Eat Turkey and Give to Charity - The Great Big Turkey Feast, November 25, Hong Kong

The Great Big Turkey Feast!

Mark your calendars for Monday November 25, for The Great Big Turkey Feast. Hong Kong's top chefs and food writers (including yours truly) will cook & serve you a Thanksgiving-slash-Christmas feast for charity. It'll be held in Linguini Fini.

Tickets cost $888 - all profits go to the Hong Kong Neuro-Muscular Disease Association.

Get your tickets here.

Eat Your Words - Food Critics Cook for Charity!

5 Food editors
5 Chefs
5 Course dinner
125 Critics
All for 1 fantastic charity

You've read our reviews, now see if we're actually worth our salt!

For 1 night only, 5 food writers will be paired with 5 chefs and put to the ultimate test – serving a 5 course dinner to 125 critics at The Salted Pig!

Who are the critics? Well, you, the public of course.

You will be invited to “crit” each course on its merits - a turning of the tables so to speak - and a challenge for our favourite food critics to eat their words!

It is all for a bit of fun, of course (you can even watch us bumble about in a commercial kitchen from live cameras in the restaurant), and, most importantly, it's to raise money for local food charity Foodlink, to alleviate food wastage and hunger in Hong Kong.

The 5 teams are (in order of course/dish appearance):

• Alicia Walker of Foodie Magazine with James Black of The Salted Pig
• Janice Jann of Time Out Hong Kong with Arturo Melendez of Chicha
• Janice Leung Hayes (that's me!) of e_ting with Anthony Fletcher of The Pawn
• Adele Wong of HK Magazine with Jason Black of Shore
• Ale Wilkinson of The Dim Sum Diaries with Gregoire Michaud of Bread Elements

And check out the fantastic auction prizes, including:

• A pastry and bread master class for 10 people with Gregoire Michaud and his team at Bread Elements
• A rooftop dinner cooked by Anthony Fletcher at The Pawn 
• A meat cooking class for 10 people with Jason Black at Pantry Magic, with a little goodie bag for each person from Pantry Magic
• A HK food tour led by me, as part of Little Adventures in Hong Kong
• A cheese and wine pairing for four people at the Caprice Cheese Room at the Four Seasons Hong Kong
• A $1000 gift voucher for dining at Yardbird
• A two-night stay for anyone visiting HK at the J Plus Boutique Hotel in Causeway Bay
• A custom-made chef uniform by Chefworks
• A blind date with the gorgeous Ale Wilkinson of The Dim Sum Diaries

That's me in my Chefworks uniform! (Just trying it on for size, not my team "colour" hehe)

Tickets are $888 for the 5 course dinner, including a matched beverage with each course, it's communal seating, and you'll also get an Island East Markets tote bag filled with goodies!

Tickets are available for purchase from today onwards exclusively at The Salted Pig, 2/F, The L Place, 139 Queen's Road Central, Central.

Proceeds from the evening will go to Foodlink.

Additional beverages will be available for sale during the evening to the thirsty!

Date & time: Monday June 24, 2013, 7pm
Location: The Salted Pig, 2/F, L Place, 139 Queen's Road Central, Central
Tickets: $888 each, including a matched beverage for each course (you can buy additional beverages at the restaurant) All proceeds will go to Foodlink.
Buy tickets at: The Salted Pig, 2/F, L Place, 139 Queen's Road Central, Central.

Tickets are limited, so purchase now now for a communal evening of food and fun!


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Cook For Family - Leftover Peking duck

It's no secret that I love to eat, and on the blog it appears that I love to eat out more than in. In real life though, I eat at home quite a bit and I do cook, albeit super simple things that can be done in a few minutes - such are the demands of modern life (or that's my excuse...).

When I got an email from Razlan about Daniel's #CookForFamily initiative, I jumped right in. Rather than paraphrase, here's what it's about in Daniel's own words:

The #CookForFamily is a bloggers-for-bloggers initiative. No competition, sponsors, or hidden agenda involved. It is created with a simple objective of getting more bloggers, and hopefully their fans and followers, to start cooking and bonding with their families.

You'll see that most participants are Singaporean food bloggers, but hey, food knows no boundaries, and certainly the internet doesn't.

Peking duck slices

But then came the challenge of what to cook. I was surprised by Daniel's blog post about bloggers telling him that they don't have time to cook or don't know how to. So instead of conjuring up a fancy menu, I thought I'd come clean and just tell you all how lazy I can be, and hopefully communicate that it really isn't hard to cook for your family, even if cooking means getting a little help from leftovers.

Table for Two - Vegetarian Food Crawl in Central, Sheung Wan and Sai Ying Pun

Black bean veggie burger at Light Radiant Food

In the developed world, we hear about health problems that stem from overabundant diets - from obesity to gout, yet in the developing world, the health problems come from malnutrition, the direct opposite. Policymakers and activists around the world are trying to remedy this, and one social enterprise hitting both these birds with one stone is Table for Two.

Founded in 2008 in Japan, Table for Two has been helping feed children in poverty-stricken parts of Africa and China through donations made from restaurants in more developed nations. The consumption of healthy meals in restaurants, offered through partnerships between Table For Two and restaurants, raises money for the children's meals.

Healthy Summer Dining Experience map via Table for Two

Table for Two was brought to Hong Kong late last year, and the team here have devised a great "Healthy Summer Dining Experience" in August (starting August 1st). Buy the designated "Table For Two" meal (or drink) at their partner outlets, a portion of proceeds will go to charity, and by snapping a picture of your meal, there are prizes to be won too.


I was lucky enough to have been brought along on a little food crawl with the lovely ladies of Table For Two to get a sneak peek on some of the fab food and drink on offer. It was lovely to see so many great names on the list of participating restaurants (and bar). We didn't cover all of them on the crawl, so do check out the map (above) for the full list.

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution Day - Hong Kong is in on it!

This Saturday, May 19th!

Have you heard Jamie Oliver's TED Prize speech from back in 2010? This was soon after he finished "Food Revolution", his TV series in the United States, where he went to a town named Huntington in West Virginia, apparently the town with most people classified as "obese" in the US.

If you don't have 20 minutes to watch the whole thing, don't worry, I'm going to highlight a few key things for you, but please see those bits at least.

At the beginning of this video (around 02:22) he shows some stats - everyone reads so much and is so freaked out about homicide, but that's the last thing on the list that's killing people. The first few are largely preventable through diet - heart disease, diabetes, stroke.

Mission Chinese Food Event in Shenzhen

I seldom write about one-off events, as I try to make this blog as useful as possible, but this one-night-only pop-up event in Shenzhen by Mission Chinese Food triggered some pretty interesting things that made me think more about where modern Asian/Chinese food is going.

If you're a foodlover from the States, or are kind of crazy and read about food way too much, you've probably already heard of MCF, or even been. They went from Mission Street Food to Mission Chinese Food, doing fusion-y Asian American within an actual Chinese American restaurant in the Mission district of San Francisco. I'd never eaten there, but from what I could gather from the interwebs it's boldly flavoured, nouveau soul Asian - which I would really have liked to eat at this event in Shenzhen, but at the same time I thought it might be a little odd - bringing soul-Asian back to Asia*.

Aside from the food itself, I want to talk about what this meal by Mission Chinese Food (hereafter MCF because I'm lazy) meant to me.

I didn't really know what to expect, but luckily there are adventurous folks like Gary and HK Epicurus, who were more than willing to come along, so across the border we went.

Clam/geoduck sashimi/carpaccio

The first thing that came out were slices of giant clam (though I think it was geoduck) on vinegared(?) melon in tomato essence, dotted with parsley oil and shiso. It was a clean, elegantly presented dish served to us in individual portions - so we pretty much knew for sure we weren't going family style.

Making tofu with Yin Yang's Margaret Xu

The only Detour event (architecture event held in Dec 2010 - I'm totally living in the past, I know) I went to this year was a 'masterclass' with Margaret Xu, the acclaimed self-taught chef and owner of locavore restaurant/private kitchen Yin Yang.