THURSDAY THE LONG WAY: SIZZLING PRAWNS

MIDTERM STUDY BREAK

Thursday the long way is a new feature I intend to use to highlight food from out of the way places including important food memories that have had something to do with forming the way I look at food today, both cooking it and eating it. They may be inspired by recent meals, by the food-media, or by anything at all.

Many of my most significant food memories are from growing up in Hong Kong where my family lived from 1985-1990 because of my father's bank job. I'm sure more Hong Kong memories will make an appearance on "Thursday The Long Way," but the one that comes to mind today is from a restaurant in Causeway Bay (an area on Hong Kong Island between downtown, "Central," and Wan Chai areas and Jardine's Lookout where I attended L'Ecole Francaise Internationale), called the Red Pepper. Not all of my most formative food memories are spicy but the trend does continue this week.

I don't remember the Red Pepper being a fancy restaurant. Yellow tableclothes, linen napkins and a turning glass centerpiece on each table, but you found those things in most Chinese restaurants. When you sat down a waiter brought out two small, shallow, porcelein bowls, one filled with sweet pickles another with roasted, salted peanuts which we ate with chopsticks one at a time (which I became fairly adept at using). I can't recall the rest of the menu but the dish I do remember was my introduction to the magic of hot spices, sizzling prawns.

A waiter walked quickly out of the kitchen using several thick handtowels to carry a thick, black, cast-iron platter on which the prawns were sizzling, crackling and sending up what seemed to my 10-year-old mind to be a terrific cloud of hot and spicy steam. As the waiter placed the platter on the table another waiter instructed us to shield our faces with the linen napkins so the scalding liquid splattering off the platter wouldn't burn us. Slowly, the cooking prawns settled down and the sauce stopped spraying and we'd lower our napkins and dig in to the succulent prawns covered in a thin, spicy sauce that filled the restaurant and burned your mouth but didn't stop you from reaching out for prawn after prawn after prawn, while the beads of perspiration formed on your brow.