liuzhou

The chicken skin fruit trees have just cropped and it's a bumper harvest this year. These pictures were sent me by a friend in Wuxuan, a town near here.

That what the sandalwood boards are - slices of tree trunk. I've seen the same with the other true woods I've mentioned.

I do regularly eat white button mushrooms. Never had a problem in 50 + years.

Yes, but.... They last for a few days, which baguettes in France (or Vietnam) don't. In France four hours at best. In Vietnam, bánh mì sellers get two or three deliveries or bake the same number of batches throughout the day. In France, you have to get up early or go without.

We also get 法棍 (fǎ gùn), literally French sticks. These are baguettes 🥖. Sometimes. Never great, the best come from Walmart or a Taiwan chain of restaurants here on mainland China. Those from local bakeries are highly unpredictable. They aren’t anywhere close to the real French baguettes my French grandmother bought every morning, but are edible bread. Walmart China Baquettes

The rosewood is too hard a wood and my knives don't like it. The bamboo ones are the ones I use more for cutting bread or soft meats (not the same boards) but scar easily if I say, chop through bones. I prefer boards somewhere in-between. I have three different sizes of the bamboo but I generally prefer the sandalwood for heavier use. Must get a new one. The old one disappeared in my last house move.

Are croissants bread? Arguable. Wikipedia describes them as a cross between bread and flaky pastry, but Wikipedia is flaky, itself. The Chinese name is 牛角面包 (niú jiǎo miàn bāo), literally cow horn bread. Whatever, the vendors of these translate them as croissants which they 100% aren’t. Although hinting at being crescent-shaped but forgetting to curve, in fact, in addition to looking slightly under baked, they contain in their depths industrial ham and pink slime sausages dressed with sweet mayonnaise. A hanging crime in that France.

Maybe in southern Asia, but in China and SE Asia most cutting boards are made from bamboo (not technically a wood, but a grass). A few more are made from Ironwood, rosewood or sandalwood. I have both bamboo and rosewood. Neither are great.

Here is the Guardian's Felicity Cloake's take on it How to make piri piri chicken – recipe | Chicken | The Guardian

Titanium. Idiotic idea. I do buy this. Seldom use it, but it's very cut resistant and seems kind to my knives. Handy in emergencies.

But enough good news. As if the abovementioned toast wasn't bad enough, beware of this. It is the dreaded 'toast' again but this time unsliced and worse. It is called 红豆吐司 (hóng dòu tǔ sī) and is flavoured with sweet red aduki bean paste. Very sweet and nasty cake; not what I call bread..

However dire, offerings are, there are a few honourable exceptions, top of which I give you 馕 (náng). This is a speciality of China’s huge far-western province of Xinjiang which borders Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Russia and Mongolia. Xinjiang is predominantly populated by the Muslim Uyghur people and has a very district cuisine. 馕 (náng) comes from there. In the Uyghur language, they call it نان (nan), meaning bread.. This in turn comes from the identical Persian word for bread. The main type of Xinjiang bread is of course, what is now known in the west as naan, although it was spelled ‘nan’ in English until around the 1970s. This I can find in many of the popular Xinjiang style restaurants found all over China. Again, seldom baked in homes, in Xinjiang it is sold in the many naan bakeries in every town or village. Unlike Indian or other naan, the Xinjiang variety is usually ornately decorated. Xinjiang nang Sadly, I can also get Mission brand Indian style ‘naan’ which is foul in comparison. Sweet and cloying. Indian in appearance only. Mission 'Indian style' naan. I'm on a mission to eradicate it.

Yes, I can easily get the necessary. In fact, I used to make my own regularly. In a large toaster oven. However serious health issues over the last few years put an and to that. I'm no longer physically able to.

The temperature hit 38℃ today, so I cooked as quickly as possible then served it cold. Stir fried freshly peeled shrimp (by which I mean they were alive ten minutes before they hit the wok. Stir fried octopus Served those to myself with a Mission brand Naan. God it was awful. Only took one bite. Sweet and cloying.

Yes.