liuzhou

As would I have done. The best type.

Today, Muhammara and Pita Bread

Frozen Grapes in Pernod

I’m not talking about frozen fruit intended to be defrosted and used in pie fillings etc. Just freezing fruits and then eating them still frozen. I’ve been using frozen grapes as ice cubes for decades but just recently spotted something that grabbed my interest. Frozen Chinese bayberries. I’ve long liked bayberries but frozen was new. You just pop in in your mouth straight from the freezer. Since then I’ve been experimenting. Strawberries are great too, but the recent local glut of litchis / lychees led me down another avenue. First I had to decide whether to peel them first or not. I tried a couple unpeeled and never looked back. When they come from the freezer, they need sitting for a minute or two, but then peel easily – another new favourite. Freezing them seems to intensify the flavour. Ideal summertime snack. Frozen Litchi - Straight from the Freezer A couple of minutes later Do you ever eat frozen fruit? If so which? I’m waiting for the new mangosteen crop to arrive. I know they don't defrost well, but I wonder what they're like still frozen.

It's called skin. You keep potatoes in the fridge? Why?

er Google returned this. Hosta - Wikipedia also known as plantain lily, although technically that is just one specific cultivar of hosta.

It is certainly possible to make the noodles at home, but extremely few people do. It takes a lot of skill and it's considerably cheaper here to buy them pre-made. The actual dish is easy once you have the noodles.

Miserable day. I awoke this morning at 6:30 and crawled to the kitchen around 7:00 to find I had no water supply. Now 8:30pm and still none. A major city-wide failure. I've never known anything like it. So no cooking. I managed to find a tiny pocket of the city with a functioning watered restaurant and ordered this for delivery. I don't know what you call it but the restaurant and I call it a Sichuan flavour boneless chicken and salad wrap. They offer it sauced in four spiciness levels: un-spiced, mildly spiced, damn spicy and what I would call volcanic but for some reason, they call 'tequila'. I went for damn spicy. And damn fine it was, too, despite its looks.

Yes, I've seen 油泼扯面 (yóu pō chě miàn) translated as 'hot oil noodles', 'slippery oil noodles' 'oil-sprinkled noodles' and others.

Thanks for letting us know. It was never a big issue. Irish pubs have that effect. Love them!

For a long time after biang biang mian appeared on the streets of China’s ancient city of Xi’an in the early 2000s, signs or menus utilising the name were all hand painted. It appeared in no dictionaries and was impossible to enter as a computer character. However the dish was far from new. I ate it often when I lived in Xi’an in the 1990s, yet never saw that name. It was 油泼扯面 (yóu pō chě miàn), literally ‘oil-splashed torn noodles’ and very popular. Some restaurants in Xi'an today sell 油泼扯面 to the locals and Biang Biang noodles to the tourists at a higher price! Today the character used to describe them is more famous than the actual dish. It is said to be the most complex character in Chinese, made up of 42 separate strokes in the most widely accepted version. The character is said to be onomatopoetic, ‘biang’ resembling the sound of the smack of the dough hitting the table when they are being stretched. 面 (miàn) means wheat noodles. The trouble is the biang character is a new and unofficial invention. Its origin is murky, with a cited notion that it was invented in the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC) having been long debunked. There is no record of it before the 2000s. The most likely and accepted story is that it was invented as a marketing tool by one of Xi’an’s more imaginative noodle shop owners (although no one agrees which one). There is another story believed by some that it was invented by a local university student as a way to pay for a meal he could otherwise ill afford. Again, which university, and Xi’an has several, is never identified. It took until March 2000 for the character to be added to Unicode in version 13.00, but that version has still not been adopted into all platforms or fonts. However, it is now here on eG. 𰻝𰻝面 (biáng biáng miàn) Rather idiotically in my view, some clown has gone on to develop a Traditional Chinese version, 𰻞𰻞麵. (‘Traditional’ Chinese). However, the size can't be altered in the trad font. hmmm. Apart from the question as to how can anyone invent a new ‘traditional’ anything, Traditional Chinese is very rarely used in mainland China where the dish’s new name concept was invented. Also, others have sought to ‘improve’, on the original by adding even more strokes, with versions including up to 70 strokes. I have only given the most accepted version (and the ‘traditional’ one for its very slight amusement value). Here is my local biang biang shop. As you can see they couldn’t write biang biang other than in Roman letters The shop name 忆长安 biangbiang 面 means Remembering Chang’an Biangbiang Noodles, Chang’an being the ancient name of Xi’an, in the Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD) the largest and richest city in the world. And their noodles. PS. The character 𰻝 still appears in no Chinese dictionaries.

How unusual. I've been photographing Guinness for years on three different continents and never seen anything like that. It must be a peculiarity of the light rather than how the pub serves their Guinness. Coloured light, perhaps.

@Neely I'm 99.99% certain that isn't Guinness in your last picture. However, there is Guinness in your first.

海鲜炒米粉 (hǎi xiān chǎo mǐ fěn), seafood fried rice noodles.

It seems like chilli peppers in general like lots of light and are heavy nutrient feeders Chilli peppers are my most successful balcony crop (in a very short list). My success I put down to fortuitously having a generous supply of sunlight on my east facing balcony. (And yes the same feeding regimen of bloom nutrient.) I stick to local cultivars such as 'facing heaven'.