WEATHER UNDERGROUND:  ‘91 DEGREES, FEELS LIKE 107’

Igor not make same mistake twice.  I waited in my lovely air conditioned room until almost 1 pm, walked slowly to Prosperus Dim Sum, and took a seat under the large marquee near a fan.  One advantage of going late is the availability of several tables, notably near fans mounted high on the wall.    Mother Nature’s breeze augmented by the fan made it very comfortable.

I am catching on to ordering at Prosperous.  It is basically a noodle restaurant offering about 3 dozen noodle dishes.  You can get them with chicken, pork, fish, or plain.  There is also a long steam table which has about a dozen or so dim sum items.  You first sit and order your noodle dish from the menu.  The waiter/waitress ticks off what you ordered on a ticket and tucks it in a container on the table. You have the option to wait for your dish, or, you can also order additional items from the dim sum steam table.

There, you select an item or items and hand your ticket to the person behind the steam table.  They tick off what additional items you have ordered, and pass the ticket back to you along with your treasures on a cafeteria tray.  I suppose you could just eat a selection of dim sum, but hey it’s a noodle shop and there are other places you can order a la carte dim sum till you’re heart’s content.

My favorite pot of tea, a highly scented Jasmine, came scalding hot along with my hot tea cup.  I delved into my two dim sum selections. I knew what one was when I selected it because I could see the pork filling nestled in the wrappers which were open at the top.  There were three of those little piggies which I dipped into soy sauce.  Two I managed to eat with my chopsticks like a pro.  The third, well let’s just say that if anyone were watching I provided them with an entertaining minute and a half.

The other dim sum was also pork.  Two small rolls of minced pork were wrapped in a thick soy bean sheet and had been steamed half submerged in a tomato like sauce.

Dim sum dispatched, I turned to my noodle dish – pork cooked so long it fell apart served with thick Cantonese style wheat noodles in a heavy, for the lack of a better term, reduction sauce.  These noodles were much lighter in color than the ones I ate yesterday.  They were very chewy but tasty.  The surprise of the otherwise lightly flavored dish (a characteristic of Cantonese food) was small pork cracklings throughout the dish.

For a moment I’ll lapse into one of my favorite childhood memories.  A six year old getting up on a chilly early November morning at my grandparent’s farm near Richmond, Kentucky .  There are five large porkers, smooth and ivory white in color, hanging from a beam suspended about six feet off the ground.  Steam is rolling off their bodies because they were previously dipped in scalding water to loosen the hair so they can be scraped smooth.  They are on display in an area up near the milk house.  I can see the steam rolling off their bodies now just as clearly as I did over six decades ago.

Later in the day after hams and bacon had been buried in salt, chops and other pieces cut up, there was one chore left.  That was to render lard.  A huge black cauldron about 4 feet across and 3 feet deep sat over a fire.  Chunks of fat were tossed in with a little water to start so the fat wouldn't burn.  A couple hours later the fat had liquefied and small pieces of skin that had clung to some pieces of the fat were now cooked to a golden crisp and floating on top of the cauldron of grease (lard).  They would be skimmed off, drained of grease, put on a plate, and sprinkled with salt.  To me, the taste of a hot salted crackling was one of the true joys of being on a farm.  Who knows, maybe that contributed to me becoming a ‘foodie’.     

So, if you didn't before, now you know what a cracking is.  And, while we are on the subject, there is a different style you get along with your eggs for breakfast if you take the Bluenose ferry from Maine over to the bottom of Nova Scotia.  I don’t recall the name of the breakfast but it has a cutesy name, something like the ‘Fisherman’s  Breakfast’.  They call them pork scrunchions.  Whereas the crackling on the farm had a bit of skin attached to it and could be quite chewy, the ones on the Blue Nose were simply small cubes of fat deep fried to a crispy goodness so when you bit into them you got an unbelievably rich flavor of juicy fried pork fat  YUM.   That’s how the cracklings were in my noodle dish at Prosperus, a rich and delicious recollection of those on the Blue Nose.   Once again, just like the ubiquitous pork belly, we have another form of the pig showing up at different places on the planet.  Versatile animal that pig.

I got so carried away with pork fat I almost forgot to tell you about dinner last night.  I ate at an area that is a common configuration here.  Carts where people cook their specialty, usually one or just a few items per cart, are chockablock, jammed up against another.  Behind them is a sit down restaurant that serves only drinks.  The idea is that you wend your way among the carts and decide on what to order.  Once you buy the food you go sit in the restaurant area where you order a drink and wait for the food to be bought to you. 

I had intended to eat fresh fish last night at ‘Tokyo Seafood’.  However, somehow I missed the place and wound up at a spot that had about twenty separate carts offering well over thirty dishes.  One was wood fired pizza! 

There was everything from duck to you name it (some you wouldn't want to hear).  I cruised the place twice before settling on a plate of crispy fried duck with rice.  You would have picked it too, solely from eye appeal.  Just wait till you see the photo of those crisp rich mahogany colored ducks hanging in the window area of the cart.

Tonight for sure I’m going to eat fish.  On the other hand, you never know.  Last night I said the same thing and got waylaid by a duck.