liuzhou

Another hot, hot day. Another salad. Baby squid and clams with couscous, tomato and basil. With a side of green salad.

Well, it looks like every lamb breast I have been buying, cooking and eating for the last half a century. Spring lamb, at that. Of course "Agneau de pré-salé" comes with salt and fat. Sublime.

Lamb breasts are fatty. That's what's good about them. Fat = Flavor. Leave it on!

Late dinner. Simple dinner. Linguine alle vongole.

I may be getting boring, but I'm not getting bored. It's hot here. 35ºC/95ºF at the moment. 9 pm. So another duck salad. Or maybe more than one salad. Busy plate. Duck breast meat sliced thinly and quick fried with just salt and black pepper. Lettuce, red onion, cucumber salad dressed with a lemon and olive oil dressing. Raw asparagus with basil and lemon juice. Tomato. Couscous.

Pork, shrimp and shiitake wontons in chicken broth. With lettuce.

Wait till you try live shrimp. If you can catch them. Chasing live shrimp wriggling around my plate, while only armed with chopsticks was.. was... was... interesting!

Toaster ovens are all crap at making toast. Buy a pop-up toaster for a fraction of the price and a fraction of the running costs.

Just as I read that the famed Mediterranean diet is going down the pan, that is what I decided to cook tonight. A mixture of French, Italian and Greek, I initially thought, but also included ingredients from China and India. Pork loin cubed and marinated in EVOO (Italian), white wine (French), garlic (Chinese) and crushed coriander seeds (Indian), salt and black pepper. Stir fried. Tomato, onion, raw asparagus and balcony basil. Dressing from same EVOO and Chinese wine vinegar with a drop of Dijon mustard. Served with orzo (Italian) and Tsingtao Beer (Chinese). No wonder I'm always confused.

Pan-fried pork cutlets, Fried double-yolked duck egg. Bread.

There is an interesting article here about "The Oldest Cookbooks From Libraries Around the World".

I've gone Sino-Italian. Tortellini with a spicy, anchovy rich tomato sauce. Except the tortellini aren't really tortellini - more like wontons - which are very like tortellini. They contain a pork, shrimp and mushroom filling. The tomato sauce consists of onion, fresh tomatoes, anchovies, and some of my neighbour's dried chillies which she dries outside her window just below my apartment window. She came upstairs today and said she had too many and would I be able to use them? I like my neighbours. I like tortellini wontons with spicy tomato sauce, too. Dusted with freshly ground black pepper, of course.

Very hot today, so duck salad (duck breast meat, lettuce, cucumber. Chinese chives and raw asparagus) with couscous. Salad was dressed with a Sichuan peppercorn oil and white rice vinegar dressing. Washed down with a chilled 2014 Bordeaux rosé.

Xiaolongbao with chilli sauce dip.

Several. But not me.

I knew this morning. When I woke up I knew exactly what I wanted for dinner. 12 hours later. Spicy porkburger with chips. Due to adverse lighting issues, you can't see the burger. I could have corrected that, but I was hungry and I hate cold chips! But I did whip off his overhanging cap for a second, to let you see the inside. A second burger was consumed for dessert. There were hidden tomato slices between the lettuce and the burger The blackest spots are chilli pepper flakes, not carbonised pork.

Steamed red drum stuffed with ginger, garlic, chilli, scallions, white wine. With asparagus and rice.

For a change from what? You are presuming it's a birthday cake. It wasn't. er, there is lots of piping. Look again! Don't worry the locals are quite adept at piping. Here is a cake I received in 2008 wishing me a "Nappy Birthday". OK maybe a typo (or should that be a "pipingo") on the English, but I'm not going to fault the piping or cake making.

I know. So, Koshering salt would be more sensible. All salt is kosher, so far as I understand.

As documented here. What amuses/infuriates me most are the claims that one salt is more pure than another. Pure salt is quite simply sodium chloride (NaCl)). Any flavour difference you might detect between salts are the impurities. So, any suggestion that say, Himalayan Pink Salt is somehow purer is is inherently nonsensical. Pure salt is almost impossible to buy. (and Kosher salt is a peculiarly American thing. And misnamed. Few have heard of it outside North America.)

Wowotou buns (窝窝头 wō wō tóu) stuffed with stir fried pork mince, garlic, ginger and Hunan Pickles (湖南酸菜 hú nán suān cài) 湖南酸菜 hú nán suān cài

Buns! Home made pork and shiitake buns. With a hot chilli sauce dip. By the way, I do like my little dip bowl things. They have an inbuilt chopstick rest. Because chewing is so tiring! Actually I ate eight buns, but out of a sense of decorum, probably misplaced, I photographed only four.

No.

One of my favourite ways to do asparagus is to trim it, put it in a microwave proof dish, drizzle with olive oil and a sprinkle of sea salt, then nuke it for a minute. Here is tonight's attempt. I also use the trimmings and woody ends by putting them in the potato boiling water, then discarding them when the spuds are ready. They add some mild flavour to the potatoes.

Kept it simple tonight and went non-Asian for a change. Pork cutlets with boiled spuds and asparagus. Salted and peppered the cutlets on both side and let them sit for an hour. Drizzled the trimmed asparagus with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt. Boiled the spuds along with the asparagus trimmings. Discarded trimmings. Pan fried the pork and nuked the asparagus for one minute. Ate.