Cooking in Hong Kong (Vegetarians beware!)

During the 1st Gulf War, the company my parents worked for in Saudi Arabia brought US Marines in from their camps in the desert (think tents, dusty grit everywhere and camel spiders that can eat your face off) to nice American homes for showers, calls back to the US, and a good home cooked meal.

Last school year I received an email forward from our crazy librarian. Normally, I delete these unread, but this one titled "Meals in the Home" I opened. Two minutes later I was replying to the Hong Kong American Women's Association Chair saying " Yes, please, we would love to host 3 or 4 sailors/marines/soldiers/whatever.". Our first hosting experience was a big success, and we were excited when the opportunity came up again this past weekend.

The whole thing was probably doomed from the start. First a typhoon threatened to keep the ships (and when I say ship I mean a "small town" of 5,000+ sailors and marines) out of Hong Kong habor. Then Saskia woke up with a fever. While I was at the grocery store shopping for our 3 marines Erik called to say that a Navy Sailor was being added to our group. No problem! A couple extra potatoes, another ear or two of corn, a second tub of ice cream, and a 2 kilo pork roast instead of 1.5.

That's right. Pork roast. (Here's where the vegetarians might want to stop reading) .After much fussing I had decided on a menu of down home pork roast, mashed taters, and corn on the cob. For simplicity sake, I decided to spend the extra $100 hk, and buy the pork roast at the fancy grocery store where I had to go for most of the other ingredients instead of the wet market, where we usually buy our meat. I didn't see any pork roasts in the display and so asked the nice butcher did he have any hidden away in the refridgerator. He said yes, I asked for my 2 kilos, got distracted watching the fish jumping out of a near by tank onto the grocery store floor, took my nicely wrapped (huge and very heavy roast), paid and left.

When I got home, imagine my surprise when I tore off the paper wrapping ready to smear on a lovely olive oil, lemon, garlic, rosemary paste and was faced with this*:

That's right: SKIN on! I supposed a true chef would be thrilled by a piece of meat like this. I however was completely at a loss. In a panic, I started googling like mad, "how to cook a roast with the skin on" "skin on roast" "roast with skin". Where would I spread my lovely lemongarlickyrosemary paste? I almost started to cry. The only thing I could think of to do was to (gulp) start cutting. As I was elbows deep in pig skin and fat (I could never have been a doctor) my phone rang. It was Erik telling me that only 1 of the 4 expected guests had shown up. 1. One. No problem, I said. Smile. See you soon, and went back to "carving" away at my little piggie.

One.

In the end it was a fantastic meal ( the roast was a little dry, I probably should have left the skin and fat on). Our one sailor was a funny, talker from Oregon of all places. And to top the evening off our good friends (and downstairs neighbors) the Driedgers came upstairs to help eat the massive quantity of brownies, ice cream and berries I had prepared.

Imagine if I had bought the roast at the wet market. Yikes!

* This is not a picture of our actual roast, we had left both our cameras at school. However, this could be the twin sister of the hunk of meat I wrestled with yesterday.