September 11, 2006 Archives

Went to Keung Kee with Wee, supposedly the summum of Cantonese cuisine in Chinatown/Montreal. He chose mushrooms wrapped in beef meat, and I got the usual chicken bits and salted fish tofu pot. Baby bok choy came on the side, and it ended up quite expensive for Chinese food (20$ per person, all included), but come to think, not so bad, b/c you're eating out, and at a regular sit-down restaurant in a place where the rent could be expensive, I think.

The special item of the night was not the beef/mushrooms wrap (which was a good idea, but so messily cooked that it looked like nothing, drenching in its sauce), but the desert, known as 雪蛤, and which goes by sut-something, or xue3ha2 in standard pinyin. It also has the poetic name of hasma, in English, in case you wondered. This thing really looks like nothing out of the ordinary, and I probably had it many times when I was younger. It's served as a tong shui (Chinese soup desert), with lotus seeds and berries (mat jhou?), and is sweet. The ingredient of interest is the innocent-looking ooze-like structure floating around. In fact, I theorized that it was perhaps an algae. I've heard stories that one other soup which I thought was a mushroom was in fact a seafood. Well, turns out that this hasma is nothing else but frog's fallopian tubes.

... (Anyways, it didn't actually unfold like this, b/c I had knowledge of it by the time the order and disgust was passed.)