A short videolog sharing scenes from today’s Chinese New Year festivities at the Chinese Cultural Center in Honolulu’s Chinatown.

[tags]Chinatown, Chinese New Year, Honolulu, Hawaii[/tags]

Last week, Hubby and I visited Mr. Liu, a Chinese artisan to order our soapstone chop carved with our family name in tensho (seal script). Today, Joyce and I went to pick it up in Chinatown.

I was a little disappointed that he didn’t provide a box to keep the chop in. Instead, he wrapped it in a paper towel and told me to find a nice box for it so I could keep it “for lifetime.” Luckily, I had a nice silk-covered box at home that Joyce had given me a few years back that would work just fine.

I was quite pleased with the result. In hindsight, perhaps we should have gotten a smaller chop, which would fit better on correspondence. This one measures about 2″ square. Hubby is now considering having a chop engraved with his family crest.

[tags]soapstone, chop, stamp, tensho, seal script[/tags]

At the urging of a friend, Hubby and I decided to head to Chinatown in search of Mr. Zong Chen Liu, a Chinese artisan who specializes in Chinese calligraphy and brush painting, stamp carving, and a plethora of other signage and picture mounting services. We wanted to create a stone stamp custom-carved with our family name as an heirloom.

“You better go see him soon before da buggah ma-ke,” Keith told us, he got a stamp carved by Mr. Liu a number of years ago. Mr. Liu is a rare find, very skilled in his art. People have been known to come from Japan and abroad to have him carve a stamp with their name in tensho (seal script) style of kanji.

Excerpted from Takase Studios’ glossary:

Tensho (Seal Script) is the earliest form of Chinese characters that goes back to the Qin Dynasty (221BC - 206BC). The tensho script uses a single stroke width, are roughly rectangular with a height to width ratio of three to two and has a feeling of expressionless refinement. Today tensho script is used for seals that the Chinese and the Japanese use instead of a signature (these are the red stamps that appear on Chinese and Japanese art and in everything from legal forms to routine business documents).

We selected a medium-sized stone with a Chinese fu dog carved into the top of the stamp. The stone cost $90 and the custom carving was $40. $130 to create a custom-made family heirloom didn’t seem like too much to ask. The selection of stone blanks ran the gamut in pricing, from a small stone with your zodiac animal for $45, to large, ornately carved pieces that I was afraid to ask the pricing on, lest he try to persuade us to buy. Mr. Liu said it was a busy week for him, so our stamp should be ready sometime next week. We told him we would pick it up next Saturday and he assured us that it would be ready by then.

While in Chinatown, we decided that some dim sum was in order. Last night, I queried the Twitterverse for dim sum suggestions. Ryan Ozawa suggested Mei Sum which is on the corner of Smith and N. Pauahi, just a stone’s throw away from Char Hung Sut — which was also on our hit list for the day.

Admittedly, I cannot claim to be a connoisseur of Chinese cuisine, usually staying well within the realms of the common dim sum fare such as char siu bao, siu mai, fried taro, custard tarts, and the like. I definitely need to have lunch with someone well-versed in Chinese cookery so I can expand my dim sum repertoire. Nevertheless, despite the poor marks given by Ono Kine Grindz, who undoubtedly has a much more refined and educated palate than my own, I thought the food was quite good. Judging by the teeming lunch crowd that we narrowly missed, you’d think the place was giving away free food.

Chicken Manapua

Deep Fried Taro

Deep Fried Eggplant

Char Siu Bao

We also had the house specialty noodles, which I failed to photograph. It had a colorful assortment of seafood and vegetables topping the thin and slightly crispy noodles. Yum! Perhaps my favorites of the visit were the eggplant and the taro dishes. It figures that the two items that were deep fried would be the tastiest. The sad fact is that deep frying makes just about anything taste magically delicious.

A lunch for two and we managed to escape with a bill of less than $20 and obscenely full stomachs.

But, we had one more stop to make: Char Hung Sut for manapua, pork hash and ma tai soo.

Char Hung Sut is one of Chinatown’s most beloved establishments. A local favorite for manapua, pork hash, rice cakes, taro cakes, pepeiao, and my favorite ma tai soo. I haven’t found anyplace else that makes this delectable snack, so it’s a rare treat for me! Unfortunately, I was too enraptured by the experience that I failed to photograph our purchase. But, Ono Kine Grindz has an awesome review on Char Hung Sut that you simply must read if you’re a fan of good local fare.

In case you’re interested, here’s the info for the establishments that I mentioned in today’s entry:

Zong Chen Liu, Artist
Specializing in: Chinese calligraphy, Chinese brush painting, stamp carving, paper cutting, Chinese & English business signs, picture mounting and framing.
111 North King Street, Honolulu
Ph. 808.222-0292
* Next to the Bank of Hawaii, Chinatown branch. Look for the red and gold dragon columns. His small shop is in the corridor right next door, but he can often be found sitting at a table right outside selling Chinese calligraphy, jade zodiac charms, and trinkets.

Mei Sum dim sum restaurant
65 North Pauahi Street Suite A, Honolulu
Ph. 808.531.3268
* On the corner of Smith and N. Pauahi

Char Hung Sut
64 North Pauahi Street, Honolulu
Ph. 808.538.3355
* Go early for best selection, they close at 2 pm.

[tags]Chinatown, Chinese cuisine, dim sum, Char Hung Sut, Mei Sum, stamps, chops, stamp carving, Honolulu, Hawaii, culture, heritage[/tags]

At my in-laws’ house, it is customary to begin the new year with a steaming bowl of ozoni. It should be the first thing to hit your stomach on new year’s day. Mom-in-law says it’s good luck. I don’t know whether it’s good luck or not, but it sure tastes good. She makes a simplified version of this traditional soup and I’ll share the recipe with you so you can begin your own ozoni tradition for your family!

Serves 4

Ingredients:
4 cans of chicken broth
1 can of Hokkigai (surf clam) - chopped
1 kamaboko fishcake - sliced
1 bunch of mizuna - coarsely chopped
mochi
shoyu to taste

In a large pot on medium heat, simmer chicken broth and liquid from Hokkigai. Add chopped Hokkigai clams, sliced fishcake, coarsely chopped mizuna and a few dashes of shoyu to taste. Finally, add the mochi. (If your mochi is dusted with mochiko, it’s a good idea to rinse it before adding to the soup to prevent the broth from thickening too much.) Cook on medium heat until mochi is soft. Serve and enjoy!

NOTES:
* I usually put no more than 4 large mochi in the pot at a time to prevent them from sticking together and becoming one huge clump of mochi.
* Depending on how hungry your family is, you can always add more chicken broth and mochi to stretch the recipe.

In case you’re not familiar with some of the ingredients, here are some photos.

Hokkigai (surf clams) come in a can and can be found in the Asian foods section of your grocery store. Just a warning, they are quite expensive. This year, one can cost me $15.77 at Don Quijote. Mom-in-law saw them selling for $23 at Star Market, so it pays to shop around.

Below is what the clams look like before chopping.

Red and white kamaboko fishcake

Sliced kamaboko

Mizuna (Japanese mustard greens) has a very mild flavor

Shoyu (I use Aloha Shoyu exclusively, the low-sodium variety)

Mochi

If your mochi is dusted with mochiko, be sure to rinse the mochi before putting in your soup. Otherwise, it will cause the soup to be too thick.

Serve and enjoy!

I went to Donki (Don Quijote) today to pick up the ingredients for the ozoni. Luckily, they still had some good-looking mizuna and the Hokki clams left after the new year’s rush. The Hokkigai was $15.77 a can, but I figured what the heck, it’s once a year. Mom-in-law dedicates an entire day to making mochi for the entire family using her mochi machine and some good old-fashioned elbow grease, so we came home with a gallon-sized ziploc bag full of the glutinous rice goodness yesterday. When I discovered how long it takes her (8 hours!), I promised that I would help her next year.

I’m debating whether to make a new videolog entry for this year’s ozoni. Nothing has changed, so it would be redundant. However, maybe I could do a mochi-grilling vlog? But then again, how interesting is it to watch mochi fry? About as exciting as watching grass grow, I would assume. Well, we’ll see if inspiration hits.

Last year, I filmed a vlog to record my mom-in-law’s secret “simple ozoni” recipe for posterity — and so I’d remember how to make it in coming years. Unfortunately, that was before I discovered the correct encoding settings, so the video quality is pretty poor. (Oh, and let’s not even talk about that bad haircut!) Nevertheless, the content is what’s important! I’m posting this early, just in case anyone wants to try their hand at making this simplified version of a traditional new year’s dish.

Happy new year!

I spent the better part of my childhood afternoons at a Japanese language class at the neighborhood Buddhist temple. Japanese School was the after school program of my generation, a place where parents sent their kids to keep them out of their hair for a couple of hours. If you learned a little bit of Japanese, well, that was just a a bonus. Even after attending classes an hour a day, five days a week for eight years, most Japanese School graduates are not fluent, but have a rudimentary knowledge of the language. Now, decades later, the use-it-or-lose it principle certainly applies. While I’m still fluent at reading and writing hiragana and katakana and recognizing a handful of common kanji, I am very hesitant to attempt to carry on a conversation in Japanese. On countless occasions, I have wished that I had continued in my studies of nihongo (the Japanese language) and lamented over my lack of conversational skills. So, when I discovered Mango Languages, it gave me a renewed interest in picking up Japanese again.

Mango Languages is a free Internet course that offers 100 lessons for various languages such as Spanish, Russian, French, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Greek. I am on lesson 4 (of 101) and have found it to be a good refresher. There are over 100 slides per lesson, but a lot of it is redundant information to help you review and check your knowledge of what you just learned. Especially helpful is the way the words are color-coded for easier translation, written in both English and Japanese hiragana. If you don’t read hiragana, hover your mouse over the characters and a pop-up box of the romanization appears. Each lessons starts with a short dialog and the slides explain the translations and grammatical elements to give you a good understanding of why the sentence is structured as it is. The dialog features native speakers, so that you can hear the proper pronunciation and practice emulating it.

Peeking ahead to the last lesson, I realized that Mango will provide a good foundation, but I’d like to continue to develop my skills beyond that level, so I started looking for more resources. In iTunes, you’ll find a ton of free podcasts you can subscribe to on virtually any topic you can imagine. In the search bar, I typed, “learn Japanese” and got a list of 46 podcasts. Surely not all of them will be gems, but keeping a keen eye on the “popularity” rating will generally give you an idea of who’s hot and who’s not. The most popular podcast listed was called JapanesePod101.com. I navigated to their website and found that it’s a company that backs the free podcast, offering free and paid subscriptions to their service. I immediately signed up for the free 7-day trial and will tour around and let you know what I find. If the resources are as comprehensive as they say, it may be worth the $8/month to subscribe. They also have a “premium” service which is $25/month. Of course, discounts are offered if you pay for the year up front, so I may opt to do that if I choose to subscribe.

Have you heard of JapanesePod101.com or tried the service? If so, tell me what you think!

If the service can keep me engaged and interested in learning Japanese, it will be a good investment indeed. Will keep you posted…