liuzhou

It is chicken breast. Not something I usually buy - I prefer dark meat 90% of the time. The birds are butchered in house by the supermarket staff. I don't recall seeing pre-packaged chicken bits. Regular markets seldom sell parts; just whole live birds although they will kill and de-feather them for you. But they don't normally break them down into parts.

Extraordinary History of Three London Restaurants I've eaten in the last two.

Penne, chicken, morels, garlic, ginger, chilli, white wine, scallions.

@Anna N Sorry, I did take the pics, but then forgot to post them. Duh! I apologise in advance for some of the photos. The lighting by the freezers is not conducive to arty pics. When you enter the supermaret for the first time, you'd be forgiven for thinking they must have a lot of frozen stuff here. They certainly have a lot of freezer space, but when you look inside it rapidly becomes apparent that the choice is actually very limited. These two lines of freezers only contain industrially-made dumplings and frozen buns. I never buy these and I can't work out who does. Hand made dumplings are available in store. They are frozen, but they are made daily but a young woman who stands beside the freezers making them in plain sight. While behind her, the in-house 'bakery' makes fresh steamed buns. Freshly hand-made, but frozen jiaozi. In another shorter line of freezers are these frozen "steaks". They are very low quality and 99% come with a hideous black pepper sauce, which everyone in China thinks is essential with steaks, as that is the only sauce foreigners eat! Moo! Steak and scallion pancakes? Then there is the fish and other seafood section. 墨鱼 (mò yú) - Cuttlefish 鲍鱼 (bào yú) abalone Why anyone would buy the above two, is beyond me. They have both fresh cuttlefish and abalone a few steps away. 鱼肝 (鱼肝 ) - Fish livers. The fish is unidentified. Then we have the unwrapped freezer-burnt trash. Lumps of unidentified fish Unwrapped freezer-burnt octopus. Yes, they have fresh octopus, too. They usually have various types of shrimps and prawns, also just thrown into the freezers without wrappings, but that freezer was being cleaned, so I couldn't picture them. Then the fake fish. Crab balls and lobster balls which are devoid of any crab or lobster. All surimi. Elsewhere is a small freezer full of this thinly sliced lamb and beef for hotpots. I do occasionally buy the lamb. Beef and lamb And finally 'ice cream' or, at least, that's what they call it. Chinese ice cream is terrible. It's a bad state of affairs when the best ice-cream in town is from McDonald's! That said, one different supermarket very occasionally has Magnums, which ain't bad. And that, really is it. Again, people probably go home and eat any frozen product that noon or evening, never troubling their own freezers. And with this being the supermarket with the slowest check-outs in the known universe, your loot is probably going to be thawed out before you get time to unbag it anyway.

Very, very few people make their own noodles. In fact, the only people I've met who do so are professional noodle makers, one of whom attempted to teach me about twenty years ago. I go with the majority in this. It is not worth the effort. Why spend time and effort making something so difficult to get right, when you can buy them so easily for much less than it would cost you to make them, to say nothing of the hard work and the high probability of failure? I buy my lamian (拉面 - lā miàn, pulled noodles) freshly made from a small restaurant near my home which makes them to order as you watch. They are from Lanzhou and serve the noodles in various dishes, but also sell them uncooked for you to take home. I doubt very much anyone has successfully made them from that recipe you linked to. For a start, the flour here is different (usually lower in gluten), and a herbal alkali known as 蓬灰 (péng huī), erigeron acris is added to the mix to make them more elastic. Only true masters can make the noodles without it; it takes years of practice. I had a look at a few of the "Chinese" recipes listed below, too. They are awful; full of mistakes and false information. Hainanese chicken rice isn't Chinese; it's from Singapore. Kung pao isn't from Hunan; it's from Sichuan and the recipe is nothing like Kungpao (宫保- gōng bǎo) anyway! Those recipes are, at best, American restaurant dishes, but not good ones. Some of the comments are amusing, though. Especially one comment where the person substituted almost every ingredient in the recipe for something else then announced the recipe was garbage as it didn't taste good!

This morning I passed by a local branch of Starbucks and saw this sign outside. Starbucks Cloud™ Beer Flavored Latte⁈ What is wrong with them⁈ No doubt served with these.

Toasted baguette with Marmite®. One of several.

From what I can see on the internet, "wok ready noodles" are just rice noodles and will be very soft and liable to break up. Especially if you fry them for 20 minutes or did I misunderstand that part?

Important! The ears are the best bit! I love them!

Spicy pork with coriander seeds, olive oil, garlic, chilli, white wine. Tomato and red onion salad. Served with orzo.

The food might be better, but other standards are slipping. What is the point of an other episode of "Toe Story" without any toes? 😁

Indeed! https://centurypacific.com.ph/brands/unmeat-2/

Today's scant delivery brought these Portuguese sardines which I've been looking forward to. However, I guess they're not much fun, really. What amused me was that they came with a "free" gift of a can of Filipino fried sardine escabeche (why?) and a plastic fan advertising a load of stuff they also sell. Nothing I want there, except I always wanted a fishy, plastic fan!

Information we all need! Should be taught in junior school!

I like rhubarb a lot, but can't imagine it with gin. The lemon one immediately under must be interesting, too. But I have no chance of finding either here, I suspect.

In 1980, the BBC broadcasted a play about a time traveller from the future visiting 1980s London. It was called The Flipside of Dominick Hide. In the play, the lead character adopts the pseudonym "Gilbey", after having seen a bottle in a pub. For some unknown reason, that stuck in my memory and, 40 years later, I saw a bottle in a supermarket here in China, so I bought it. It was OK, but nothing special. My preference is for Tanqueray, but I recently sampled a Scottish gin called The Botanist, which was rather good, so I may switch my allegience. I mentioned that gin here. I'm not sure why someone would say Bombay Sapphire is a bad choice. It's fine. In recent years, there has been an explosion in so-called craft beers and people do sometimes get rather snooty about their gin, making stupid claims that their choice, no doubt hand-crafted by six nuns up a mountain in Patagonia, is the only one worth opening. Ignore them and enjoy what YOU like.

great minds ... I just ordered 10g of Kaluga Queen caviar. The equivalent of $21 USD inc. delivery.

yes

Scale They are, of course, Japanese. The spoons, not my hands.

Much as it would amuse me to declare @KennethTthe winner, it can't be done. (By the way, I deliberataly didn't indicate scale. Didn't want to to limit anyone's imaginative musings!) @ElsieDI'm sorry, but no. They are a bit larger than teaspoons. @ShelbyYou could try, but you'd be there for days! @paloAn incorrect statement. @blue_dolphinis correct. They are sold as watermelon spoons, but could easily work for ice cream, too. Or yoghurt, etc.

Nope. No connection to any other purchase.

I have trouble finding my favourite flavour. Potato!

Perhaps not.