liuzhou

New Years Day 2018 Bizarrely for me, today I went vegetarian. Rest assured it was highly temporary and to placate a friend who is going through one of her food fad tantrums. Next week she will only be eating raw whale meat or something. Anyway, dinner was more pleasant than I expected. Most vegetarian restaurants here like to recreate non-vegetarian dishes using vegetable substitutes. I can't figure why? If you want a steak, eat one. Don't make a pretend one! Don't know what half of it was, but it was OK. The "eggs" are sticky rice with a shell made from rice (somehow), I was told. Then I went for a burger!

My science teacher in high school was a Mr. Still. This provoked hilarious (in out minds) jokes questioning whether he had any illicit stills, simultaneously and cunningly evoking images of both moonshining and extra-marital procreation, neither of which we really knew the technical details involved. But bless him; he did allow (and help) us to distil some potable brew or other (it was a long time ago - I forget exactly what it was) which was potent but otherwise revolting. Extra-marital procreation, or any other kind, he left for for us to work out for ourselves later.

AS posted on the Dinner topic.

Last dinner of 2017. Heavy on the seafood. No apologies for that! Oysters au naturel. $1.70 USD for 8. Should have bought more. Wild shrimp with cuttlefish ink pasta, shallots, chilli, Sichuan peppercorn, green onions/scallions.

This started as one thing and became another then another but finally it was beef and red kidney beans in a long, slow-cooked spicy tomato sauce with onion, garlic, chilli, star anise and red wine. Served with penne.

I do recommend the "Angry Chef" book mentioned in the article. An amusing, but precise take down of the non-science behind most of these "diets" or food fads. But beware if so-called profanity offends you. His relatively curse-free website is here.

I'm not saying we did, but many did. Do. Here is an article from from the Guardian earlier this year, but which I only found today and which I found interesting, although I'll admit it feeds into my own suspicions. You can read here. Or listen here.

Double Duck Fried Rice Salt cured duck leg meat, duck egg, mushrooms, garlic, shallots, chilli pepper and rice.

For over thirty years, I've been following this recipe and am happy with it. These days, I have to make my own tahini as it's unavailable here. Chinese sesame paste is not substitute!

@Norm Matthews Haha! One of my local restaurants here copied you, but they cooked the veg. The locals don't do raw.

This is part of my miserable Christmas dinner. Actually it tasted OK, but looked less so. Roasted everything on this plate: duck leg, potatoes, carrots and onions. There were also stuffed cabbage rolls and gravy which didn't make it through the photo quality control man in my head. This picture just scraped through on compassionate grounds. I have a new oven which I'm not quite used to yet, so bits were overdone and bits were just done.

They probably mean Pekin duck. That is a particular breed. Peking duck (Beijing duck) is the renowned preparation or dish.

Today, I followed tradition and had Christmas lunch with my dearest friend J. Tradition is that we always have lunch together on Christmas Eve, but neither of us can remember why. Neither of us really celebrate Christmas in any other way. What we ate certainly wouldn't be considered traditional Christmas fare and probably all the better for that! Part of our tradition is to go to a restaurant we've never visited before. Fortunately, two days ago, I noticed that a favourite seafood place had sadly given up the ghost, but had been replaced by a place whose name gave little clue to the cuisine other than beef. So, we had to investigate. It turned out to be a standard hot-pot place, but with an emphasis on beef, so guess what we ate. We arrived at 11:45 and the place was empty, although it filled up and then emptied again by the time we left. We chose our hot-pot base. I love spicy; J is less keen so we went for this. Perfect. Known as a 鸳鸯火锅 (yuān yāng huǒ guō), literally two duck fire pot, as you can see, it has spicy one side; non-spicy the other. Then we choose the beef. They offer various parts of the animal. J chose this, so I'm not sure exactly what these are. It was a picture menu and I'm reasonably sure J didn't know either. Whatever, it is thinly cut slices of beef. We also chose the next item purely because we couldn't work out what it was and the menu wasn't helping. It looked like strips of fat. but proved to be tripe from one the beast's many stomachs. To accompany our beef, we ordered some beef. Beef heart Beef balls Beef on sticks. 牛肉串 niú ròu chuàn. I love that last Chinese character - it looks exactly like what it means. These were alternating cubes of tender meat and soft fat. Lovely. J declared the beef balls "really good", but I found them a little on the dense side. But tasty. Just in case we weren't full, we also had these skewers of vegetable in a deep, pungent chilli sauce. Wood-ear fungus, lotus root etc. Nearby our table was this selection of dip ingredients from which you assemble your dips of choice. It took us three hours to get through this lot, but we were also distracted by our own conversation. A lovely lunch time. Merry Christmas! 圣诞快乐！

My heart bleeds for you! I'd be content to eat that for every lunch every day from now till doomsday. What, please, type of roe exactly in the first picture?

Sichuan 辣子鸡 là zi jī; chicken with chillies and Sichuan peppercorns. With a very non-Sichuan simple spinach salad. Rice.

Back in the summer, when I escaped from the clutches of the hospital which I had gone to for emergency repairs, but was instead tortured by demons in the kitchen, the quack-in-chief ordered me to start every day with four boiled eggs. This I sensibly ignored, but compromised with a couple of ova instead. I ate that almost every morning for about a month then thought "^$## this!" and reverted to more sensible breakfasts such as gin and tonic; spliff; cold, leftover, cheap chain pizza etc. This morning, I woke with a strange hankering for, damn it, boiled eggs. So: Duck eggs (courtesy of my neighbour's duck, although I had to boil them myself. It seems ducks don't lay boiled eggs. Who knew?) Hand made flatbread (my hands). Don't worry. I've booked a therapist appointment for this afternoon.

Yet another thrown together meal on arriving home late and tired from a work trip. Penne with kidney, bacon, mushrooms, shallots, garlic and chilli. I would have liked some herbs on top, but what you don't have, you can't have. Major shopping tomorrow. Thank heavens they don't celebrate Christmas here, so it won't be mayhem in the shops. I've given myself the next four weeks off.

No. As Anna says.

Yes, that is the most common design. Like this.

In what way does it strike you as wasteful? It seems to me to be the opposite, allowing one to measure an appropriate amount rather than too much, and then stir it into the water without needing another tool.Two for the price of one.

Yes, all these pictures were faked by the same people who did the moon landings. And a simple Google search for "miso muddler" brings up many English language links referencing its use. Obviously fake.

Time to put you out of your misery! What we have here is a Miso Muddler. You stick the business end into the miso paste and twist it. Extracting it carries out the correct quantity for a standard serving of miso soup. Put this into boiling water and stir, so that the paste dissolves. Here is the packaging And a close up of the thing in use. Some alternative designs can be seen here.

I'd treat it like any other meat and freeze it if I were keeping it any longer than two or three days.

No.

Not a lot of taste, I'll agree. But I liked the texture when cooked.