Lizard Soup

One of my favorite areas in Hong Kong is the herbal medicine shop streets around Sheung Wan. For reasons I won't get into here, these shops carry an amazing variety of real deal Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), that you almost cannot find in mainland China anymore. In Shanghai pharmacies, for example, they look at you like you're nuts if you ask for herbals instead of pills. They think they're being "modern", we guess. In Hong Kong they still have the good stuff, or as the proverbial tourist might say, the weird stuff. Dried sea creatures, mystery animal parts, deer antlers, tiger penis, wine with whole king cobras, and stacks and heaps of herbs and twigs and tree bark. This is where I always stock up on Kam Wo Cha, the boxed herbal tea -- the best cold cure I've ever found.



It's not just the large selection that makes this TCM shopping district special -- it's the quality, the sights, the scent, the classic atmosphere, and the openly friendly service.

We'll have to devote several upcoming posts to Traditional Chinese Medicine weirdness, but we decided to start with these cute Ta!wan tree lizards we found...



The lady at the TCM shop explained that the lizards are best in a soup, and set out collecting all the bits and pieces to make the soup with. The soup ingredients (herbs) are yam, chinese dates, ginseng, medlar, and something called tragacanth. About 10 grams of each. I'm American, so I don't know what grams are. You cook these herbs with some pork bones and the lizards. The TCM shopkeeper told me I could eat the lizards (snap off the head and limbs and toss them out) and that the tails are the best, as in beneficial, parts to eat. They're reported to be good for asthma, colds, lungs and heart.



The lizards at the market were dried and tied to wooden sticks, two a piece. One is a male, the other female. The pharmacist told us they were all lizard couples, and that we're supposed to consume both genders together in the soup. We felt better knowing these married lizards perished together -- is this practised anywhere else, with other animals-for-consumption?

Anyway, the lizards sort of dissolved into the soup -- maybe we cooked it too long? -- but we did get a few little bites of bona fide lizard meat, and they were kinda tartly fishy tasting, and very bony.



Yes, that's a lizard coming out of my mouth.

Snake Soup

The recent earthquake in Taiwan has made the internet slow and logging into blogger difficult from Asia, so we apologize for the delay in updates...



I was in Hong Kong recently, to visit my friend PaPeRo. PaPeRo is a robot made by NEC. I was asked to perform (as a DJ) at NEC's booth at the ITU, a massive technology expo. My little friend PaPeRo does cool stuff like talk in 7 languages, dance, use GPS to track down where my friends and fans are, does internet searches for me, and if you tickle him a bit too much, he farts (although he's polite and calls it "break wind"). He's also kind of a flirt, we found him chatting up all the models at the expo, getting phone numbers and posing for pics with the cute ones.

One day, PaPeRo scored a dinner date with a girl who suggested they go for snake soup. One of PaPeRo's features is that he can detect human emotion. He could tell I was a bit jealous. After teasing me a bit, he invited me to tag along, so I could check out the snake soup for WeirdMeat. Another of Papero's features is that he can taste food for you, so he's a perfect companion for weird meat explorations.



We went to a little cafe in Causeway Bay, you know the typical Hong Kong ones with white tile floors, steamy windows, and elderly waiters that have more wit and energy than I could ever dream of. In the window at this place, there are several large glass jars with snakes in them, including one fearsome looking king cobra.

We ordered a bowl of the house standard snake soup. Everyone was having this. According to the waiter there are 5 different snakes in it -- I mean, 5 kinds of snake. Including the king cobra. The soup was yummy, with a comforting, mildly savory broth, and plenty of snake meat. Snake meat is similar to eel, but more delicate and white like fish. It's supposed to be good for you, especially in winter, and like everything in Chinese medicine, an aphrodisiac.

PaPeRo just giggles when I ask him how the rest of the night went.



We didn't make it to Kowloon's Snake Street this time, but there's a good article about that here. We'll have to do pics there next time.

BTW, is my PaPeRo robot friend a communist?

Sea Horse Soup

My assistant Coco was chatting up WeirdMeat to a Guangdong-ese friend of hers and they suggested we go to a traditional Chinese medicine shop and get some dried seahorses.



I've always thought sea horses were cute little bizarre animals. I learned that it's actually the male sea horse that gets pregnant and carries the babies, from watching indie rock band Yo La Tengo play a live performance set to the films of Jean Painleve -- an underwater cinematographer from the 1930s or something. Real stoney stuff.

Anyway, the Cantonese make a medicinal soup with dried seahorse. Good for the facial skin and a restorative detox/cleanser. I happen to be blessed with perfect facial skin, but I could always use a little detoxing. So we found 4 seahorses -- 2 pregnant males, and 2 females (virgins?) -- and put them in a soup with carrots, ginger, and some pork stock.



The broth had a salty and pleasantly pungent oceanic flavor. The seahorses were just thrown in dry and lent their flavor and magical medicinals to the mix. And they still looked cute.

Have you ever looked at a seahorse? They have a boxey body shape, the profile of a horse's face skeleton, and a tail that curls inward towards the belly and head. They also have these perfectly symmetrical little bone spikes sticking out (like the Hellrasiser guy) that make them very difficult to eat. That's when I asked the question -- are we actually suppose to eat these? How? A few desperate calls to the medicine shop and some random Guangdong-ese comrads didn't help -- no answer. But we could taste the things from the soup broth. I did manage to extract small bits of meat from the softer part of the tails, and from the pregnant bellies of the males, and found it reminded me of dried scallops, but more salty and less complex.



There's all kinds of weird stuff I want to try in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). One that really intrigues me is this little worm thing that every Chinese person I've talked to tells me, begins life as a plant, and then turns into an animal species. Or vice versa. That's impossible, I tell them. Something lost in translation perhaps?

Why is everything in TCM good for male virility? Is there anything in TCM that isn't? What do I take if I've got too much male virility? I suppose if male humans got pregnent like the male seahorse, we'd be a bit less horny, you think?