With Leah back in California, I’m on my own for dinner, on my nights off. Like tonight.

I’ve never been one of those people who can do a restaurant alone, and I’m not ready for the fast food thing, and it’s basically not possible to cook in this apartment …

So.

So, I went up to Queen’s Road to a semi-Western grocery store named Taste that does some prepared meals. To see what I could see.

Well, it didn’t turn out very well.

For starters, the offerings on a Monday night are not nearly as good as they were on Saturday night, when I had spring rolls and orange chicken on rice. Far less stuff out there.

Other issues:

–The bakery is fine for … baked goods. Gummy breads, and such. No dinner there.

–Most of the prepared food is sushi. I don’t do sushi. There goes about 40 percent of the offerings.

–Over at the sandwich counter, I could have had dinky sandwiches for 35 HK dollars (or about $5), but that’s a lot of money for not much food, here, and I balked. Plus, the ladies behind the counter were cleaning up, and the the sign about “asking your server to re-warm your food” didn’t entice me. Neither did the “home-made lasagna with beef.” All I could think of was, “who’s home?” Followed by, “and how long has it been in that display case?”

–Then, I was thinking the teriyaki chicken on skewers would work, over by the sushi … but the skewered chicken was cold. And did I mention there’s no microwave in this apartment? I decided cold skewered chicken wouldn’t work.

–So, now I’m over at the last table.  The semi-warm Chinese  table. It’s a variety of stuff … pretty much all of it laid out over a bed of white rice.

I’m looking at this … and so are waves of Hongkongers. Looking, and not liking. Most of them walk away, empty-handed, perhaps headed up one story to McDonald’s.

There are packages of duck meat and pork bellies, but I don’t much like duck and pork bellies is just another word for “really fatty bacon” …

Now I’m back over looking at the containers with rice at the bottom. Several of them have chicken over the rice, but upon inspection I notice that the chicken is just one piece of chicken — hacked into similar-size bits by a cleaver.

They do that, here in Hong Kong. They don’t pull the meat off chicken. They don’t even segment chickens the way we think they ought to (leg, thigh, breast). They just whack a piece off, and then hack it into 6-7 bits — with the bones still inside.

Which maybe I could deal with if I hadn’t already, more than once, found bits of chicken bones (they shatter, you know) in my rice. And realized that what looks like a decent chunk of meat is, spread over the top of your rice, is 75 percent broken bone, skin and gristle.

So, finally, I picked out a bowl of rice topped with vegetables. Green vegetables. It strikes me that I can’t quite remember the last time I had a green vegetable in this country (it was a week ago Saturday, upon further review), so I bought that.

Here’s the good news: The thing cost 11.9 Hong Kong dollars — or about $1.50.

After getting “home” I peeled off the cellophane and realized that what I thought might be a couple of chicken bits in a sort of orange-chicken sauce … appear to, in fact, be a chicken foot — and some other, oblong piece of something chicken-ish.

I set those aside for the moment,  and went for the veggies. I was hoping spinach or maybe bakchoi … but it was just celery.

I thought I was going to have an issue with seasoning on the four-inch mound of rice below the veggies … but the vegetables are so heavily salted (at least I hope it was salt, and not industrial-level quantities of MSG)  that I didn’t really need soy or anything for the rice. Actually, I need the blandness of the rice to make the massive quantities of sodium I’m taking in almost palatable.

I spied a bit of carrot, in there, and two small slices of something brown, which I thought might be mushrooms but turned out to be (I think) thinly shaved pork. One of which was not chewable.

Yeah. Not a great result here. I ate all the rice, spit out the pork, threw out the chicken foot and nibbled a bit of meat off the chicken part I couldn’t recognize (middle of a leg, maybe?) .

But did I mention it cost $1.50? Anyway, I also had about 40 percent of another bad baguette (when will I learn?) and a big bag of M&Ms. Now I’m good.

Maybe on my next day off I try to find the Yoshinoya outlet allegedly not too far away.  Or just make myself a sandwich. That, I can do.