Kake

Dinner tonight: plain stirfried Chinese leaf (大白菜); and Fuchsia Dunlop's chicken with chillies (辣子雞). Served with jasmine rice.

I have an overview of Chinese cucumber salads/cold dishes on my blog, which may be of interest. I think the variation you describe is of a kind that I've also had trouble finding recipes for, though. Here's a picture of what I'm thinking of: I'm wondering if simply marinating cucumber pieces in a really good chilli oil (with bits) would be a good start. I like Sunflower's recipe for chilli oil. I've also had a really savoury version of this that reminded me somewhat of the sauce from mouthwatering chicken (口水雞/kǒu shuǐ jī). That might be another good thing to try.

So in the end I did a few more websearches, with the help of Google Translate, and got the impression that the 木耳 are usually boiled briefly (around 3 minutes or so) for this dish, rather than fried. So I did that instead, then drained them and dressed them with black vinegar, a bit of sugar (not enough to make it sweet, just enough to balance the vinegar), a splash of soy sauce, and some home-made chilli oil, including plenty of the chilli "sludge" from the bottom of the jar (I ran out of sesame oil while making another dish, or I'd have added some of that too). It was pretty good, though I think it would have been better if I'd boiled the 木耳 in chicken stock rather than plain water. I'd still be interested in hearing from anyone who knows how this dish should be made!

I've had this dish a few times, and I don't remember it ever being particularly sweet, no. The most recent rendition (not the one in that picture) was fairly spicy, to the point where someone who wasn't used to eating chilli-enhanced food would have had a problem with it. Your suggestion sounds plausible, and I'll give it a go if nobody else weighs in — thanks!

Does anyone have a good recipe or some hints for making the spicy wood ear (木耳) salad served as a cold dish? The sort of thing pictured here.

I would love to know more about this device/custom, but have failed to find the earlier thread — can anyone point me to it? I'm also not having much luck Googling for more information elsewhre, so would appreciate any suggestions of potentially useful search terms. Kake

You can also do this with sweetcorn; it's then called golden sand corn (金沙玉米) or more prosaically, corn with salted egg yolk (鹹蛋黃玉米粉). Here's a description of my attempts at it, and below is a photo of the result.

Thank you! That makes sense.

I'm having trouble working out the difference between 臘肉 (là ròu) and 臘味 (là wèi). Are they actually different from each other? I usually see the former translated as "Chinese ham" and the latter as "Chinese preserved meat", but the photos I've found online look quite similar.

Ah-ha, thank you! Interesting... I know that "golden sand" (金沙) is often used to mean the yolks of salted duck eggs. Could "yellow sand" possibly be the same thing?

This sounds brilliant, thank you for posting it. One question regarding the name — I know 南乳 is red fermented tofu, and 花生 is peanuts, but why is there a 肉 in the name?

Yes, I was there on Monday. I wrote it up here, and I have some photos on Flickr. There are five units open in the food court at the moment — a Thai stall, two Japanese stalls (one specialising in takoyaki), a Chinese/roast meats/dim sum stall, and a Korean stall. I tried some of the dim sum, and it was not bad at all (siu mai and fried turnip cake good, king prawn cheung fun less good but still OK).

I was there on a group dinner, and we'd reserved space in the back room — this may only be possible if your group's large enough.

Is it me or is it de rigeur to bash Tayyabs? ← For the avoidance of doubt, I wasn't bashing Tayyabs — I liked it. I do think it's important to warn people about the queues, though; if you're not expecting them then it might put you in the wrong mood to enjoy the place.

I'm always surprised when I see a comment on London Eating that isn't a complaint... However: it does indeed get very crowded, with queues both inside and out. I don't have a comparison to "what it used to be", but my recommendation of the lamb chops else-thread is fresh from a couple of weeks ago. Hope that helps a little.