liuzhou

Fried noodles with pork, mixed wild mushrooms, asparagus, garlic, ginger, chilli, Shaoxing wine, soy sauce and love.

I usually buy wild shrimp in the wet market where they come live and wriggling, so they are head and shell intact! The ones I ate today, I cleaned and shelled apart from tails. Heads and shells are making a stock right now. One of my local supermarkets also does live farmed shrimp, which I only buy if the wet market fails. Until recently that was rarely, but we live in strange times. Otherwise, it's possible to buy dead ones either cleaned, decapitated or fully intact apart from life. These may or may not have been frozen. Frozen are also available. I very seldom go there.

I know I cooked shrimp a couple of days ago (my memory isn't that bad), but today for the first time since January, I found my favourite large, live, wild shrimp again! Couldn't resist. Did in a Thai style red curry with asparagus, and Chinese chives.

Plenty in mine! Seriously though, imported foods are becoming difficult to find, for obvious reasons. While there is no shortage of locally produced (i.e. China) items, I cannot get my usual cheddar cheese (imported from Ireland) and I've noticed that Japanese Kewpie mayonaisse is gone (not that I ever buy it).

Yes. A very popular dish. 反沙芋头 (fǎn shā yù tóu). It's usually taro. I don't get it, either. Not normally served as a dessert, though. It just turns up at random with the other dishes at banquets.

Indeed, but Worcestershire Sauce is also popular in China, especially Shanghai. They even make their own and very good it is, too.

I cooked them for some young friends 20 years ago and they were baffled, but delighted. Although , they wanted to put sugar on them until I stopped them. But yes, shortly after that they became relatively common, led by KFC, then McD's. Western food in China is as strange as Chinese food in the west!

Damn! That cornvirus is spreading! As soon as I say I've never seen baby corn in China, look what turns up in the supermarket! Did I buy it? Don't be ridiculous! I'd rather mainline disinfectant .

Shrimp with black garlic and capers, seagrass and orzo.

Terrible picture; good breakfast. Wontons in soup with squash flowers.

No. But today China's production of corn is second only to the US and catching up. The fools love the stuff. That said, I have never seen baby corn here.

Fortunately, we are well supplied with yeast here. The Saf yeast people have a huge factory in Laibin, a city one hour south of here and China's largest domestic yeast producer, Angel has a plant right here in town. Unfortunately, my oven has died!

Why not just tell us what salts you can get, then perhaps someone can advise?

Rock salt. Same thing again. Nearly all of Brunei is beside the sea! You must be able to get some. The only real difference is the names.

Use coarse sea salt. It's the same thing. "Kosher salt" isn't available most places in the world, but sea salt is.

Yes. A lot of my cooking is “vaguely Asian“. I just get irritated on the internet (especially YouTube) when I see things labelled as “Chinese” when someone has decided to add a drop of soy sauce to their shepherd's pie or the like. Or even worse when things are described as “Chinese“ because they contain Japanese ingredients!

Sure, chao mian is available in every almost food stall on the mainland too, but is nothing like what has been pictured above. And the concept of "chao mian noodles" is linquistic nonsense in any variety of Chinese, given that mian (or mein) means 'noodles', specifically wheat noodles. If I were to go into any store or supermarket and ask for chao mian, they would think I'd lost my mind.

Without wishing to get too off-topic, it's the opposite. 'Stodgy' originally meant 'muddy' and the culinary usage followed a short time later. Its use to describe a person's thinking came from the earlier meaning.

Thanks. Now I'm baffled. Never saw anything like that before, but they sure ain't Chinese!

This is the most popular regular, everyday brand available round here.

Of course there are better brands, but hard to find and expensive. Pearl River Bridge is one one of the best internationally available mass-produced, that's all. The brands I use are probably not available in North America - I don't know, but I do have some "artisanal sauces", but don't always use them. I usually use a more common brand. Depends what I'm cooking.

Started with clam and sweet potato shoots soup. This is usually made with mustard greens, but I had sweet potato shoots needing using. Green stuff! Brined and breaded half chicken breast. The breading is spicy. With garlicky maitake mushrooms and Chinese chives. Unusually for me, no carbs except the breading!

Pearl River Bridge if you can get it is good.