liuzhou

For me that is corn. I really can't abide it. Even one stray ear in my dinner puts me right off eating. I have no real idea why. I just find the taste and smell revolting. Yet otherwise, I happily eat all sorts of strange things. Here in China, they like to ram corn into everything, even when I specifically ask them not to. I mean the even have corn ice-cream. If that's the peak of 6,000 years of civilisation, I give up!

They are beets. The article linked to at the top of my post has more detail. The video isn't great on its own, but then they are not professionals.

https://news.yale.edu/2018/06/14/what-did-ancient-babylonians-eat-yale-harvard-team-tested-their-recipes

While I wait for @liamsaunt's pizza to arrive, I made this. Chicken legs, skinned* and covered in flour, salt, pepper, chilli powder and turmeric. Deep fried. Triple cooked chips. Flower shiitake mushrooms drizzled with OO and finely chopped garlic. Sprinkled with sea salt. Asparagus ditto. Mushrooms and asparagus nuked together for about 1½ minutes. Eaten. * Fret not. The skin is in the fridge to be re-purposed with breakfast tomorrow.

I'll have the artichoke-mushroom, please. Do you deliver? To China?

Soft boiled eggs with raw asparagus "soldiers".

This is, perhaps, a bizarre mix. But a happy one. Pork tenderloin cubed and marinaded in garlic, chilli and a commercially bottled Thai ginger sauce and Vietnamese fish sauce, then fried. A very simple green salad of baby bok choy and scallions. Orzo and tomatoes. I didn't dress the salad other than applying some sea salt. Any dressing would have been overwhelmed by the umami rich marinade juices, which ended up on the salad anyway..

Good. Yes, they can be expensive here, too. Depends on grade which seems to be based on appearance as much as taste. The price of top grade dried, wild flower shiitake can be stratospheric.

Yes, very common.

Was just wondering. Were the shiitake your friend found fresh or dried. I like both, but they are different. The fresh are even more meaty.

Often. As a kid I would be packed off for the summer to live with cousins in Fife, where butteries are also eaten. Haven't had one in decades. As I recall, they taste...well, buttery. But savoury. Not sweet like kouign-amann.

Not so unusual. Here is one such pairing I spotted on my recent visit to Vietnam. There was also a vegan place here in town a few years back. It was sandwiched between a Sichuan and a Hunan restaurant. Both very carnivorous. It didn't last long.

Stir-fried chicken and black fermented beans, with "flower" shiitake and asparagus. Rice. The chicken was marinated with garlic, ginger, chilli and Shaoxing wine. "Flower" shiitake (花菇 huā gū)

Just a cheap plastic bowl, but I like it too. I have a purple one too. Can't remember where I bought them.

Soup noodles Rice noodles, pork, Tonkin jasmine, garlic, ginger, chilli, coriander leaf. In a broth made from Chicken and pork bones.