liuzhou

Chicken and Mushroom soup with ginseng and jujubes. More info on the Soup Topic.

Of course not. You pay for the advertised dish. If ýou order a cheeseburger but dont eat the cheese, do you expect a discount?

It's a pity your friend didn't give you plants rather than cuttings. You could try planting cuttings, but whether they will survive is unsure. I've never had much luck with basil cuttings. My plants are still doing well in November, but it's warm here. They do want to flower, but I remove any flowers as soon as they appear. That is one of four plants on the balcony. I do have two plants which I have allowed to flower as I want the seeds for next year. As to your immediate needs, I'd be eating a lot of Thai or Vietnamese food and making lots of pesto or the French version without pine nuts, pistou. Both freeze well.

Clam and Mustard Green Soup. (车螺芥菜汤 chē luó jiè cài tāng ) Chicken stock, garlic, red chilli pepper, white pepper (lots*). clams and mustard greens. *by lots I mean what appears to be far too much. I give 25 twists of the pepper grinder.

America ginseng, Panax quinquefolius is a different sub-species from South China ginseng, Panax notoginseng. I have seen the American variety here, but it is rather expensive.

This is the root of a plant, so I vote that it belongs here. 人参 / 人蔘 (Mand: rén shēn; Cant: jan4 sam1), Panax notoginseng, is South China Ginseng. The plant is extinct in the wild, so all available now is cultivated. Seldom available fresh, the dried root is mainly used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), but also has culinary uses. It is used to make ginseng tea and canned energy drinks and is also used in soups, especiall;y with chicken, and in hotpot stocks. The taste has an earthy sweetness similar to carrot, and a slightly bitter aftertaste.

There is a small pizza place here in town. While the Chinese generally have no idea how to do a pizza, this one is better than most and bearable when I'm really too tired to cook. However, like every other such place they throw c*rn into every pizza. There I ask them to omit it, because I know they are going to assemble the thing to order right in front of me and missing a listed ingredient is not going to interrupt the flow of their service. One time, I found myself unhappily in Pizza Hut - not my idea. I requested Pizza No. 21, but without the c*rn. No can do! Impossible! That's when I remembered that Pizza hut's 'pizzas' are pre-assembled in a factory hundreds of miles away and shipped frozen to the individual restaurants.

Picked me up a nice piece of pork. Trimmed most of the fat and rendered it down. Sliced the flesh, salted and peppered it and left that in the fridge for 2 hours. Chopped shiitake mushrooms, 红枣 (hóng zǎo) aka jujubes and black garlic. Fried the pork in olive oil. Fried the mushroom mix in the pork fat (now lard). Flamed the pork with some nice Armangac. Rested the meat while pouring and scraping the cooking juices and bits into the mushrooms. Served with simple boiled potatoes and greenery which I didn't bother to photograph. You know what they look like. Put into mouth. Armangac and Jujubes

You could have a look at the Chili Cook off, where there are over 300 comments discussing chili.

A few years back, these cucumber slicers were a craze here - not for culinary use however. People (women) were slapping slices of cuke all over their faces for some supposed therapeutic benefit. The craze stopped as suddenly as it started. Not before I did buy one however. Hardly ever used it and have no idea where it is now. Never slapped cuke to my visage, though.

I regularly walk past neighbour's homes and nearly choke on chilli fumes. It's just part of daily life here! I do the same to them!

Did you use fresh chillies there? Some look fresh. La zi ji is made with dried chillies.

One thing I forgot to mention is that these Miao people like to play drinking games. Here is one example where the women pick on a man and force him, in an artistic manner, to down far too much home made-rice wine poured down a series of bamboo channels. I declined to partake, claiming ill-health, which no one believed. I hate their rice wine and I like to drink at my own pace. They graciously passed me by and this poor chap got the prize! Apologies for poor video quality. It's crystal clear on my original, but not on YouTube. No idea why!

What needs to remembered is that most of the cooks in those Chinese restaurants have never been to China or eaten "authentic" Chinese food, so couldn't offer it if they even wanted to. Chinese Cusine and Chinese Americann cuisine are two very different things.

This reminds me of the restaurant scene in the movie "Hell or High Water".

I agree with the first part of your sentence. The second part, no. You are not their employer; you are their customer and entitled to buy and, hopefully, enjoy the product they are offering. I'm sorry, but you have no right to demand anything they don't offer for sale or alter anything unless they give you that choice. It isn't pick 'n mix or build your own pizza unless they say so.

I'm with the chef on this one. After all, a restaurant is just another shop. You wouldn't walk into any other shop and demand something they didn't offer for sale! If you don't want what the restaurant offers, why did you go there? There are others!

Yes, but they age rapidly and become inedible before deliquescing. You got to catch them at the right moment when they first pop up.

Pass

As noted in the Wikipedia article @nonblonde007linked to, very closely related species grow here in China. We eat them, but when younger than your example.

It says under her avatar. Location:Limousin, France

This kind of amused me in the supermarket this morning. Sea salt pineapple mints sugar? "Sugar" here is a common mistranslation for "candy". The two words are the same In Chinese. No. I didn't buy them!

Spicy turmeric chicken with shiitake mushrooms over orzo. The chicken thighs were rubbed with turmeric, cayenne, sea salt and olive oil and left for about half an hour, then braised for about 3-40 minutes. Shiitake were added for the last four minutes. Finished with Chinese chives and coriander leaf.

Tea is seldom drunk with food in China. Before or after eating, maybe, but tea drinking is generally an activity requiring full, undistracted concentration on the tea. One exception is 饮茶 (Mandarin: yǐn chá; Cantonese: yum cha), the breakfast meal where one eats 点心 (Mand: diǎn xīn; Cantonese: dim sum), but despite 饮茶 literally meaning 'drink tea', not everyone does even then.

Buttery scrambled (chicken) eggs with flying fish roe and chives. On flatbread.