liuzhou

Another day. Another round of needles and probes. Another lunch. Another 14元. Pork with carrots. Pork with some kind of squash. Bok Choy. This duplication of pork dishes seems to be a feature. Minced with the carrots; sliced with the squash, today. Other features are the three vegetables and excessive (to me) mound of low quality rice. Can't wait to see if the pattern is repeated at dinner. Probably.

Sorry, Woks of Life, but 捞面 does not translate as you have it. 捞 translates as 'dredged' or 'fished out'. 面 translates as many things but here 'wheat noodles'. Nothing to do with stirring or any other wok technique. The noodles are briefly cooked in a pan of water from which they are dredged or fished out before being incorporated in with the other ingredients in the wok.

Before I end up on the missing members' list, I should report that I am on the back-in-hospital list. While this is obviously not a good thing, it has some benefits. This is my third stay in hospital in nine months but this time I had the choice of which establishment to grace with my broken body. I chose the city's largest non-TCM hospital rather than the TCM place I used before. Within an hour of arriving at this hospital they had diagnosed what the TCM had missed and therefore left me suffering for nine months. Now I'm being treated with good, healthy drugs and painkillers instead of witches' brews and tiger penis soup. For the technically minded or just the purient, I am suffering from a previously undetected compression fracture probably caused by a fall in September last year and which erupted in excruciating pain yesterday. I feel better already just from finally knowing what the problem is rather than having to make increasingly ridiculous and ever more terrifying guesses. Two main problems remain now. First a near total lack of internet. This hospital doesn't have wi-fi so I'm reduced to my cell phone which sadly has no VPN to get me past China's insane censorship. In addition to a lack of internet, there is a lack of food. The choices for lunch and dinner is limited to two set meals at each. The 14元 meal or the 17元 meal. There is no indication what these may be until they turn up at your bedside. Breakfast is slightly better with a choice of buns, rice porridge (congee) or noodles. Here is my 14元 meal tonight. 茄子肉末 🍆, eggplant with minced pork; 莴笋肉片, celtuce with sliced pork; stir fried cabbage and a ton of rice. It wasn't bad but could have been better seasoned - as ever Not only is my meal choice sparse, so may be my posts here for the immediate future but don't give up on me yet.

I realise this is a very old topic, but as David Ross reminded us often, Cook-Off topics are not time limited. And anyway, I'm sure there's more to be said on the subject. I just came across this one today and feel I must point out a couple of oft-repeated errors and attempt to resolve some unresolved confusion. The errors both involve the name. First of all, @alanamoana claimed twice that xiaolongbao literally means 'little dragon buns'. No. It. Doesn't. 小笼包 (xiǎo lóng bāo) literally means 'little basket buns'. The confusion has arisen here from the Chinese for 'dragon' (龙) being a homophone (having the same pronunciation) of the word for basket (笼). Different, if similar, characters. I see that Ah Leung also addressed this but disagree that the confusion being anything to do with 'mainlanders' being too lazy to write the character correctly. I've never seen it mis-written in Chinese. Only seen mistranslated. Then a different member says that XLB are soup dumplings. Again, no. Soup dumplings are XLB, like dogs are animals, but animals aren't usually dogs. There are many types of XLB which aren't soup dumplings. Then there is the wrapping confusion and the question of whether these should be of the pasta-like variety or more bready like found in Baozi or steamed buns (often made with high gluten flour). Here in China both can be found. Soup buns, more properly known as 汤包 (tāng bāo) or 小龙汤包 (xiǎo lóng tāng bāo) tend to be of the former type, but certainly not always. Finally, Ding Tai Fung is a Taiwanese chain and their soup dumplings slightly different from those found in Shanghai. Not that they originated in Shanghai either.

I usually head to the fresh fish section where their wares lie on beds of ice, then rub my fingers on the ice to moisten them.

Insane! For the price of your single lychee, I can buy a kilo! Almost.

Sorry, it's an old post and I just noticed that sentence. May I ask why?

This was somewhat optimistically described as 海陆空至尊炒饭 (hǎi lù kòng zhì zūn chǎo fàn), sea land air supreme fried rice. The sea was a couple of shrimp, the land was both beef and bacon and the air was chicken. Yeah, I know they can fly but... It also contained, egg, carrot, green soy beans, green onion and the dreaded c⊘rn, which I carefully extracted and threw out of the window.

Spicy, salt and pepper prawns (with coriander leaf and Chinese chives).

Today's harvest. And a refill of bayberries.

I'm sorry, but I only know the local Chinese names which I don't think will be of much help to you. I'm not sure how they relate to Canadian names, if at all - they may be local cultivars. For the record, these are known as 王中王大芒果 (wáng zhōng wáng dà máng guǒ) which translates as 'King of Kings Large Mangoes'

That's my usual excuse, too!

That is exactly the misinformation I was talking about. Waxberries are emphatically not Myrica rubra. These do not have any waxy coating.

White wine vinegar is a fruit vinegar!

Rice vinegar and rice wine vinegar are the same thing. All vinegar is technically some kind of fruit wine based. The name is from the Old French vyn egre, meaning 'aged wine'. In botanical language a grain of a cereal plant is not a ‘seed’ but a ‘fruit’ of the kind called caryopsis. As with most things, the flavour varies with brand but, in general, I find the rice vinegar milder than many western vinegars.

Just to even things up, here is an example of the Chinese creating their own food myths for once. Today, I posted this image in the Fruit topic. These are 杨梅 (yáng méi), Myrica rubra. At least half the time, I see these descibed in Chinese literature written in English as waxberries. Waxberries they certainly ain't. A search for the Chinese name turns up all sorts of hits including from China Daily, the Communist Party controlled, biggest circulation English language newspaper all the way through to Chinese students' blogs, with many saying they are waxberries. They are, in fact, Chinese bayberries and I love them. You are unlikely to come across them though as their importation is illegal in many western countries, not because of the fruit itself, but because of the insects the fruit attracts. I don't know about where you are but we do get dried samples when the fruit is out of season and they aren't bad, but the fresh, as usual, are much better. They are also used to make wine. 杨梅酒 - Bayberry Wine

Although I can get western type vinegars easily, I do most of my pickles in Chinese white rice wine vinegar which I find to be much milder. My pickles tend to be of the quick variety, although I have done longer treatments with results which please me.

The bayberries in the above picture aren't very clear so here is a better image. In Chinese, 杨梅 (yáng méi). They are native to these parts.

Today's haul. Mangoes, lemons, limes, lychees, bananas and bayberries.

KFC just sent every cell phone in the city this ad for their latest breakfast choice. They are turning into a noodle shack. 葱油拌面 (cōng yóu bàn miàn), literally 'scallion oil mix noodles' although together the last two characters refer to noodles with soy sauce. ¥14 ($1.95 USD) is a steep price for this dish. The same (better?) dish can be had yards away for half that.

There are many of them. But then the Chinese have long loved pressure cookers. Midea and Supor are generally considered to be the best brands. I've never been tempted.

You are welcome. What is awesome is watching them being made fresh. A skilled chef holds a great lump of dough in their left hand/arm and with their right shaves off bits of dough which fly through the air and land in a large pan of boiling water. These are skimmed out seconds later and served. Cabaret with lunch! There are videos on YouTube (which I can't reach at the moment). Use the translation or the Chinese to search.

It shouldn't, nor did I say it did. What does matter is when a chef introduces a new dish of his/her own devising or makes a wild guess at a recipe without knowing anything about the cuisine they are 'contributing' to. See the topic below for examples.

The crispy noodles originated in Hong Kong, possibly influenced by the British who ruled it from 1841 to 1997. They would originally have been rice noodles. Certainly, crispy noodles aren't found anywhere else in China that I know of.