You can buy preserved plums in many Chinese specialty shops in Canada, the USA and Australia. They are also very cheap, but they give the food a wonderful flavour.
Don’t go here if you are concerned about explaining what you want to waiters who are not fluent in English. However, if you persevere you will be rewarded with some wonderful food that is not available in Chinese restaurants in many western cities.
September 20th, 2006
.khiewchanta.com
A fun way to get children to eat their food - baby chicks made from potatoes and breaded shrimp in a nest of noodles. The noodles are optional, the birds look just as good if served in a basket.
Ingredients
200 gms Big Potatoes
1/2 Teaspoon Salt
10 Shrimp
2 Garlic Cloves
1/2 Teaspoon Pepper
1 Coriander Root
1 Tablespoon Light Soy Sauce
1 Egg
5 Tablespoons Breadcrumbs
Oil for Deep Frying
Black Sesame Seed (For the eyes!)
10 Tooth Picks
Noodles (Bami, Instant Noodles etc.)
Preparation
1. Whip the egg.
2. Pound the garlic and coriander root together.
3. Clean the shrimp, remove the shell but leave the tail on, be sure to cut down the back and remove the black thread gut.
4. Put a small lengthwise cut through the back of the shrimp, then bend the tail back on itself and bring it up through the cut you just made. This gives you the body and tail feathers of the chick.
5. Mix the pounded garlic and coriander over shrimp, together with the pepper and soy sauce.
6. Dip the shrimp in the whisked egg, then dip in the breadcrumbs to cover them.
7. Deep fry until the breadcrumbs are golden brown.
8. Peel the potatoes, cook in boiling water until cooked. Mash them with a little salt (no butter or milk, we want them firm!). Take some of the mash potato and roll into small balls, one for each bird.
9. Cook the noodles in a pan of boiling water, drain and set on the plate. Take a fork and swirl them around the plate so they look like a nest.
10. Assemble the birds by taking a shrimp, placing one of the potato balls on it, and adding 2 sesame seeds for the eyes. Break a toothpick in half and push it into the potato to form the beak.
11. Set them out in the noodle next and serve.
Posted by Appon at July 4, 2006 12:20 PM
Comments
what a pretty presentation! I love your blog and wonderful recipes. This one is extremely beautiful, thanks for sharing with your readers!
September 20th, 2006
CNNÂ - 7 hours ago
LAKE PLACID, New York (AP) — As dusk shrouded the summit of Whiteface Mountain, Juan Klavins aimed his headlamp at the bird in his left hand, its head between his fingers and its wing extended to expose a crimson vein.
The 26-year-old Argentine researcher deftly pierced transparent skin with a hypodermic needle and filled two fine glass tubes with blood to be tested for mercury. The bird craned its neck to eye the swarming gnats, impatient to resume feeding.
The fledgling was a rare Bicknell’s Thrush, subject of a long-term study by the Vermont Institute of Natural Science on the bird’s breeding grounds at high elevations in the Northeast and its wintering grounds in the Caribbean.
Bicknell’s Thrush is a cousin of the American Robin but is smaller and slimmer, with a brown back and wings, chestnut tail and speckled throat. Unlike the common Robin, Bicknell’s is rarely seen, living in dense fir forests on high mountaintops. It is identified more often by its lilting flute-like song than by sight.
Although Bicknell’s is not formally listed as endangered or threatened, it is among the rarest of American songbirds.
“The reason we started studying this bird is that it’s not only very rare, but it also requires a very specific habitat that faces a variety of threats,” said Chris Rimmer, who started the Bicknell’s study in 1992 with a colleague at the institute.
The species breeds only in scrubby boreal forests above 2,800 feet (840 meters) on top of mountains in New Hampshire, Maine, New York, Vermont and eastern Canada.
“It’s a difficult bird to study because it’s distributed across a fragmented range of mountaintops which we sometimes refer to as ’sky islands.’ We estimate the total population to be between 20,000 and 40,000 birds,” Rimmer said.
The bird’s habitat faces potential threats from ski area development, communications tower construction, wind energy projects, acid rain, mercury and global warming.
“Every one we’ve sampled has mercury in its system, although we don’t know yet whether the level is high enough to adversely affect them,” Rimmer said. “This was a very surprising and compelling finding for the science community.”
For the last five years, an annual census by volunteers called Mountain Birdwatch has documented a 7 percent annual decline of Bicknell’s, Rimmer said. “We really need more time to make any meaningful conclusions, but that does provide further evidence that we need to be concerned.”
It has been well documented that loons and other water birds suffer neurological and reproductive problems linked to high mercury levels from eating fish. Now, it appears mercury is moving up the food chain from soil to insects to birds, even on the highest mountains, Rimmer said.
Like acid rain, much of the mercury causing pollution in the Northeast drifts from coal-burning power plants in the Midwest.
Among all the potential threats to Bicknell’s habitat, global climate change is the most worrisome, Rimmer said. “If current trends continue, over the next 50 years we’re going to see a dramatic change and loss of the balsam fir forests that these birds require,” he said.
There are also serious threats to the bird’s winter habitat, the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which includes Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where 90 percent of the total population of Bicknell’s Thrush is believed to winter, Rimmer said.
The Olympic Regional Development Authority in Lake Placid, which operates a state-owned ski center on Whiteface, launched a project this summer in cooperation with environmental groups to raise money to protect Bicknell’s habitat on Hispaniola. The ski center scaled back expansion plans and funded a study of Bicknell’s habitat on Whiteface in 2005.
In the Adirondacks, nearly all mountaintops are part of the state-owned Forest Preserve, where tree-cutting and development are banned. As a further protection, Gov. George Pataki has declared all state-owned mountains above 2,800 feet (840 meters) to be Bird Conservation Areas. About 70,000 acres (28,000 hectares) in the Adirondacks support breeding populations of Bicknell’s.
Bicknell’s Thrush was considered a subspecies of the more widespread Gray-Cheeked Thrush until 1995, when a Canadian taxonomist demonstrated it was a distinct species.
Because Bicknell’s has been identified as a species so recently, it makes an intriguing research subject, said Brendan Collins, 32, a Vermont school teacher who did graduate work on Bicknell’s and spends vacations working for the Vermont Institute.
“Every year, we learn so much about this species that wasn’t known before,” Collins said.
For example, males outnumber females 2-to-1, and both males and females mate with different partners. Each nest has young from different males. As a result, each nest usually has several different males feeding the babies.
Institute researchers have had the rare experience of capturing the same bird in both its summer and winter territories.
“In 1995, we banded an adult male on Mount Mansfield in Vermont, and six months later the same bird flew into our mist net on a remote mountain in the Dominican Republic,” Rimmer said. “We caught the same bird again on Mount Mansfield in the summers of 1996 and 1997.”
After they published a paper about that in 2001, the researchers netted a Bicknell’s on another mountain in the Dominican Republic in 2004 that they had banded the previous summer on Vermont’s Stratton Mountain.
“It provides a compelling biological link between Vermont and the Dominican Republic, and underscores the need for conservation on both ends of the bird’s range,” he said.
Collecting the data requires long days in the field. Before their trip to Whiteface, Collins, Klavins and 22-year-old Pat Johnson of Hanover, New Hampshire, awoke at 3:45 a.m. on a Catskill peak 150 miles (241 kilometers) to the south, finished sampling birds there, carried 80-pound (36-kilogram) packs down the mountain and drove to the Adirondacks.
In the fading light on Whiteface, they strung 800 meters of mist nets along a rocky trail and went to work collecting blood and feather samples, measuring bills and wings, noting body fat and parasites, clamping identification bands on legs, and writing down numbers by the light of headlamps and flashlights.
After a few hours dozing in sleeping bags on the ground, they arose at 4 a.m. for the morning netting, followed by an afternoon nap on sun-warmed rocks.
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
September 20th, 2006