Adventures with Kake

[Image: A tall pile of thin, browned, crispy deep-fried slivers of potato. A few pieces of dried red chilli can be seen among them.]

So, I said I'd be back in September, and here I am, just under the wire.

I realise I've been a bit flaky recently in terms of this blog. I took July off to move house. I missed a post at the start of August, then halted the dim sum month entirely. It's true that in my personal life I've had A Bit Of A Year, for various reasons, but I do really want to keep up this project, because I enjoy doing the research, testing the recipes, writing the posts, and reading all the useful, critical, amusing, and generally lovely comments that people are kind enough to leave.

So my plan is as follows, for now. I'm going to keep the structure of concept post followed by character post followed by dish post, but I'm going to post once a week instead of three times a week. I'll see how this goes, and possibly adjust it a bit so each month has a theme instead of each-three-weeks having a theme, but this is what I'm going to do for now. Hopefully this will let me maintain quality while still posting regularly.

I'm also going to make things easy on myself today, by posting a dish that I have no intention of attempting to make at home. It's also on-theme since it's a variation of a dish that I posted about at the end of a previous hiatus, 土豆絲 (tǔ dòu sī) — shredded potatoes. While that version is a fresh, snappy stirfry of julienned potatoes, this version is basically a large, fragrant pile of crispy deep-fried ultra-thin shoestring fries. It is delicious.

The version pictured above, which I ate at Royal Palace in Surrey Quays, was listed on the menu as 香辣土豆絲 (xiāng là tǔ dòu sī), literally "fragrant-spicy shredded potato". Judging by Google Image search, 香辣土豆絲 is usually, but not always, the deep-fried version. I've seen this particular name twice on menus; once it was deep-fried, the other time it was the lightly stirfried version.

I said above that I'm not going to try to make this at home, but if you'd like to then the Beijing Haochi recipe looks pretty good.