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Gary Soup

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Everything posted by Gary Soup

  1. Our "everyday" vegetable is qing cai (or "qing guang cai"), better known as Shanghai Bok Choy. The link below is an excellent printable (.pdf) guide to the identification of Chinese vegetables, complete with sketches and Mandarin, Cantonese, scientific and English names: http://www.aphis.usda.gov/ppq/manuals/pdf_...ble%20Guide.pdf
  2. Odd that no one's mentioned it, but I think an essential ingredient in congee is pidan, a.k.a. Thousand Year Old Egg.
  3. On the subject of Sichuan cookbooks, I've heard that Fuschia Dunlop's Land of Plenty is very good.
  4. There's a lot overlap with Korean Cuisine in that part of China. You could call what you described "kim chee". You'll find that kind of thing in Shandong cuisine, too.
  5. In Shanghainese home cooking, there's a potato salad that's remarkably similar to the potato salad of the West. They even call it sala'. Most likely a hangover from the concession era. It's not someting you'll find in restaurants. The cold noodles with sesame-peanut sauce that's prevalent in northern Chinese cuisine certainly should also qualify as a "pasta salad."
  6. I think the trend to "designer" produce was something started by Alice Waters, albeit unwittingly. From the outset, she put great effort into finding the highest quality producers and got locked into them. They basked in her subsequent celebrity as "purveyors to HRH Alice Waters". Don't blame Alice, but the trend took on a life of its own. A designer tag lets produce vendors and restaurateurs inflate the prices and make the consumer feel good at the same time. Why does the Slanted Door need "Niman Ranch" beef or "Harris Ranch" pork plastered on its menus? Do they bear any resemblance to Vietnamese beef or pork? It's strictly a copout and a ripoff. "Famous label" fruits are in the same category. Hey peaches are peaches, and some growers pay more attention to the qualities of their product than others, especially if they are too small an operation to attract the Del Monte buyers. Why pay Starbucks prices when there's Peerless?
  7. I'm a newbie here (in spades) but I can already see that eGullet has staked out a claim to being the food message board with taste.
  8. Salty doujiang or doufu hua, conyou bing, shengjian bao. Xiaolong bao if available. That's what I go for when I'm in Shanghai. Have to go out of my way to get them here in San Francisco, though.
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