kake.dreamwidth.orgAdventures with Kake

Account name: Password (OpenID?) (Forgot it?) Remember Me You're viewing kake 's journal Create a Dreamwidth Account Learn More Interest Region Site and Account FAQ Email IM Info Reload page in style: light Mostly (but not entirely) about reading Chinese menus. At the moment. Recent Entries Archive Reading List Tags Profile Previous 20 Entries inner -- Sticky: About this blog Apr . 3rd , 2011 03:45 pm The main purpose of this blog was to document my journey in learning to read Chinese menus. I started this project around the beginning of 2010 because I was intrigued by the many restaurants here in London that have Chinese-language menus with different dishes from the English-language ones. I find I generally prefer the food offered on the former type, so I needed a way to acquire it. A year later, I had become fairly confident in ordering from a Chinese-language menu, but decided to continue the blog because researching and writing the posts was a good incentive to continue learning more about the different cuisines of China. The Chinese menu project is now officially retired, though the posts will remain open for comments. I may in the future decide to use this blog for other kinds of posts. If you're only interested in the Chinese menu stuff, just follow my "chinese menu" tag and the other stuff will be filtered out: web , RSS , Atom . Here are some useful posts to read if you're new here: On learning to read Chinese menus (first post, explanation of blog structure) How to comment here Index of posts on concepts (subjects) Index of posts on individual characters Index of posts on individual dishes Tags: chinese menu , chinese menu: meta Add memory Share this entry Permalink 0 comments Reply The end of the menu Dec . 9th , 2012 04:00 pm So it's been nearly a year since I last posted , and it's time for me to admit that the Chinese menu project has run its course. There are a number of reasons for this, but perhaps the main one is that I lost someone very important to me at the start of 2011, and have spent much of the time since putting my life back together. Everything has changed; nothing is the same. I live in a different area of London now, where good Chinese food is hard to find. But also, my feelings about the menu project are inextricably tied up with the person I lost — he was my primary cheerleader on this, and every time I think of it, I think of him. I've made myself a new life, full of so many good things, and I think it's OK now to say that I'm not writing a Chinese menu blog any more. The old posts will, of course, stay up, and I will continue to respond to any comments. (If you like my writing style, and want more, you can always head over to The London Road Tour Project, a series of articles I'm writing for the Croydon Citizen online newspaper The Past and Present of Croydon's London Road . It's a kind of hybrid of local history and city guide, and as far as I know nobody else has done quite this sort of thing before.) Tags: chinese menu , chinese menu: meta Add memory Share this entry Permalink 14 comments Reply Apologies for lack of posting... Feb . 26th , 2012 06:11 pm [Image: A small glass bowl containing fish balls, chunks of daikon radish, and large pieces of translucent pig skin, all bathed in a reddish-brown broth with small "eyes" of fat floating on the surface.] Hello! I'm so sorry I haven't posted here for a while. I've been very busy with paid work recently, and that (along with other things) is leaving me a bit wiped out. Right now, I can't say when I will be able to get back to regular posting again. But I do have some good things in the pipeline, including a couple of guest posts that I'm pretty excited about! For now, though, here's a photo of a super-old-school dim sum dish I ate a few months back with eatlovenoodles and ewan . This is 魚蛋豬皮蘿蔔 (yú dàn zhū pí luó bo), or fishballs with pig skin and daikon, served in a thin, rich, savoury, slightly spicy broth. We had this at Tai Tung at the Wing Yip Centre in Croydon (you can read more about the restaurant on Sung's blog ). 魚蛋 (yú dàn) are fish balls, literally "fish eggs"; according to Sung , they're called this in Cantonese because of their shape, roughly like an egg. 豬 (zhū) is pig, and 皮 (pí) is skin. Note that as I mentioned in my very first "character" post , 豬/zhū doesn't appear on menus as much as one might expect given the ubiquity of pork in most Chinese cuisines, since when 肉 (ròu/meat) is used without further specification, it's taken to mean pork. However, in this case we do get the 豬: 豬皮. Finally, 蘿蔔 (luó bo) is daikon (aka mooli, white radish, Chinese radish, etc). Speaking of dim sum, I'm in Oxford (the UK one) for a week from 2nd-9th March and am planning a dim sum lunch there on Sunday 4th as well as a Sichuan dinner on Tuesday 6th. If you're in the area and interested in coming along to either or both, do let me know. Characters mentioned in this post: 蛋/dàn (egg), 皮/pí (skin/leather/rind), 肉/ròu (meat), 魚/yú (fish) Other related posts: Concepts: 點心/diǎn xīn/dim sum If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment ( here's how ) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about. Tags: chinese menu , chinese menu: dishes Add memory Share this entry Permalink 0 comments Reply Reading Chinese Menus: 辣椒油 — là jiāo yóu — chilli oil Feb . 2nd , 2012 07:00 pm [Image: A close-up view on some bright red chilli oil in a glass jar. A sedimental layer of sesame seeds and crushed dried chillies is visible at the bottom.] As you may have noticed, it's technically February now. However, as I mentioned on Twitter yesterday , I haven't finished doing everything I intended to do in January, so I declare today to be the 33rd of January. And so it's still ingredient month! Each week in January I'm covering a different ingredient commonly used in Chinese cuisines, giving the different names you might find it under, suggesting some dishes that include the ingredient, and explaining any other background information that might be of interest. The final ingredient of this year's ingredient month is chilli oil, which has a number of different names in Chinese. You may see it as 辣油 (là yóu, literally "spicy oil"), 辣椒油 (là jiāo yóu/"spicy chilli oil"), or perhaps 紅油 (hóng yóu). The last of these, 紅油, is the one I've seen most often on menus; it literally means "red oil", a good description in my opinion! Chilli oil is an essential component in Sichuan food — in fact, Fuchsia Dunlop's Sichuan Cookery lists 紅油味型 (hóng yóu wèi xíng), or "red-oil flavour", as being one of the 23 essential flavours of Sichuan [1] . However, it's also used in other Chinese cuisines as well as cuisines from other areas of East and South-East Asia. Even Cantonese cuisine, which certainly doesn't have a reputation for being particularly spicy, has uses for chilli oil; for example, eatlovenoodles recently posted about the chilli oil at Gold Mine , one of his favourite Cantonese barbecue restaurants (he notes in comments that it goes particularly well with their soup noodles). Chilli oil is also frequently found as a table condiment (and one which, unlike soy sauce , is actually used by those "fluent" in Chinese cuisine, not just the newbies!) Like sesame oil, chilli oil is not used directly for cooking, but is added to stirfried dishes at the last minute, incorporated in dressings for cold dishes , or simply used as a dipping sauce on its own. Unlike sesame oil, however, chilli oil is not extracted from the plant for which it is named, but rather is an infusion based on a milder-flavoured oil such as peanut oil. To make chilli oil, the base oil is heated with crushed dried chillies and other spices, then left to infuse. The solids may be strained out before the oil is stored, or they can be left in as shown in the photograph above, and even included in the dishes and dressings made with the oil. The ve...