Week 47 - Macanese

We've been to Macau once. It was a one-day excursion over 17 years ago during a trip to Hong Kong, and I don't remember much. (Of course, I was behind on recapping anything back then too, so I never got up to it and now most of those memories are gone.) I remember taking the ferry there, trying to go to a casino just to look around (Vegas-style) and having our water confiscated and then not staying long anyway, a lot of walking around and difficulty getting taxis, having more luck understanding things in Portuguese than Chinese, and having some traditional Macanese dishes for lunch.

Years ago with everything under construction ... It looks so different now

I have vague memories of what we ate (the photos help with that), but only one dish name persisted in my memory - minchi. (I know now that the others were some assorted fritters and African chicken, but that took some researching.) It seemed like an easy choice to make minchi for this challenge in honor of that trip. I couldn't remember exactly what it tasted like, but I was hopeful that following a recipe (like this one from What to Cook Today) might awaken some long-buried memories.

Minchi is a simple dish of ground meat and potatoes, often eaten with rice and topped with a fried egg. With B's allergy, we were definitely skipping the fried egg, but the rest of it looked doable. I substituted Impossible Burger for the ground beef, but otherwise generally followed the recipe, hoping that it would reawaken those memories. The first step was to air-fry the potatoes, then to cook onion and garlic in a skillet, add bay leaves and ground meat, add cumin and all the other seasonings (soy sauce, Worcestershire, brown sugar, and white pepper), and then when everything is cooked, add in the fried potatoes.

The dish looked fairly similar to our photo of minchi from Macau (other than the egg on top of that one), but did it taste the same? I don't know if I can say it's exactly like that one since it's been too many years, but it was close enough to taste somewhat familiar, which was good enough for me. It also just tasted really good, whether or not it was the same dish, so we were happy with dinner. B wasn't that into it, but he's kind of anti-sauce at the moment, so not that surprising. Very glad the challenge had a Macanese week so we could explore this, and would absolutely make this again.