There’s nothing better Full English Breakfasts and it’s always a bonus when you can find a place that serves them when you’re away from the motherland. Even better? Making one yourself, and using ingredients that are available locally. After a couple of months of buying groceries at the Wan Chai wet markets in Hong Kong, I started piecing together the produce and meat available and determined that it would be possible to make an awesome English breakfast out of what was available for sale. The clincher was the cans of beans that are sold in the dry food stores. The remaining ingredients are all common ingredients in Cantonese cuisine, and world cuisine for that matter.

The Ingredients

Pork

Tomato

This guy was my go to vegetable guy. He’s located on Hennesey Road in Wan Chai next to the library, on the same road as the 7-11, the video game place with the Taiko drum arcade machine, the bakery, the bank, an awesome restaurant, and the Western doctor. That could be said for most of streets in Hong Kong, though.

Potatoes and Onions

I bought these from a very camera shy, albeit quick, clerk.

Mushrooms

Sui Mai

These are basically fish balls and meat balls and are used in soups or eaten after being steamed.

There were four types of Sui Mai I bought, and to get a more authentic Full English Breakfast experience, I’d recommend the meat ones that are shown in the following picture, second from the left. The fish taste of the others was a bit much, especially when there’s a vaguely fishy substance inside the dumpling. The ones that have the random fishy substance inside of them are shaped like Super Nintendo enemies.

Eggs

I had bought some eggs previously before this, but this is how they are sold in a wet market.

Chinese Sausages

This man was happy to sell me four chinese sausages for the low, low price of 20 元.

Baked Beans

The can that started this quest.

Cooking

This part is rather self explanatory. Fry it all up! I used Canola oil as butter is impossible to find in the wet markets. I did do some prep, though — I boiled the potatoes after dicing them and I marinated the pork while I went out and bought the remaining ingredients.

The beans… there is one problem with Hong Kong apartments. The space. I had a small studio, and therefore only one small induction stove. How to cook the beans?

With a rice cooker! I even used the water to make green tea. One of the problems solved…

Here’s the fry up in mid-action.

One more thing. There’s no pepper in a wet market. Nothing. But, the potatoes need something in them…

I used this Sichuan style pickled bamboo shoots that my Sichuan head chef had made previously. It worked quite well. I can’t make this, but it looked like it was chopping up a ton of vegetables and then shoving the mix in a jar. Refrigeration was optional.

Presentation

Now you’re thinking I killed myself with grease, right? Well, I didn’t finish the plate, and I was 4 hours away from a trans pacific flight at this time, so I have excuses for creating this monstrous plate. And, yes, my last meal in Hong Kong was a full English breakfast.

Eating

It was amazingly good after months of eating tofu, rice, vegetables, and value meals at McDonalds. This is a highly recommended excursion and food project for one to do. It cost around HK $100, but it made enough for 3 people to eat, maybe even more. The pork was excellent, as the butcher cut it very thin, and the marinade was enough to tenderize it. The other ingredients taste like they do at a normal restaurant, and the sui mai was a nice bit of localization to this meal. A good idea would be to add a bit of western fried rice, if you had some pre-cooked rice available. The chinese sausages were a bit sweet for my tastes, and it clashed with the rest of the meal. There are blood based sausages, and that might be a better choice for one who is used to the blood pudding that comes with the breakfasts that have an Irish inclination. The meat based Dim Sum / “Sui Mai” was a perfect addition, and did most of the job of replacing an English sausage.

Back when everyone bought CDs, my favorite thing to do was browsing through the selection at used CD shops. I did this for years, and found a ton of music by combing through the other people’s discards. I was never a collector — I was in this only for the music. It was a good way to kill an hour, and I got to be one of these flipper guys, rapidly scanning the racks of CDs as fast as possible… “Alanis, Pulp Fiction. Oh wow, there’s a David Bowie cluster here. I hope I finally see ‘Low’…” The CD flipping continues. “Outside.” Flip! “Heros.” Flip! “Earthlings.” Damn probably not. Ah there it is!” I grab “Low”. And flip through the rest. There were many commonalities in the selection between stores. Pink Floyd is surprisingly rare, even the usual suspects of their discography. It took me forever to track down “Animals”. It took forever to get the full discography for “The Orb”. But, there’s always copies of that great Blur album with the “Song #2″, which means you’re never far from a physical copy of the awesome “Essex Dogs”.

My favorite thing to do was to was to buy a CD without listening to it, without knowing the artist, and with only a quick glance at the cover. I’ve discovered music that I wouldn’t have discovered any other way with this method. Here are my three favorite random buys.

Journeyman - Mama 6

I have a thing for long songs… songs that go on for ten minutes are more. It started from my listening to Enigma when I was 12, and my tolerance for that sort of thing grew from there. In this one, the songs go on for twenty minutes, which mean they are twice as good as a ten minute song.

Now, you have to know what you’re doing when you produce a ten minute song. It’s a totally different skill as compared to producing the usual four minutes of music. It’s more of a journey that you have to produce, and there has to be an identifiable theme to the whole thing. You can cheat by adding speeches, but it’s only a small cheat. A forgivable cheat. It also works better if there’s an element of symphonic harmony going on. Dance music fits well for this sort of thing. The only tolerable rock and roll song of a considerable length is Guns N Roses’ “Coma”.

This CD was bought on the last day of a clearance sale. $3 I paid for a song that is one of the top ten CDs in my collection. I didn’t know anything about the band or even what type of music it was. It was $3, and it was a random selection. It’s great stuff, and I’m surprised its so hard to track down information about the band. Here’s the shortest song on this album.

Jouneryman - Valves [mp3]

http://www.discogs.com/release/59932

http://www.full-source.com/woob/

Xtatika - Tongue Bath

She seems to be a Korean expat who knows some sort of Korean folk singing, but she’s one of those Koreans who like New York. She’s very angry about something. I bet her cellphone’s a Motorola. There’s not much out there on this band, but that’s the risk, beauty, and the entire point of buying random CDs. The basic structure here are songs with her strong vocals as the central focus, very little post production, an emphasis on slow BPM drumming that sounds like, I don’t know, what jazz would sound like if taiko drums were readily available in the 1930s. There’s also a high dynamic range between the highs and the lows, which is great to hear in performance based CDs. The one song I loved from this one was “Malady”. If you like that one, the rest will be very distinct but similar variations on that theme.

Don’t be scared of the other titles like “Ghost Dance”. It’s good stuff.

The band really changed in their latest release… Live FM says they’re a “Noir-Wave electronica with a slithery backbone of Industrial beats, tight female vocals, and crashing synths.”

Live FM - Xtatika

http://xtatika.com/NEWS.html

Tyranny of the Beat

This was the best CD I’ve ever bought, which is what any music geek would say of the CD that introduced them to Can.

And SPK.

My most memorable moment in listening to this would be that this was my “farming” music (It wasn’t getting high music as you’d expect). I’d bring in a CD player and a few choice CDs and drive a tractor for 10 hours. Now, farming can get very boring. It’s like mowing a lawn in that you’d have to go back and forth over the field, the same thing over and over again. As such, I listened to this CD over and over again, and really got to hear every layer of this CD.

What it is is an introduction to Industrial music from the 70s. So if you’ve heard about Caberet Voltaire and that’s about as far as the knowledge goes, this would be a great CD to track down.

I didn’t like “Midget Submarine” though. What the hell? It’s a song with the title of a Devo outtake. I really don’t get the point of that one. And there’s another song to avoid — Candy Man. 天啊！

http://www.discogs.com/release/150152