Pork aspic (肉凍) and the best puffs ever (高力豆沙 or高力芝麻)

One of my favourite foods when it was Chinese New Year at home was the pork or chicken aspic my parents used to make (and I mean both my mom and my dad).  They would boil a whole chicken or pork trotters, remove the meat from the bones, add gelatine to the soup (in the case of pork trotters, they need only to add very little gelatine because of the natural gel from the trotters), put the meat back in with a touch of fish sauce and put the whole thing in the fridge.  When it's unmolded, it was one of the best  cold appetizer ever, which made it handy for serving to the non-stop stream of visitors on the first couple of days of the lunar New Year.  Those were the days!  Today, in a fit of nostalgia, I went to a Shanghai style restaurant that serves something very similar.  It's not as good as what my parents made, but good enough - now if only there were more jello and less meat!

This restaurant with the odd name, Skyland de Shanghai, serves one of the best desserts ever.  This is deep-fried egg whites with bean paste inside (高力豆沙).  This is a dessert which originated from Beijing and is called 高力 (high power) because the egg whites have to be beaten with very high power until they are stiff, flour and corn starch are then folded in to make it into a paste, bean paste or other sweet paste added in the centre, then deep fried.  Whipping the egg whites is the tricky part, as in all puff pastries, the egg whites have to be at room temperature and the beater clean, the flour folded in gently without overstirring, making sure not to let the air out of the egg whites.  Other than the traditional bean paste, I noticed a version with black sesame paste today and promptly ordered it as I've never tried it.  Obviously the black sesame has a more intense flavour but I prefer the texture of the bean paste - that didn't stop me from eating three of these, in lieu of noodles or other starch...