liuzhou

from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

I'm going to agree with your local critic. Some, but certainly not all restaurants will give you a glass of tea (or hot water) on arrival, but it is almost never served with food. I often eat in Chinese family homes. They never offer tea with meals. Other times, yes. I've eaten in five restaurants in China in the last 24 hours and none offered tea, although to be fair, we didn't ask for any. It wouldn't occur to us to want it. Yes, dim sum is different. Dim sum refers only the side dishes that are served at morning tea, and the tea comes first. The event is called 饮茶/飲茶 (Mand: yǐn chá; Cant: yam2 cha4) meaning 'drink tea' . No one ever says "Let's go for dim sum." They go for 'yum cha'. But dim sum or yum cha is mainly a Cantonese thing. Not Sichuan cuisine. Tea houses are very popular there, but are different from restaurants. More like temples to the divinity of tea. Serious stuff. As your critic also says, Sichuan cuisine would overpower any tea. Sacrilege! However the relatively bland tastes of Cantonese food works well with tea, but as a complement to the tea, rather than the other way round.

Don't worry. All my senses were on full corn alert! To my great astonishment none turned up. Obviously the restaurant didn't get the email pointing out that western people put corn in every single dish.

Suitably fermented liquid grapes, I hope.

After a torturous disgrace of a dinner last night, today I was marched at gunpoint to another restaurant to have lunch with one of last night's companions and two other young women I know, but rarely see. One of the women ordered and we ate family style. This restaurant is odd. It thinks it's serving Western food, which it certainly isn't, but unlike most such places, it still manages to mostly serve tasty, agreeable grub. Four of us ate: Grilled oysters with minced garlic and chilli One bite salmon and crab roe in a crisp pastry shell - almost but not like Filo/Phyllo. Squid and scallops in a thin tomato flavoured sauce. Strange but good. Beef with pretty veg. As ever, the beef was overcooked. Rice with clams, mussels and shrimp. Chilli, green olives and black olives. With a spiral squirt of Kewpie mayo. These are revolting. Baked oysters with plastic "cheese". Fruit salad with more Kewpie Mayo Another bite sized attempt. Potato chips/crisps hide the mystery ingredient. It rests on a purée of purple sweet potato. The mystery centre turns out to be a lump of overcooked, gristly, inedible pork. Not dish of the day. I have no idea what this is. I didn't go there. It looked like de-constructed cream puffs with blueberries and mango. Another cut of overcooked beef. Tasty, but needed some pink. The Chinese don't do pink beef. And red scares them. With three types of mushrooms. Spicy sea snails. My favourite. So, some albeit odd successes and a couple of failures. Tonight, for dinner, I'm going to curl up at home with a nice cheese and misanthropy sandwich and a beer or five and get away from the indignity of having to eat nice food with lovely women friends. It's been a stressful couple of days.

As @heidih notes, people here get through astonishing amounts of fruit.

Tragic.

Yes, it had coconut milk. Tom yam kathi ( ต้มยำกะทิ) style. In my experience tom yum soups are usually opaque, but then then are many kinds.

The things I have to put up with! Life is so difficult! It's scandalous. Tonight I was forced to have dinner in a private room in a local restaurant with five lovely women half my age. And damn it! The place had good food, too. Five old friends I haven't seen for a couple of years. I chose the restaurant and most of what we ate. In random order as usual: Thai Style Mango Beef Chicken and Shrimp Stew Steamed Yellow Grouper This is described on the menu as "荷塘月色 (hé táng yuè sè) which means "lotus pond moonlight". It's stir-fried lotus root, Chinese celery, wood-ear fungus and carrot. Tom Yum Soup - There are shrimp lurking under the broth. It was very good. Soy sauce rice with pork and chilli Stir fried green beans with Chinese olive paste and pork floss Thai style spring rolls Fruit to finish The suffering. The suffering. And I'm having lunch with one of them tomorrow!

One of my neighbours (I don't know which) has lopped off a lump of banana tree and is leaving them in the communal area of our apartment blocks to ripen in the lovely sunshine we are experiencing. I took this photograph about an hour ago. They were there yesterday, too. She or he takes them in at night.

Restaurant woks are. And red hot, so you want a long handle to prevent roasted chef syndrome.

All my local supermarkets sell olive oil. It is a new thing though. 20 years ago, I couldn't find it at all. Still, most of it used as a skin conditioner. It is seldom used in Chinese cooking, yet strangely she uses it in many of the recipes on her site. As well as avocado oil, which I've never seen in China. We only recently started getting avocados . (Does anyone agree with me that that is a hideous looking website with way too much advertising and sponsorship?)

Not unknown, but certainly unusual. Near my home is a small kitchen equipment store, selling mostly domestic non-electric stuff (apart from a few rice cookers. Recently, it announced a closing down sale. Yesterday I popped in to have a look. I wasn't intending buying anything; I'm well-equipped. Among the items on offer were two pro bits of kit that surprised me. They were the equivalent of $11.50 USD for the two, so more out of amusement than anything else, I bit. I'll probably never use them, but they make an interesting ornament for the kitchen. Professional wok scoop. Regular, domestic size at top for comparison. Professional wok ladle. Ditto. The scoop is 74 cm / 2 feet, 5 inches long and the ladle 62 cm / 2 foot.

Thanks. Not bad for 7.00 in the morning!

I know I may have to skip lunch today (work related), so a hearty breakfast. Sausage, egg and chips.

Whatever next? I have seen Spam in China, but only in specialist shops selling imported foods, That "Sichuan" type is a new one on me. I can't see it going down well in Sichuan, though. At least, they got the Chinese Pinyin tone diacritics right.

Tonight. An hour ago. Chicken with garlic, chilli, ginger, Shaoxing wine, soy sauce and 雪菜 (xuě cài) which literally means 'snow vegetable' but is salty ferment leaf mustard. Mushrooms with coriander leaf/cilantro Rice.

Good ideas, but no. It makes a perfect tool for folding omelettes. Prior to buying this I had to use two spatulas when I wanted my omelettes to be particularly presentable. That said, I did buy it for fish flipping/serving.

Yes, it's sold as a fish spatula - mainly used for flipping whole fried fish or for lifting the same to a serving plate. But can you guess what I used it for first? No deep frying involved.

As your wiki link mentions China also has this dish or something so near as to be identical. 锅饭(guō fàn). Yes, the rice is the best bit and highly prized. Available in Chinese fast-food joints everywhere.

I bought this a couple of days ago, on a whim. I've used it once so far, but not for the advertised purpose*, although I will certainly do that in the future. From hanging hole end to end of 'blade' it is 36.5cm / 14.5 inches and the "blade" is 18cm / 7 inches wide at its maximum. * But for culinary purposes, I hasten to add. Behave yourselves!

My cheese choices are extremely limited. Locally made mozzarella is easy to find in specialist bakery supply stores as there has been a bit of a pizza fashion in recent years. The pizzas are inedible, but I can get the cheese. Cream cheese is also available in bakery shops. Cheddar cheese is available in one supermarket at the moment, but that can change at any time. They have imported cheddar from Ireland, both regular and extra sharp. The also have "Dubliner" cheese - an Irish cross between Cheddar and Parmigiano-Reggiano. Not from Dublin, despite the name - it's from Cork. Gouda and "Swiss Cheese" are even less frequently available. We used to get Danish Brie and Camembert until some clown in government misread a report, decided we were all going to die and banned all soft cheeses. It was reported shortly after that the ban had been rescinded, but the cheese has yet to return.

I picked up a can of Guinness this morning, intending to make beef and Guinness pie later. I was amused to see flag on the price ticket sign. It's enough to restart a war. Ireland hasn't been a part of the UK since 1922 and gained full independence as the Republic of Ireland in 1949, the same year Mao formed the People's Republic of China. Maybe the Guinness is well aged?

A few pages further on is an explanation of the celery's presence.