STUMBLING CHOPSTICKS

Basil beef arranged on a bed of broccoli florets (碧綠香草牛粒 'pik luk heung chou ngau naap'). Which, if you're familiar with A) the peculiarities of Cantonese, and B) situational and contextual interpretives, does NOT mean vanilla cow bits. Hong Kong Cantonese uses the construct 雲呢拿 ('wan nei naa/laa') for vanilla, and therefore "fragrant grass' (香草) is free for other meanings. And "naap" (粒) is in the Cantonese culinary context the word for chunks that are not large enough to be lumps (塊 'faai').

So I was correct in assuming basil beef. And I now know that even though the people there do speak Toisan, and are probably originally from there, they're via Hong Kong.
What I did not know about was the broccoli.

I'm okay with broccoli. Cantonese cooks are good with broccoli.
Basil leaves are a recent introduction, but they're going native.
The waitress knows about me and hot sauce.
So that was as usual a given.


What the dish name 碧綠香草牛粒 directly translates into is diced green vanilla beef.


It turns out that broccoli is actually an excellent addition, otherwise there would have been no vegetable component to my meal other than Sriracha, but I think stalky mustard green would have been as good or better.

There is no broccoli in the picture I drew because frankly, this illustration was done in a hurry and I didn't want to waste my time drawing broccoli. Life is too short for that.

Besides, many Americans would not have eaten the broccoli but left it there, assuming it was used purely for visual effect. Which is partly true. It looked lovely. But I ate all of it except for one piece which was simply too large to handle deftly with chopsticks while my fingers were slighly numb from the cold.


The weather may be part of the reason why there were many more customers than usual there. It was noisy with the happy sounds of Cantonese wit and eloquence, because if anything, food brings out the good humour and cheers the soul.
Especially in the bleak part of the year.
Oh boy, food!



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