liuzhou

So, continuing from last night's debacle of a dinner, I fished the sea bass I had intended cooking then from the fridge, scaled and gutted it, dried it, then made it wet again using Shaoxing wine and salt. Cut three deep slashes across its width on both sides and inserted batons of ginger, green onions and shiitake mushrooms. Stuffed the cavity with more ginger, onion and mushrooms then steamed it. Served with Malabar spinach stir-fried with garlic. And rice. And a chilli, soy sauce, black vinegar dip. The fish was beautiful despite being 24 hours behind schedule..

For what it's worth, your naan looks rather like the Uyghur bread from Xinjiang (far west China) which is also called 'naan', and is different from Indian naan.

Dinner last night was eventful, but un-photographed. I had a all the makings for dinner in the fridge and was ready to start cooking, but decided I rather fancied a beer or three to wash it down. So, before starting, I nipped out to the local supermarket which is five minutes walk at most from my apartment. I picked up a six-pack of my beer of choice and started to head back. I had to stop for a moment as a car was reversing out of the entrance to the gated area in which my apartment is. But I recognised the registration plate number, if not the car. It was a friend, but he has had his white car re-sprayed black. He spotted me, rolled down his window and asked, “Have you had dinner?” I informed him of the negative and he told me to get in and join him. It turned out he had been invited to dinner by friends of his and was taking me along, too. Perfectly acceptable in China. Anyway, I was told, I had met the hostess ever-so briefly in 1999, so that makes it even more OK. So off we set. I don’t have a car, but if I did I wouldn’t drive to that restaurant. It is a few minutes walk away. But my friend is a lazy sod in some ways. I mean he works hard but he won’t walk anywhere that has the possibility of being driven to. We got to the restaurant to find that the automatic barrier to their car park was broken and we couldn’t get in, but were told that there is a secret rear entrance. So we headed there. As my friend drove into the secret sentence he failed to notice a stone ‘island’ in the middle of the road to separate ingoing and exiting traffic and drove straight into it. I was in the back of the car, but banged my head into the empty front passenger seat, cutting my lip. There were no other injuries apart from to the vehicle which had a somewhat bashed front. In Chinese way, we stopped, completely blocking the exit and called our hostess to say we would be delayed, then took lots of photos of the wall and car etc for insurance purposes. My friend was sure he could claim, despite the accident being entirely his fault. Finally, we limped on to the restaurant. This was a huge barn-like room full of large round tables for 8 or more and every one was full. There must have been around 400 people there and the noise was overwhelming, as usual. We found out hostess (whom I didn’t recognise, at all), her husband and another male friend (whom I didn’t know either). After the customary hellos and an explanation of our lateness, I was asked if I would like a beer with dinner. “Why not?” I thought. A waitress was called over and was asked what beers they carry. “蓝带“ “and…?” “Only蓝带” 蓝带 is Pabst Blue Ribbon, a liquid which I don’t even consider to be beer. I know America does some excellent craft beers, but the stuff you export to China is dreadful. Actually, Blurgh Ribbon is made here under licence. Many of the Chinese breweries were started by Germans and still employ German master brewers. The local beer was an Austrian company until Mao took it into Chinese hands after the revolution. Their master brewer is still Austrian, though. Nice man. I've met him. I was thinking of going out to the car where my six-pack of local beer was waiting for me, but the hostess’s husband shot off to a nearby store and bought the necessary. China restaurants seldom object to you bringing in consumables from elsewhere. . They had already ordered, but as is customary, we late arrivals were instructed to order one more dish – this duty fell to me. It was a Hunan restaurant, a cuisine with which I am very familiar having lived there for two years, so I was happy to choose something. I went for a frog dish with a ridiculous amount of green and red chillies. Other dishes included a lovely chicken soup, a beef and bone marrow dish, some kind of fish, very spicy shell-on shrimp, another chicken dish, mixed pig offal with chillies, potato fritters, eggplant fritters, steamed buns and I’m sure I have forgotten something. The food was very good and I regret that I have no pictures to show you. Remember I had just nipped out to the local shops and didn’t take my cell phone or camera. About half way through the meal, a waitress toddled up and tried to hand me a fork and knife. In 21 years in China that is the first time that has happened. I thanked her but declined. It doesn’t make sense to use a fork and knife in that setting. Chopsticks are easier. We made our way through the food and the beer, except my friend who was driving. The conversation was interesting and the restaurant started to empty around us. By 8pm, it was all but deserted. Another Chinese habit. Finally, we decided we had done as much damage to the food as we could and we had definitely finished the beer, so we left with many a goodbye. Before leaving the car park, my friend, for some reason, decided to re-stage the accident and take more photographs. By the time he was satisfied with his photographic skills, I was feeling the need to void some of the beer, so I nipped back to the restaurant to avail myself of their facilities. I informed my friend as to my intentions and he said “OK.” When I returned to the car there was no car to be seen. I looked around, but couldn’t see it or my friend (and remember I had no cell phone) so I set out to walk back. After about two minutes, friend (and car) pulled up beside me, my friend asking why I had abandoned him. I still don’t know where he had wandered off to in the meantime. I’m not sure he does either. Three minutes later I was home. Tonight, I will cook what I planned for last night’s dinner and thankfully I didn’t have to go shopping in today’s monsoon-like rain. Hopefully I'll have a quiet uneventful meal by myself.

I had a duck carcase with some attached meat so made a stock with that and an onion and some ginger. Strained it then stripped meat from carcase. Put stock through muslin to fully strain, then added the duck meat, chopped potato* and carrot, shiitake mushrooms and jujubes. Lots of white pepper for a kick. Served with home made soda bread. A meal soup. *I have loved duck and potato together since I was served a duck hotpot which contained potato in a roadside shack in China some twenty years ago.

I know the article. and it is useful and reasonably accurate, although not without a few minor errors. For example, it says the celtuce tops (AA Choy here) is Lactuca sativa. Well, yes it is, but so are all varieties of lettuce. You really need to be more specific. It is Lactuca sativa var. asparagina. It is also a bit limited, to my mind, in its selection, but that may reflect what's available in the author's local Asian market. There are many more Asian greens than are covered here. It's biggest failing, I would say, is the lack of any Chinese characters for the names. They can be so helpful in clearing confusion. As @Shelby mentioned above, you can print them and take them along if there is something you particularly want. The cooking notes are certainly useful. About a year ago, I was asked (away from eG) to put together something similar but declined. My reasoning was that for every type of greens there is a plethora of names and I don't know them all. I guess no one does. The Saveur article only has a fraction of the possible names. AA Choy, for example, is commonly known as 油麦菜 yóu mài cài both in mainland China and in Taiwan. Saveur doesn't give this name. Nor does it give the most common Chinese name for water spinach - 空心菜 kōng xīn cài (hollow heart vegetable. Secondly, I know Mandarin Chinese but many of the Asian market people will speak Cantonese or some other Chinese language which I don't know. The names Saveur gives are predominantly Cantonese. Historically, Cantonese has been the main language of the Chinese diaspora, although that is rapidly changing with Mandarin becoming more common to the point where, in some cities, it outnumbers other languages (as it does by a huge margin in China)). This is another reason for giving characters. Characters are nearly always the same across Chinese languages and dialects although the pronunciation differs widely. For example, 菜, meaning vegetable, is pronounced cài in Mandarin, but choy in Cantonese, yet the character is the same. It is not my intention to be negative about the Saveur article. It is mostly correct and useful. I am just trying to illustrate the complexity of the issue. I have a number of short articles on Chinese greens on my website (along with other foods), but I always stress that any names I use are possibly local. Maybe some day, I will expand them and repost here.

Because the chicken is deep fried. You wouldn't want to do that with chopped garlic and ginger, would you? What? They are @Norm Matthews' , not mine.

I'd say for heat control. Appearance to an extent. And for balance with the Sichuan peppercorns, perhaps. I don't normally de-seed chillies for other dishes but do for this one. I've seen someone hospitalised after eating it, but then he ate some of the chillies despite being told not to.

Dinner tonight was one of my favourite things to eat, but I seldom make it. 辣子鸡 là zi jī or 'chilli chicken'. No one else was volunteering to make it, but I really fancied it, so I bit the bullet. First you have to get hold of around 50 grams of these chillies. 干指天椒 (gān zhǐ tiān jiāo) or 'dried pointing to heaven chillies' so-called because they grow on the plant pointing upwards rather than hanging down like most chillies do. Each chilli has to be cut in half and the seeds removed. A long tedious chore. Here is the chilli seed detritus. (You can plant these to get your own pointing up chilli plants.) and the deseeded halved chillies. I then cubed a boneless chicken breast (Sichuan would use on-the-bone meat and I sometimes do, but today boneless was what I had). It is marinated in Shaoxing wine and both light and dark soy sauces then deep fried until brown with crisp edges. Garlic and ginger is fried separately, the chillies added along with a tablespoon of Sichuan peppercorns. When everything smells wonderful the chicken is added along with some green onion and the whole lot heated through. Sesame oil is added at the last minute. The finished dish: To accompany this I took some sweet potato shoots (红薯苗 hóng shǔ miáo) and stir fried them with a little garlic. And rice. Most enjoyable, but I'll probably wait about a year before doing it again. The thing is you spend so long dealing with the chillies then you don't eat them! Although, they do add flavour to the chicken.

雪菜 xuě cài, meaning 'snow greens' is salt fermented, chopped mustard greens. These I bought from the supermarket, but I have made them myself from time to time. The ones on the plate below are home made. The next image is the supermarket variety. Anyway, I had some in the fridge. Usually they are cooked with slivers of pork and chilli, but I was out of pork and too busy to go get any. A rummage in the freezer produced a pork kidney, the nearest I was going to get. So I cleaned and sliced it., marinated it in Shaoxing wine with garlic, ginger and chilli, then stir fried it with the snow veg and finally some green onion.. Served with rice. I've never seen or heard of kidney with snow greens before, but I'd make it again.

I decided today to translate the ingredients lists of the three packets of mixed nuts. Just to confirm my suspicions. Once I found my magnifying glass. The small print is ridiculou8sly small. Mixed Nuts A: Cashew (the Chinese literally translates as kidney nuts) Macadamia (literally Hawaiian nuts) Walnuts Black raisins Green Raisins Dried Blueberries Mixed Nuts B: Cashews Almonds Dried Cranberry Black Raisins Blueberry Mixed Nuts C: Walnut Cashews Almonds Black raisins Dried Cranberry Not that it made much difference as I mixed A,B, and C together in one bowl. ABC

Tonight, I deferred to my adopted homeland and went Chinese. Stir fried beef with garlic, ginger, osmanthus wine, soy sauce, and finished with sesame oil and Chinese chives. Served with wilted celtuce tops. 油麦菜. I intended to finish these with some oyster sauce, but found I didn't have any. And rice, of course.

Oversight remedied.

Yes. The same. It has many names. Here are a few more: Indian lettuce; Taiwan lettuce; sword leaf lettuce

Late dinner last night. Fish (cod) and chips.

Check the name at the market. There are a couple of other 'greens' which look almost the same. Particularly, watch out for 油麻菜 which looks very similar and even has a similar name (only the middle character is different) but it tastes totally different. I should also give the Traditional characters which are often used by the Chinese diaspora (and in Hong Kong and Macao). The leaves: 油麥菜 yóu mài cài The stems: 萵筍 wō sǔn or 萵苣 wō jù

@Anna N Beautiful.

Here is the recipe from member Carolyn Phillips which sparked the original discussion.

I’m an idiot. It’s official. A couple of weeks back, on another thread, the subject of celtuce and its leafing tops came up (somewhat off-topic). Someone said that the tops are difficult to find in Asian markets and I replied that I also find the tops difficult to find here in China. Nonsense. They are very easy to find. They just go under a completely different name from the stems – something which had slipped my very slippery mind. So, here on-topic is some celtuce space. First, for those who don’t know what celtuce is, let me say it is a variety of lettuce which looks nothing like a lettuce. It is very popular in southern mainland China and Taiwan. It is also known in English as stem lettuce, celery lettuce, asparagus lettuce, or Chinese lettuce. In Chinese it is 莴笋 wō sǔn or 莴苣 wō jù, although the latter can simply mean lettuce of any variety. Lactuca sativa var. asparagina is 'celtuce' for the technically minded. Those in the picture are about 40 cm (15.7 inches) long and have a maximum diameter of 5 cm (2 inches). The stems are usually peeled, sliced and used in various stir fries, although they can also be braised, roasted etc. The taste is somewhere between lettuce and celery, hence the name. The texture is more like the latter. The leafing tops are, as I said, sold separately and under a completely different name. They are 油麦菜 yóu mài cài. These taste similar to Romaine lettuce and can be eaten raw in salads. In Chinese cuisine, they are usually briefly stir fried with garlic until they wilt and served as a green vegetable – sometimes with oyster sauce. If you can find either the stems or leaves in your Asian market, I strongly recommend giving them a try.

I didn't see a D. I guess they are just a series. Letters don't mean much in Chinese. They don't usually use letters other than to indicate a series.

Isn't it typical. Just yesterday, I mentioned to a friend that although nuts are common and so are raisins and other dried fruits, I've never seen mixed nuts and raisins on sale. I could buy each nut and each fruit separately to mix myself, but that required visits to several different shops. This morning I go shopping and without deliberately looking find these in my local supermarket! They have three different mixtures. Illustrated is mix A. I also bought mix C but haven't sampled it yet. I can't think why I didn't buy B. Tomorrow.

Wontons in a peppery chicken stock with some sort of greens which I've never been able to definitely identify, but which I like.

Odd sort of day. I hate to wait all day for a workman to come up to do some essential maintenance. I only knew he would arrive sometime today. Yes, they work Sundays - we are atheists here, don't you know? But I knew he wouldn't come before 8:30 - 9:00, so I nipped out for breakfast. Back before 8:30 (People get up early here. Breakfast starts around 6 am.) and then waited all morning. Then I knew he wouldn't come between 12:00 noon and 2:30 pm. Siesta culture. So I nipped for for some noodles for lunch. I then thought about dinner, as you do, but he was due to be doing the work in the kitchen, so I didn't wanted to start preparing, then have him turn up and I would have to put everything away again. 3:30 pm he turned up, saw what I wanted doing (I had already told him on the phone) and he said he would be back soon with some tools. I don't get it. Chinese workmen, electricians, plumbers etc never bring tools with them, arrive and say I'll go get my tools. So he did, then he had to go again to buy parts. The result was it was nearly 6 pm when he finished and I'd done no shopping or preparation for dinner. So, the freezer bailed me out again. Took some wild prawns which I had frozen and curried them. Served with a side of okra which I forgot to photograph but remembered to eat. The blue patch in the images is light coming from my computer monitor. It isn't poisonous. Famous last words

That is my idea of beauty. But I'd want some wine.

I need a bigger plate. Although it's already a big plate. I had these three yellowtail fish Gutted and fried them whole but headless. Then made a simple salad of lettuce, yellow bell pepper, mint and tomato, dressed with a lemon vinaigrette. Served with rice. As you can see, I could only fit two on the plate with the rice and salad - and it's still overcrowded. No problem finish those two and the salad. Get other fish and rest of salad. Continue. Robert is your mother's brother.

I did.