New Hong Kong is the closest Chinese restaurant to our home and also my favorite. We eat there or order out every couple of months, and we're pretty much always satisfied. The food is consistently tasty, the portions are generous, and the owners couldn't be more friendly and attentive. They work incredibly hard and I'm very glad they're successful, so far.

We last ordered food from there last night. We had the fried wontons ($3.75) which were nice, crispy and not oily - but not otherwise special, the Mongolian beef ($7.25) and the orange chicken ($6.75). The chicken was nice, juicy and not too sweet, the beef was very tasty, with a deep sauce. We ordered it medium which was a bit too spicy for me and not spicy enough for Mike - so probably correctly spiced as "medium".

New Hong Kong now has a website and you can place online orders - ready in 10 to 20 minutes for pickup. They also deliver. Check out their take-out menus for attached coupons.

New Hong Kong Restaurant
1750 E. 14th St.
San Leandro, CA
510.357.6288
New Hong Kong Restaurant

Original Review

Marga's San Leandro Restaurant Reviews

I wanted to make ice cream to go with the purported buche de Noel my friend Lola was bringing for Xmas Eve dinner. I wanted something creamy, refreshing, with a light flavor that would go well with the cake regardless of its flavors. I wanted it to be simple, and doable with whatever I had at home. My original plan had been to make this salted caramel ice cream, but I decided at the last moment that it was too complicated, and as I searched for other recipes the idea of making maple ice cream came to mind. I had loved it as a child, when my grandmother used to make it from the tiny bottles of maple extract she'd gotten during her last trip to the United States, before my birth, and for that reason it still holds a warm place in my hand. Plus, it's very simple to make and I had maple syrup at home.

The following is the recipe I made, from the Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book. It's a great recipe, the results gave me a smooth, tasty ice cream which I loved (though not as much as granny's).

Maple Nut Ice Cream

2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
2 cups whipping cream
1 cup milk
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped

Put eggs in a large bowl and whisk them until light and fluffy. Whisk in the sugar, a little at the time, until completely mixed in. Whisk in the cream and milk. Pour into the ice cream machine and process according to the instructions.

Two minutes before the ice cream is done add the maple syrup and then the walnuts. Finish processing, pour into a freezer safe container and freeze overnight.

Christmas Eve 2010 menu

Marga's Best Recipes

As my frequent readers know, I have a hate-hate relationship with vegetables. We were a meat and gnocchi family when I was growing up, but once in a while my parents decided that we needed to eat vegetables. They would then proceed to make puré de espinacas, or spinach puree - a combination of boxed mashed potatoes and boiled spinach (or most often Swiss chard, as it was significantly cheaper) put in the electric blender until a disgusting green mush was formed. They would then force us to eat it - and I do mean force us. They'd threaten us, hit us and even physically close our mouths if we didn't eat it. More than once we ended up throwing it up (which only made them madder). This is definitely one of my childhood traumas, and as a result of it my siblings and I don't eat vegetables (my youngest sister, born much later and not subjected to such torture is a happy veggie eater).

Slowly, however, I've been trying to overcome this trauma - making myself eat roots, mushrooms, salads and the like. But cooked veggies have been difficult - until a few months ago when, prompted by moans of pleasure by my fellow diners at a girl's nights out at Mua in Oakland, I tried their version of collard greens and fell in love. The soupy, softish veggies had been cooked with bacon (and I don't know what else) and had a very strong smoky flavor that I loved. I wanted to make them myself, and Christmas Eve seemed to be the perfect opportunity.

I didn't find Mua's recipe, but I hoped this one from epicurious.com would be close enough. Alas, it wasn't. The resulting greens were pretty good - I still ate them - but they didn't have the smokyness and didn't end up with a broth. I enjoyed them well enough during dinner, but nobody had seconds and we didn't eat the leftovers.

I followed the recipe below closely, but I used half as much collard greens (4 lbs is way too much, even 2 lbs were more than twice as much as we needed for 6 people eating it as a side). If I made this recipe again, I'd probably also use more bacon.

Collard Greens with Red Onions and Bacon

The pièce de résistance for my 2010 Christmas Eve menu was Beef Wellington, and I was serving mushroom soup as the first course, so I wanted an appetizer that would go with the menu but would not include pastry or mushrooms. That's harder to do than you'd think - so I decided to look through my cookbooks and see what I could find. I hit on the idea of making a pipérade while paging through Gerard Hirigoyen's The Basque Kitchen. I'd eaten a pipérade before at Hirigoyen's namesake restaurant and I had quite enjoyed it.

I followed Hirigoyen's recipe, with a few modifications. His recipe called for Anaheim chilies, and all the ones I could find at two supermarkets were green - but the pipérade I had @ Pipérade featured red chilies, and the chilies shown on the picture next to the recipe for the pipérade in Hirigoyen's book were also red, so I decided to use red bell peppers instead. I later found out by reading The Cooks Thesaurus that Anaheim chilies are, indeed, green. They turn red when they mature and are then called chile colorado or California red chile. I'm not sure if Hirigoyen meant that those chilies should be used on this recipe. No matter, it worked well enough with bell peppers.

The original recipe called for 6 eggs. I had meant to add them, but by the fourth egg it as clear that the concoction was waaaay too eggy. Indeed, if I was to make this again I'd only add 1 egg, 2 tops (and the recipe below has been modified to show this). Finally, I added some chopped prosciutto to the final product. Pipérade is traditionally served with a slice of Bayonne ham, but I wasn't concerned enough about authenticity to go searching for that. The prosciutto I got at the deli counter @ Lucky wasn't very good, though, so I recommend you stay away from it.

Anyway, without further ado, here is the recipe:

Pipérade

This is fairly easy recipe that I chose because I have TONS of fresh rosemary & sage growing next to my house (though nothing else). It was quite good and Mika proclaimed it very loudly to be the BEST CHICKEN EVER. I thought it was good, not amazing, but I'll defer to her opinion :-) The recipe, as usual, comes from epicurious.com

Roast Chicken with Mustard Vinaigrette

For the vinaigrette

That would be right now, a Saturday at 5:30 PM, the place is packed with people pushing carts filled with stuff.

Grocery Outlet in San Leandro is currently selling Rosenborg Danish Blue Cheese at the unbelievable price of $2lb. Really, I'm not kidding. The same cheese sells at amazon fresh for $13lb.

Best of all, the cheese is actually very good. It is creamy (when @ room temperature), with a smooth blue cheese flavor, not too bitter and with perhaps a hint of sweetness. We all loved it, and it as fantastic in a Blue Cheese and Caramelized-Onion Squares recipe.

The cheese that they had today had been packed on 1/3-1/7 and had a "sell by" date of 1/15th.