First, thinking about food.

When you’re a kid, you believe that your mother is the best cook in the entire world. It took me years to find out otherwise. My mother cooked meat 5 nights a week – steak, roast, brisket, meat loaf, lamb chops, veal chops and so on. The sixth night would be either roast chicken or some sort of fish casserole. Let’s put it this way, my mother’s fish casserole was so pitiful that I grew up thinking I didn’t like fish.

On the seventh day, we’d eat out. Sometimes a kosher deli, sometimes a diner, sometimes “Chinese food.” We’d go to the same restaurant and order the exact same dishes each time – wonton soup, egg rolls, spare ribs and fried rice – none of which looked anything like the Chinese food in Hong Kong. It was the 60s and this was American Chinese food. (I have to confess, I sometimes feel a nostalgic pang for this stuff.)

When my father retired, he pushed my mother out of the kitchen and took over cooking for the family. The menu didn’t change much but at least my father knew how to cook fish.

I was thinking how, if I grew up on such a limited diet, did I turn out to be someone with such varied tastes and so willing to try almost everything? (And by almost everything, I’ve eaten raw horse, barbecued squirrel, snake, raw whale, fried bees, fried worms.) At any rate, I figure my life is a hundred times better because of that. And I’m quite lucky that T shares the same wide range of tastes and same curiosity.

In the past few days alone, had seafood at Lamma, Australian rib eye at Quarterdeck (those were both business-related meals), Mongolian-style hotpot at Little Sheep, Indian fusion at Maya dinners and so-so Vietnamese and Thai lunches. Sometimes good, sometimes not-so-good, but at least a wide variety.

By the way folks, if you haven’t been to Little Sheep, you really gotta go. It’s a chain that has probably hundreds of locations throughout China, including 2 or 3 in HK. (The one I go to is in Causeway Bay Plaza.) Unlike other places, Little Sheep does not offer any sauce for dipping your food. That’s because their soups are so tasty that you don’t need any other sauce. The beef and lamb are incredibly fresh and beautifully marbled. They have an English menu but be careful – you get a preprinted slip to mark off what you want, but they changed the numbering on the slip but didn’t update the menu – so if you don’t read Chinese, better to call over a waiter and have him mark it off for you.

The price is quite reasonable as well. We went with the “premium” beef and lamb plates, plus a dozen live prawns, cuttlefish paste with roe, shrimp balls, shitake mushrooms and golden mushrooms, corn on the cob, a 32 ounce Carlsberg and a pitcher of watermelon juice. It would have been enough for three; we did our best. A veritable feast for $560. They’re open till 1 AM and the place can be quite busy at peak hours but it’s a big place and worth the wait.

We stopped off at Bar 109 on the way home. They’ve got hookahs now and can set one up for you to smoke at your table. Mango margarita, yum. Walked past Bridge and noted some half naked white guy standing outside while his friends (?) inside were pouring pitchers of beer on him.

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One other Wanchai note: Strawberry’s is gone, replaced by Galaxy, the opening party was Saturday night, free food and drinks. It looks like they spent all of 2 cents renovating the insides and maybe 3 cents on the band. But longtime Neptune customers will recognize most of the staff there. The place is being managed by Sammy, who ran Neptune for years and more recently was at Boracay and who is vowing to make the place “better than Neptune.” Strawberries died a slow death the last year or two and I guess it remains to be seen whether people will hike over there but there was a good crowd for opening night.

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Decided to reorganize and upgrade the hard disks on my main PC. Purchased a 320 gig for my “main” drive and a 500 gig for music and photos. Again, in a vaguely nostaglic mood, as I purchased over 800 gigs of storage for well under US$400, I thought of how excited I was back when I upgraded my Atari from a tape drive to a floppy disk – I think at the time I thought things couldn’t possibly ever get better than that.

The thing is, for some reason, I spaced out at the computer mall and asked for Serial ATA drives instead of IDE drives. Got home, opened the first one up, and looked blankly at the back of the drive, thinking “what the fuck?” Examined the motherboard – luckily my motherboard had two sockets for S-ATA cables.

But I was still caught in “what the fuck” mode, because the instruction sheet that came with the drive showed the ATA plug on the back and the usual 4 pin connection for power, but the drive itself didn’t have that. I had to go to the Maxtor web site and hunt around and finally found a proper diagram and instructions. Then checked my power supply and thankfully it had two plugs that would fit the drive.

The drives don’t come with software but the instruction sheet said one needed to go the Maxtor’s website and download their “maxblast” software to get the drives set up. How incredibly fucking cheesy.

The software itself seemed fine with one exception – there was an option to make the drive bootable and copy over everything from your existing C: drive. And I ticked that option, waited the hours for the files to copy over, then rebooted to find that my computer wouldn’t boot off the new drive and that Explorer still thought the drive was unformatted. So hours wasted.

Norton Ghost to the rescue. Files, including master boot record, copied over, reboot and yes, it’s working the way it should. Still have shitloads of stuff to copy over from the old D: drive, which I’ll do overnight. Then will recycle either the old C: or the old D: as a back-up drive.

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Back to food, we watched Tampopo tonight. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a Japanese film from 1985. The story concerns five strangers coming together to help a middle aged Japanese woman create the best ramen shop ever. It’s equal parts Kurosawa, John Ford and Luis Bunuel with a touch of Chaplin to boot. (Look for a young Ken Watanabe in a supporting role.)

I had to special order it from Rock Gallery and Kung had a hard time finding it, but of course he came through. I showed the box to T and said that we had to watch it tonight, that I thought she’d like it because it’s Japanese and all about food. She asked me if I’d seen it before – yes. “Then why you buy????” “Because I thought you’d like it.” She stared up at me for a few seconds and then kissed me. And yes, she enjoyed the movie quite a bit.

Since that went well, now I have to hunt down The Chinese Feast, a wonderful comedy directed by Tsui Hark and starring Leslie Cheung. Used to have it on VCD but that’s one of the things that left with the wife.

Other food movies? Not just an eating scene like in Tom Jones, but movies devoted to food? I don’t think T will go for “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” or “Grand Bouffe.” “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeiosie” would maybe be a stretch, maybe not.