Chef Jones

So yesterday I finally made use of my shiny cookbook and traipsed off to Carrefour on the hunt for ingredients for 锅包肉, guo bao rou, meat slices in batter in a sweet sauce, and 地三鲜, di sanxian, "three treasures of the earth", a.k.a potato, pepper and aubergine in soy sauce.

I spent far too much of my life plodding around Carrefour in search of things like cornstarch and vegetable oil. Turns out that despite my Chinese cookbook urging vegetable oil, such a thing is not stocked in Carrefour so I made do with corn oil which is probably the same thing. I located everything else and queued up and paid and made for the exit.

But then I realised I had no scales to measure anything so I headed back and tried to find the scales. Carrefours have a very confusing layout but I found the stairs to the 3rd floor. All good. A preliminary search revealed no scales so I wandered around asking the assistants. The word for scales is 磅"bang" so I did actually spend 10 minutes walking around saying "bang!" at people. Eventually I discovered the Chinese don't really weigh food when they cook and the best they had was one of those scales where you hang something on a hook to find out how much it weighs. Not much use for powder but I bought it regardless.

I borrowed the Koreans' wok and rice cooker (never used one before-gadgety) and despite my ineptitude, what was finally plonked on plates at the end was not half bad! The batter on the meat wasn't perfectly crispy and the di san xian was a wee bit mushy but overall it tasted nice and nobody died :D Next stop, apple crumble in a microwave!

On the way back from the Carrefour the bus was so full the driver wouldn't let more people on. For this to happen, the bus has to be stuffed so full nobody can move. Or breather. I have worked out a way to cope with this and that is to stay stubbornly as near to the door as possible so that a) I can breathe when the door opens and shuts and b)I can get off without trying to fit through a 1mm gap between construction workers from Anhui.

Speaking of construction workers from Anhui, a group were waiting at the bus stop with me and one of them showed me an Indonesian 500 rupiah note. I have no idea where he got it from (he says he found it on the floor) but he wanted to know how much it was worth. Of course I had no idea and refused the offer to buy it. It was quite hard talking to them as their accents were just so thick. Sounded like they were talking through a dodgy radio receiver. How does a human voice achieve that effect?

And finally, this is my 100th blog post... *fireworks*