2025-01-17

Drinking black coffee every day was starting to give me mouth sores. I had to use powdered creamer today.

Remember a few days ago when I said I was going to limit Anki time? I failed to stop myself again.

To be fair, probably half of flashcard time today was spent making dim sum flashcards. I actually had to do some research in Cantonese wikipedia because some of the items had weird or missing translations.

The most interesting ones were 香菇四寶扎 (hoeng1 gu1 sei3 bou2 zaat3) and 荷葉珍珠雞 (ho4 yip6 zan1 zyu1 gai1). I actually had to use ChatGPT for them which led me to 四寶雞扎 (sei3 bou2 gai1 zaat3) and 珍珠雞 (zan1 zyu gai1).

• 四寶雞扎 (“chicken tofu skin roll”) - The 四寶 (“four treasures”) refer to the four key ingredients used in the filling which are chicken, ham, fish maw, and shiitake.

• 珍珠雞 (“pearl chicken”)- This evolved from 糯米雞 (no6 mai5 gai1, “sticky rice chicken”) which were too large to serve in dim sum.

Dim sum lore goes hard.

EDIT: I went on the English Wikipedia Dim sum page and it had all the common items, including the “four-treasure chicken roll” and “pearl chicken” which could’ve saved me a lot of time on flashcard making 🫠 Oh well, I guess it was a good exercise to translate them myself anyway.