ONE OF THE best things about living in Hong Kong is its proximity to so many other Asian countries. It's so easy to hop on a plane and take a weekend trip to Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore or Vietnam, especially now it's the off-season and airfares are relatively low.
For myself and many others, part of the pleasure in travelling is getting to taste each country's cuisines. Unlike my grandparents, who wanted to eat Chinese food wherever we went, even in Paris (where it was bad) and Rome (where it was worse), I like to sample local cuisines, especially street food. I always buy special ingredients in each country and when I'm back in Hong Kong, try to recreate some of these dishes.
Although I'm a trained chef and have a huge collection of cookbooks, there are times when a flavour eludes me. That's when I turn to the Internet, which is a wonderful, ever-changing resource for recipes and information (although, admittedly, you must trawl through a lot of rubbish to find the gems).
One of the best sites I've found recently is from Malaysia. The main Web site is thestar.com.my, but it's difficult to navigate and I haven't yet figured out how to get to the alphabetical list of recipes. It's faster and easier to go straight to thestar.com.my/kuali and either type in the name of the dish on the search (this only works if you're absolutely sure of the spelling) or go to the bottom of the page and click on the first letter of the dish you're trying to find. This site has interesting articles and an extensive set of recipes with 'tastes from around the world', but the ones of most interest focus on Malaysian and Singaporean dishes. There are recipes for hawker favourites such as nasi lemak (coconut rice), sambal udang (prawns in chilli sauce), gado gado (bean curd and vegetables with a spicy peanut sauce), ikan bakar (grilled spicy fish) and various laksas. The recipe for bak kut teh (pork rib and herb soup) unfortunately relies on bak kut teh herbs from a packet, which is difficult to find in Hong Kong, but most of the recipes start from scratch.
For Thai food, head to thaitable.com, which exhorts us to 'learn Thai cooking'. One interesting aspect of this site is that you can hear the correct pronunciation of whatever you're learning to cook by clicking on the megaphone next to the name of the dish. This informative site is easy to navigate and each recipe has pictures of the preparation as well as the finished dish, plus recommended dishes to serve with it. It isn't the most comprehensive source, but it does include popular dishes such as laab and satay, as well as more unusual ones for Chinese olive fried rice and crispy catfish mango green salad. Recipes are ranked according to difficulty. There are also a few interesting essays, including one on 'Snacking on deep-fried bugs in Thailand'.
Vietnamese is one of my favourite cuisines but so far, I haven't found a comprehensive site to help me learn about it. The GoCee.Com Viet Center (gocee.com/ viet) recommends several sites for Vietnamese cooking - look under 'food and recipes'. It lists asiarecipe.com, which is a good starting point for finding recipes for many Asian countries - not just Vietnam, China, Singapore and Malaysia but also Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Laos. Another site it lists is recipesource.com, which is one of my top picks for international cuisines.
