Baked spaghetti and HK-style food

I bet you Westerners are scratching your heads on this one. Spaghetti can be BAKED? Well, I can tell you it's quite popular in Hong Kong. Lots of fast food joints and cafes offer this dish (as well as baked rice) in a variety of flavours. My personal favourite is the no-nonsense meat sauce baked spaghetti, which is made with tomato sauce, and which has a bit of cheese melted on top. Other varieties usually employ a white cream sauce of which I'm not too fond, as well as chicken, tuna, pork, etc. Baked rice is quite nice with pork chops and tomato sauce, but anything with white cream sauce and chicken is usually too bland. Anyway, these dishes are made by putting pre-cooked pasta or rice into a small disposable aluminium pan, placing the toppings and sauce on top, then baking it in an oven. This is a particularly nice treat in Hong Kong because it seems that most kitchens lack ovens.

Actually, baked pasta (and rice) doesn't seem as strange as it sounds. Westerners may not find it strange because they may have grown up eating lasagna, which is curiously absent at these fast food joints, probably because it's takes a bit more effort to make. Actually, I just googled "baked spaghetti" in the hopes of finding a photo, and it turns out it's quite a common term on many American websites. Anyway, I never felt stuff like baked spaghetti was strange because I grew up eating HK-style food.

What does surprise me about Hong Kong is how much Western food is now part of everybody's diet. I'm willing to bet that Hong Kong people, on a per capita basis, eat more hot dog sausages, ham slices, luncheon meat (Spam), and macaroni than Americans do. And strangely, it's much easier to find a HK-style Western breakfast than it is to find a Chinese breakfast. Of course, Western food has seem some modifications to cater to local tastes, and there are some distinctly HK-style Western dishes that some of my Western friends absolutely love. One example is Hong Kong-style French toast. HK-style French toast isn't the pan-fried egg battered pieces of bread that Westerners are used to, but are rather two pieces of toast, pressed together, with peanut butter between them, then deep-fried. Western friends of mine who either studied, lived, or visited here tell me they miss this essential component of afternoon tea.

As for baked spaghetti, it's available at the Chong Yuet Ming cafeteria a couple of days per week; there's a rotating menu of baked rice and spaghetti dishes, with one rice and one spaghetti dish available for $18-19 HKD. I try to keep consumption to once or twice a week, since it's high on carbs and since it doesn't come with a side portion of veggies. On a couple of occasions, I felt so guilty for not eating vegetables at lunch that I ended up ordering rice and vegetables for dinner. Well, what's wrong with indulging once in a while?