Picture of the Day: Pandemic Sourdough

A delicious sourdough with flax seeds and chia seeds

When the coronavirus pandemic erupted in Hong Kong in late January, supermarkets ran out of toilet paper, cleaning supplies, rice... and flour.

Amateur bakers started making sourdough, a pretty time-consuming recipe that takes around 30 hours as the dough has to be stretched and folded every half hour for a few hours before it is baked in the oven.

A beautiful-looking loaf with heft too!

I'm very lucky to have two friends who have decent-sized ovens at home and each have made a sourdough for me recently.

One is a busy mother of two who bakes when she has time or uses it as an opportunity to de-stress, the other is a hotel general manager, who has a very quiet hotel these days and now has more time to attend to his hobby.

He takes meticulous notes of the process like a methodical scientist and takes pictures. Every person who has received his loaf has praised how delicious it is.

Earlier this week I received an organic cranberry sourdough loaf from him and it was very professional looking, even using a banneton, the ridged clay-pot to get the circular pattern on the top.

When I get bread I slice it up and then put half the loaf in the freezer and the other half to eat in the next few days.

Inside is moist with lots of cranberries

I haven't eaten so much bread till this pandemic, but as a comfort food, these homemade loaves are like a warm hug from thoughtful friends.

Picture of the Day: Uni Cup Noodles

Uni in Cup Noodles? Not really worth it, but interesting...

A young relative of mine likes to travel to Japan whenever he can get a cheap ticket. He's going there again in a few weeks, but about a month ago he went to Tokyo and brought back some snacks that would raise a few eyebrows.

He went to a museum on technology and at the gift shop he bought a can that said "space bread" on it, and another packet for curry that would be eaten in space.

We tried those out and the space bread was more like a brioche bun than bread, but funnily enough it went well with the Japanese curry that just looked like a thick dark brown sauce.

Another of his favourite purchases was trying interesting Cup Noodle flavours. One we tried this week had uni, or sea urchin in it.

I wasn't holding my breath, but inside were these small orange things that really looked like pumpkin, but lo and behold they were tiny uni, though not having much flavour of course!

Why you would even bother to put uni in cup noodles... except to make customers buy it at a premium...

Far from Eco-Friendly

Colourful floral horses prancing in the air at Landmark

The shopping malls have lots of horse-themed decorations to entice people in, take pictures and hopefully linger and part with some money along the way.

The Landmark in Central has floral horses dancing in the air that remind me of My Little Pony... or am I dating myself?

Equine-themed displays are a relief from the Year of the Snake -- how are you supposed to make an armless and legless reptile attractive?

In any event, I was shocked to read about a bakery in Olympian City use slices of bread to make a horse (that looks more like a lama) -- and the sculpture was next to World Vision's 30-Hour Famine.

The breaded horse sculpture was the work of bakery Bo-Lo'gne to celebrate Chinese and Western Valentine's Days that fall on the same day -- the second month and the 14th day which is why 428 slices of bread were used to make the horse, while hundreds more were thrown away while making it.

A spokeswoman for World Vision diplomatically said "the possibility of such a display sending a message that does not go along with the spirit of the 30-Hour Famine".

Meanwhile Sino Group which manages the mall became red in the face when this contradiction was mentioned, considering the company had previously pledged to reduce food waste.

The unfortunate breaded horse (lama?) at Olympian City

The animal, made in the style of a popular Italian inflatable horse character called Rody, was taken down soon afterwards.

The bakery had planned to use the sculpture for other events, but said it would be broken up and used as fertilizer.

However, glue and preservatives were applied on the slices of bread. Friends of the Earth's Celia Fung Sze-lai criticized the sculpture as wasteful. "Food is very precious. If they want to promote their bread, it would be a better idea to just let shoppers try it," she said. "Now it's a waste and they can't even achieve what they set out to do."

Fung added the used bread could not be used as fertilizer or fodder because the chemicals in the glue and preservatives could affect livestock and soil.

In this day and age, do we still have to educate people about food waste and what can and cannot be recycled?

How can Bo-L'ogne even conceive of the idea of making a large horse out of bread (wasting hundreds of slices in the process) and then think that it could be reused by literally breaking it down in the environment? Some people are completely clueless.

And then Sino Group totally dropped the ball, letting the bakery display the horse sculpture even though this went against Sino Group's corporate social responsibility ethics, and that it was placed next to an event trying to promote the awareness of people starving in the world?

One would have thought a gaffe like this would be found in China, but it's in Hong Kong. It's embarrassing and shocking that the place has a long, long way to go before it becomes a city with some kind of eco-awareness.

In the meantime we'll continue to have people who use more than one paper towel to wash their hands, not turn off the tap when they are lathering, order too much food they can't finish, and ask for plastic bags at the supermarket because they were too lazy to bring their own (mostly men).

When is Hong Kong going to realize we have finite resources and money will not solve all our environmental problems?