liuzhou

I know the railroad car meaning came earlier than the current meaning, but long after the original meaning which is the one still used in Britain and elsewhere. The person dining.

Staff note: This discussion was split from the The Diners in Your Life topic, to maintain focus. That topic title confused me. For me and most people outside the USA, I expect, a diner is a person who dines i.e all of us! I only have a vague notion of what actually defines an American diner; anyone care to elucidate? I know the etymology, but that doesn't really help.

Nothing shameful about leftovers when they are so well used.

Mature Irish cheddar cheese on Russian rye bread with homemade spicy mango relish. Recipe for spicy mango relish

150 grams soft brown sugar 150 ml white wine vinegar 3-4 mangoes I star anise 2 cloves garlic, chopped ½ red onion 1 thumb ginger 1 red chili 1 teaspoon black mustard seeds salt and pepper to taste Dissolve sugar in vinegar then add everything else. Simmer for 25-30 minutes. Cool. Keeps in the fridge for months. Excellent with cheese or ham. Or both. Also with poultry. Duck and asparagus with spicy mango relish and rice.

I just watched episode two and loved it. Sadly, I undertand that's it. No more episodes, which is a pity as it ended on bit of a down note with that space cadet turning up! But I won't discuss the politics here. I want to go eat with Pancho! Just hold the cØrn!

Boiled duck egg on buttered rye bread. Sea salt and black pepper.

I just watched the first episode of this series from PBS. I know nothing about Mexican or Tex-Mex food, so learned a lot. In places it was even quite moving. Did get annoyed when some joker, who claimed to be able to tell which dish a cow was most suitable for just by looking at the live animal, announced that Angus beef is an English breed. No. It. Isnt. It's Scottish! Grrr! Then the Mexican journalist Alfedo something who is a terrible driver. He is driving around waving both hands in the air more than he is holding the steering wheel! But the food was fascinating.

To start: Salt and pepper prawns. Salt, Sichuan peppercorns and kashmiri chilli flakes. Prawns I bought live, but they didn't make it through the night in the fridge. Stir fried with the spices - shell and heads on. To continue: Chinese liver and onions. Pig's liver flash fried in bacon fat with white onion, bacon, garlic, ginger, Shaoxing wine and soy sauce. Bizarrely, served with buttery mashed potato. Con fusion food. Sorry. Terrible image. Having lighting problems.

Samuel Pepys Buries His Parmesan

They also explain the connection between rotting and fermenatation in some detail. I can see nothing wrong with the article.

Er, the article talks at some length about fermentation. It uses fermented or fermentation etc 19 times. Where's the problem?

It also has the offensive meaning in the UK and Ireland. Most of my antipodean acquaintances talk about samwiches and samiches, which I thought meant the same, but according to this they are different - slightly. In Russian sambo is a kind of martial art something like a cross between sumo wrestling and karate.

Dinner tonight didn't happen as planned. I went on a seafood hunt this afternoon intending to do something undecided for dinner, but someone called me and asked to meet over a meal. This was from someone who has pushed a lot of business my way over the last few years so I couldn't really refuse. The seafood can wait until tomorrow. I didn't live this long by not knowing how to safely hold fresh seafood over till next day. They were all alive when I got back from the market. The crab and oysters still are; the shrimp, alas, have gone to shrimpy heaven and been respectfully buried in my fridge. Breakfast should be interesting. The food at dinner with my contact was edible if uninteresting, but I did end up with a reasonably lucrative contract for the next year. That'll pay for a good few noodles and beer! Red Crab Oysters They were still alive when I took the picture, but clearly relaxing!

I'm not much of a burger person but I'd throw old ladies and children out of the way to get to some of those fries / chips!

I would have tweaked that recipe, too. Just as you have done. It isn't very good as it stands. Chicken wings? No way! Yes. 新疆线椒 (xīn jiāng xiàn jiāo) and Kashmiri chilli are indistinguishable if not identical. I buy Kashmiri chilli - never seen xianjiao.

The breading containing Chinese spices such as Sichuan peppercorns, star anise, fennel, cumin, chilli etc. It's a supermarket mix. They don't call it schnitzel, of course. I made that one up, but it's kind of an accurate description, I think.

I'm pretty sure some of your posts have been highlighted there. There is also a Facebook page. Perhaps more.

Nothing new. Move along.

Chinese pork schnitzel with triple-cooked chips and tomatoes. I'm painfully aware that is very similar to the mackerel and chips I posted just a few days ago, but in my current one-handed state it's easier to repeat something tried and tested rather then go hungry.

Wow! Many thanks to whoever has taken over David Ross's responsibility for maintaining the eG Twitter feed. I was very surprised to see this pop up a moment ago, especially as it has no images.

Way back in the 1990’s, I was living in west Hunan, a truly beautiful part of China. One day, some colleagues suggested we all go for lunch the next day, a Saturday. Seemed reasonable to me. I like a bit of lunch. “OK. We’ll pick you up at 7 am.” “Excuse me? 7 am for lunch？ “Yes. We have to go by car.” Well, of course, they finally picked me up at 8.30, drove in circles for an hour trying to find the guy who knew the way, then headed off into the wilds of Hunan. We drove for hours, but the scenery was beautiful, and the thousand foot drops at the side of the crash barrier free road as we headed up the mountains certainly kept me awake. After an eternity of bad driving along hair-raising roads which had this old atheist praying, we stopped at a run down shack in the middle of nowhere. I assumed that this was a temporary stop because the driver needed to cop a urination or something, but no. This was our lunch venue. We shuffled into one of the two rooms the shack consisted of and I distinctly remember that one of my hosts took charge of the lunch ordering process. “We want lunch for eight.” There was no menu. The waitress, who was also the cook, scuttled away to the other room of the shack which was apparently a kitchen. We sat there for a while discussing the shocking rise in bean sprout prices and other matters of national importance, then the first dish turned up. A pile of steaming hot meat surrounded by steaming hot chillies. It was delicious. “What is this meat?” I asked. About half of the party spoke some English, but my Chinese was even worse than it is now, so communications weren’t all they could be. There was a brief (by Chinese standards) meeting and they announced: “It’s wild animal.” Over the next hour or so, several other dishes arrived. They were all piles of steaming hot meat surrounded by steaming hot chillies, but the sauces and vegetable accompaniments varied. And all were very, very good indeed. “What’s this one?” I ventured. “A different wild animal.” “And this?” “Another wild animal.” “And this?” “A wild animal which is not the wild animal in the other dishes” I wandered off to the kitchen, as you can do in rural Chinese restaurants, and inspected the contents of their larder, fridge, etc. No clues. I returned to the table with a bit of an idea. “Please write down the Chinese names of all these animals we have eaten. I will look in my dictionary when I get home.” They looked at each other, consulted, argued and finally announced: “Sorry! We don’t know in Chinese either. “ Whether that was true or just a way to get out of telling me what I had eaten, I’ll never know. I certainly wouldn’t be able to find the restaurant again. This all took place way back in the days before digital cameras, so I have no illustrations from that particular meal. But I’m guessing one of the dishes was bamboo rat. No pandas or tigers were injured in the making of this post

Yippee! A foot!

Spanish Manchego (sheep's mik cheese) with vinegar and seasalt dressed tomatoes. Round 1.

I thought persimmons were the only fruit I've encountered that I really don't like. Then recently, I accidentally ate a dried persimmon, a highly popular snack round here. That I did like, so I revisited the fresh type. Still didn't like it, at all. But I've been buying the dried ones ever since. Dried Persimmon