liuzhou

Home made Scotch quail egg. Spicy mango relish. You don't really think I only ate one, do you?

Happy find this morning in my local market. Chicken Skin Fruit. I mentioned these in this post four years ago. This fruit is extremely rare, with 90% of it grown right here where I live. Anyway, they are back in their short season and I couldn't, didn't want to resist.

Yes, I know. I have tried to replicate the dish several times, and although I've come up with various approximations, I've never quite got there. However, I did in my efforts fortuitously come up with a dish a like a lot. It's not at all like the one in that restaurant in taste. The restaurant dish is sweet from the mango. I came up with a sweet and sour version using Thai nam plah fish sauce for the 'sour' element. I have posted pictures in past dinner threads. Here is one version.

Hilariously sad. It was actually a tasty chicken soup, but not quite what we were expecting!

小笼包 xiǎo lóng bāo, literally 'small basket bags' with chilli sauce.

I was just about to reluctantly enter the hothouse that is my kitchen, when my phone rang. "Hey, we're in town. Let's meet up for dinner." Four lovely young ladies I worked with briefly a year ago in a neighbouring city had decided to visit Liuzhou. They suggested I suggest a suitable venue for dinner. Knowing they don't know the city well, I opted for a building they couldn't miss. It is the tallest in the entire province. That it is just next to my home did not enter the equation, oh no! Beside it is an overpriced deserted shopping mall, but the fifth and sixth floors are entirely restaurants. Some great; none bad. And very busy at weekends (Impossible at holidays.) I chose UBUD, a SE Asian place named after the city on Bali, Indonesia. Despite the name most dishes are Thai-inspired. The girls chose (with me subtly pushing them to my favourites!) Only one had eaten Thai before. As you can see, it is a picture menu. These are everywhere in China. Unlike in Europe and I suspect the North Americas, there is no class distinction. Even top quality restaurants often have picture menus. You tick your choices and the serving staff enter your requirements into their computer station and presumably the kitchen pick up on it. Food arrives. They chose: Beef with Mango Garlic Shrimp with Vermicelli This was the one failure of the evening. The girl who had eaten Thai previously strongly suggested the others try Tom Yum soup, which was on the menu, but which they announced had sold out. Unlikely. It was only 7:30 pm. Instead they chose what was listed as Thai style coconut chicken soup. What arrived was the above regular chicken soup into which someone had, at the last minute, thrown some lumps of hard raw coconut. The soup was fine but stunningly unexceptional and had no taste of coconut at all. Yellow curry (chicken and potato) bizarrely served with a couple of bits of garlic bread. Thai spring rolls Clay Pot Cauliflower and Bacon We happily got stuck in. That was good! The bill. ¥249 = $37 USD. And, no. This is a non-tipping culture.

Staggered home at around 5:30 pm in the 38ºC/100ºF evening and en route swung past the only one of two bakeries which do baguettes which was anywhere near me. I say they do baguettes, but with 50% French heritage and genes, I consider myself qualified to say they are a pale imitation, baked by someone who has never actually tasted one, but once saw a photograph. Anyway, I picked up a couple (beggars / choosers) and toddled home. I did drop one on the way and didn't notice until this woman came rattling up the sidewalk behind me on an electric scooter yelling "Foreigner! Foreigner! You dropped your... something!" in Chinese. She had no idea what it was. I thanked her profusely, crossed the road, bought a six-pack of beers and within minutes was home-sweet-homed again. I had earlier procured some pork tenderloin and diced it. Retrieved said pig meat from fridge and slathered it with sriracha sauce and garlic. (There was a moment of hesitation while I decided between red and yellow sriracha, but I went for the red. Hey, it's communist round here!) Left it for a bit while I checked out that the six pack beer was of a suitable quality and temperature for my fine-tuned requirements. The first can passed muster, but I thought that might be a fluke so tested another as a control sample, just in case. By this time, I was getting peckish, so I fried the marinated pork along with its marinade until it seemed cooked through. Didn't take long in a hot wok. Sliced a tomato. Dropped cooked pork onto halved baguette (un-buttered) and topped with tomato slices. Placed in mouth. Chewed and swallowed. Repeated twice. Then drank the remainder of the beer just in case it became too cold in the fridge or went off. Routine disaster prevention procedure. My dietary advisor would probably be having seizures, if I had ever employed such a thing, but it filled me up, made my mouth happy, and didn't involve the kitchen being a furnace for more than a minute. And I still have half a baguette for breakfast tomorrow. Genius!

May I humbly point you to my one minute cooking time dinner this evening?

Salad of squid and pre-cooked orzo with baby bok choy. Tomato salad with basil and enoki mushrooms. Dressed with a lemon/OO dressing The only thing freshly cooked was the squid which I merely blanched for a minute in boiling salted water. Dressed with a white rice wine/OO dressing. Both liberally sprinkled with black pepper.

Yes. But that is a commercial kitchen and those guys hands are scarred and burnt. I have been in hundreds of commercial kitchens across China and seen them - the hands and the woks. I've even cooked in them. I've even been in the kitchen in the video! The OP is looking for high heat in a domestic setting (something I've already pointed out Chinese people almost never aim for). You will note those guys in the video do toss by yanking the wok backwards. And splashing oil over their calloused incinerated hands. A long handle wok makes a lot of sense in a domestic set up and are also used in many industrial kitchens, too. The handle-less wok may be the "original", but the Model T Ford was the original mass produced car. I don't see many people queuing up for those today.

Quite simply. How are you going to be able to toss food with that wok over a very high flame without wearing an asbestos suit? How are you going to hold it? What the OP is/was looking for is a professional type set up. That is an amateur, domestic wok of average quality. Nothing special.

Variation on a theme: Boiled duck egg with toasted mantou bun.

So, they illustrate their round bottom woks with an image and a description of a flat-bottomed wok. Seems like they've really got themselves sorted out. Whatever, I still say the wok isn't suitable for a high-BTU burner. You really need a long-handled Beijing-style wok for that.

Following your link takes me to this The description clearly says Glad see that it weighs nothing, though.

I'll eat yellow bell peppers, reluctantly suffer red ones, but there is a total exclusion zone in my life for green bell peppers. Detestable, vile things which should be eradicated from the planet universe multiverse!

Another hot weather dish. It's now just after 11 pm. 33ºC/91.4ºF. Not sure what it was when I cooked. Certainly more. Clams with black fermented beans, garlic, ginger, white chillies, coriander leaf, scallions and Shaoxing wine. I usually serve myself this with linguine or similar, but tonight decided on a whim to try orzo. It worked very well. You can't see in my pictures but all the spicy, salty clam juices made their way to the bottom and soaked into the orzo. Happy mouth.

I'm sorry but your place sounds like somewhere I'd seriously avoid. Apart from the blatant health risks, if I want a BBQd pork chop I don't want something that has been tortured for days by people who throw at it every bit of random pseudo-technique they misread about. Take pork chop (bone-in please) and BBQ/grill the damned thing. Serve. Deal done!

That wok, as the description indicates, is a flat bottomed wok designed for use on electric stove tops and therefore is not what the OP was looking for. It wouldn't be suitable for a high heat wok burner.

Been there; done that. Regularly. Actually, it is a feature of Chinese cuisine which I particularly like. No one dreams of serving just one dish. To calculate the minimum number of dishes (N) to prepare for a meal, most home cooks count the number of diners (D) then add one. N=D+1 More adventurous cooks go for N=D+∞

Which one? Your link just goes to the company's home page.

Dinner tonight was bits and pieces cooked at various times over the last two days. Heat avoidance. I started out making Scotch quail eggs this morning at 6 am. There was also a couple of chicken legs braised with turmeric, garlic and white chillies. these were done the day before and refrigerated overnight. Then, at the last minute, stir fried fresh ramen noodles with pork, garlic, ginger, Shaoxing wine, soy sauce, shiitake mushrooms, white chillies, coriander leaf, and scallions. There was a salad, too, which failed to take advantage of its photo-op.

(Possibly) the last interview.

Huh! I once stayed a night in a hotel in Blackburn, Lancashire (cue Sgt Pepper's and A Day in the Life) and I'm sure the toast they served me at breakfast was way older than that. The egg wasn't too fresh, either.

You read correctly, I think. a) I don't always cook Chinese, as I'm sure you have noticed. b) Contrary to popular opinion, not all food in China is is cooked in seconds over blistering hot woks. My small slow cooker, which I use most, was a gift from a Chinese friend. Later I bought the second to deal with occasional larger requirements . Many Chinese dishes are slow cooked or can be adapted for slow cooking. Hong shao (red-cooked) dishes are often slow braised for extended periods, for example. Every store selling domestic cooking appliances has slow cookers. Soups, stocks, braised anything*, tomato and other sauces, can all be prepared without turning the kitchen into a furnace by using the slow cooker. Tonight I am slow cooking a couple of chicken legs and will use the meat with a ... well, I'm not sure yet. See the dinner thread tomorrow! All that said, yes I do cook most things in one of my woks. *Slow cookers are ideal for pig ears, oxtails and other tougher cuts which are then finished in the wok.

Like most people, I do not have AC at home. Nor do I want it. Apart from the environmental considerations, when I have used AC, in hotels and the like, I wake with appallingly painful sore throats. I just use fans, which are dotted around the house. The biggest one lives at the end of my bed and blows on me all night. I can't imagine using AC or a fan in the kitchen (apart from extractor fans). One thing I omitted to mention is that I use a slow cooker a lot in summer, too. Well, I use a slow cooker a lot year-round. It doesn't get particularly hot and they can be used for light dinners as well as hefty winter stews, etc. I have two: a largish one for when I have guests (seldom) and a small one with just enough capacity for dinner for one.