liuzhou

I've mentioned this before. My go to sauce. Except it maybe isn't a sauce at all. The Chinese means chopped chilli. But I used to buy it in 210 gram jars. Then I got excited when I found it in 425 gram jars. Today I'm having chilli orgasms. 2.3 kilogram jar! 210 grams 425 grams 2.3 kilograms!

Thanks, but I think I'll stay with mine.

What is a 'smokie' to you? Not from Arbroath obviously.

Matterhorn no more: Toblerone to change design under ‘Swissness’ rules

I wouldn't.

I just read this word mince on a London restaurant's website and had to take a sedative. "Built on a studio ethos, we are a restaurant, bar, art and performance space that moves and shifts with the seasons via its curated collective program." Utter pretentious nonsense.

The white one grips any screw top from 0 to 3 inches in diameter; the all metal one goes up to almost 6 inches. I don't think it would open anything else other than screw caps nor was it intended to. For the other necessities I use my ancient, well-used waiter's friend.

Imported from Bombay (Mumbai).

I was going through a box of stuff from my countryside home, which I recently sold and found these which I had forgotten about. The white handled one is great, but only deals with opening lids on smaller jars, where as the all metal one is more accomodating of a range of sizes less comfortable to use.

This is definitely food and drink related. A friend with a sense of humour decided I needed this. It's a cup and came with an unexpected teaspoon.

Chicken heart fried noodles with Shaoxing wine, garlic, culantro and chilli oil.

These are sold as 天然海笋 (tiān rán hǎi sǔn), which means ‘Natural Sea Bamboo’. However, a search for sea bamboo on the internet in English or Chinese returns several answers, none of which fit these. One option offered is Sea Bamboo (Ecklonia maxima) 南极海笋 (nán jí hǎi sǔn, literally South Pole sea bamboo), but that only seems to grow around South Africa making it an unlikely candidate and anyway, it doesn’t look the same. Another appears only around Chile. Those results concerning animal species are definitely ruled out So, no positive identification, for now. These little tubes seem to be the stems of a young variety of kemp which have been dried and chopped into approximately 6 cm / 2.4 inch pieces. They are rock hard when purchased and require 3 hours soaking to rehydrate them, after which they expand to around 8 cm / 3.2 inches. Dried Sea Bamboo The rehydrated stems are slimy to the touch but that disappears on cooking. They remain slightly firm on the teeth. The tubes areadded to soups and hotpots and can also be stir fried. Rehydrated According to the packaging

Fried salted broad beans aka fava beans.

My main problem distinguishing lemons from limes here is that we get a lot of green-skinned lemons known as 青柠檬 (qīng níng méng, literally green lemons). Limes, on the other hand are 青柠檬 (qīng níng méng). I rarely find limes.

Yes. The end nearest the peduncle (if it were still there).

I don't thing they are. As they say, the arrow in the first image is pointing to the junction between the peduncle and the calyx and not to the peduncle itself.

peduncle Nat. Hist. (pɪˈdʌŋk(ə)l) [ad. mod. Bot. L. peduncul-us footstalk (Linnæus Philos. Bot. §82 D, Pedunculus, truncus partialis elevans Fructificationem nec folia), dim. of ped-em foot. In L. only as a late variant of pedīculus, pedūculus louse. In F. peduncule (1765 Encycl.), pédoncule (Dict. Acad. 1835).] A comparatively long and slender part forming a support or attachment for some other part or member in a plant or animal body; a footstalk. 1.1 Bot. The stalk of a flower or fruit, or of a cluster of flowers or fruits; the primary or main stalk, or one of the general stalks, of an inflorescence, which bears either a solitary flower, a number of sessile flowers, or a number of subordinate stalks (pedicels) directly bearing the flowers. (Distinguished from a leaf-stalk or petiole.) Also sometimes applied to other stalks, as those that bear the fructification in some fungi.

In my mental dictionary peduncles are stalks or stems.

Nori flavoured crackers, cheddar cheese and nori.

Women Gathering Seaweed by Katsukawa Shunko, 18th Century - PD Of the top three most consumed seaweeds in Japan we come to the third after wakame and konbu, and which is probably also the most well-known in the west. But as we will see, it is not exclusive to Japan or Japanese cuisine. Nori (Japanese 海苔) originally and historically just meant seaweed but by around the 17th century, by a process linguists call ‘narrowing’ became restricted to members of the Porphyra family. In common usage in Japan it usually refers to P. tenera. In English, it is usually called ‘laver’. Nori was originally eaten as a paste until, around 1750, it began to be made into sheets using paper making techniques. The nori industry in Japan was in decline after WWII due to the seaweed being foraged from the wild and to its often being damaged by typhoons and other storms etc. Also, just as importantly there was little understanding of the life cycle of porphrya so there was no successful cultivation of nori farms. Around the same time and before, Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker, an English scientist from Manchester was studying P. umbilicus, another member of the same family which to this day is gathered in Wales and parts of England as well as Ireland and consumed in the same manner as what we now know as nori. Her most significant finding was that porphyra requires bivalves and their shells in the initial stages to be able to develop. She also determined that egg shells could be used instead of the bivalves. Her 1949 published paper was picked up by Japanese scientists and by 1952 Fusao Ota and others had developed artificial seeding techniques, which rescued the entire nori industry. Drew-Baker, known in Japan as Kassurine-San, never visited Japan, but she is still honoured there as “Mother of the Sea“. Each year on April 14th there is a Drew Festival in Uto, Kumamoto where there is a shrine to her memory. Every year garlands of nori of that year's crop are placed around the shrine. Whether she ever ate sushi is not recorded! In the 1960s and 1970s nori became more available in the west due to the hippie-favoured macrobiotic diet and the growth in the popularity of Japanese restaurants. Nori is, of course, used to wrap sushi rolls and お握り (rice balls) but is also served with noodle soup dishes or toasted and seasoned to be eaten as a snack food. It also flavours other snack foods such as crackers and even Lay's have their use. Dried Seasoned Nori In China, nori is known as 紫菜 (zǐ cài), literally ‘purple vegetable’ and is often used in soups. The seaweed and egg soup on your local Chinese restaurant menu often contains this. It is formed into dried flying-saucer shaped discs and sold in most supermarkets. China also goes down the snack route the same way as Japan. Chinese seaweed and egg soup In Korea, the favoured porphyra is P. yezoensis although they use other varieties, too. It is referred to as 김 (gim, kim). They also have popular snacks using 'gim'. Back in Drew-Baker’s land, P. umbilicalis is gathered around the shores of Welsh, Western English and Irish waters, boiled for hours and made into paste balls which are then coated In oatmeal and fried. The resulting laverbread (sometimes written as lava bread); Welsh: bara lafwr or bara lawr; Irish: sleabhac. This is traditionally eaten for breakfast along with bacon and cockles. It is high in protein, iron and especially iodine. Laverbread and toast - PD Dried nori should always be stored in a cool dry place preferably with a dessicant. This jar contains nori slices and a large box of dessicant at its base.

I see these all the time in my local supermarket; have done for years. I think I only bought them once - used them in garnishes that needed some citrus. Maybe on a drink. No substitues for limes!

Yeah, I saw some of that when it was originally on BBC.