Adventures with Kake

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.)

[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 very simplest type of chilli oil is made with just oil and dried chillies, but there are many variations (see the links at the bottom of this post for a selection of recipes). Vegetarians, beware! Some chilli oil is flavoured with dried shrimp; I think this is more common in the Cantonese version than in the Sichuan version. The chilli oil shown above was made using Sunflower's Sichuan chilli oil recipe, flavoured with spring onion, ginger, Sichuan pepper (花椒/huā jiāo), star anise, ground-up dried chillies, and sesame seeds.

Here are some dishes that include chilli oil:

And here are some links to other people's posts:

• Appetite For China: Homemade chili oil
• Carolyn J Phillips: Numbing chilli oil and Citrus chilli oil with black beans
• Hollow Legs: Sichuan chilli oil
• Kattebelletje: How to make chili oil: a Flickr photoset
• Red Cook: How the West was won over by Sichuan chilli oil
• Show Shanti: Easy recipe for chili oil (辣椒油 lajiao you)
• Sunflower Food Galore: Sichuan-style chilli oil and Cantonese/Hong Kong-style chilli oil
• Wikipedia: Chili oil

Happy New Year! 新年快樂 (xīn nián kuài lè)!

Today marks the start of the Year of the Dragon! To celebrate this, I have a guest post from shuripentu, who has previously guest posted here on the subject of the Mid-Autumn Festival. Last year I posted a brief introduction to the Chinese lunisolar calendar, which led to my asking her to do another guest post for this New Year. Shuri is a Canadian of Chinese descent, and a great fan of calendrical systems, mathematics, and footnotes.

Now over to Shuri...

A while back, my mother and I were discussing the Chinese calendar^[1], and I happened to mention that the Hong Kong Observatory has some useful Gregorian-Chinese conversion tables. "What does the Observatory have to do with it?" asked Mum.

The involvement of an observatory in setting a calendar may seem odd to those of us who are used to the purely arithmetically defined Gregorian calendar: the number of days in a year, and the way those days are divided into months, is set by a simple numerical algorithm. That the Gregorian year remains closely synchronised with the actual solar year^[2] is entirely due to the well-chosen numbers involved in the algorithm: there is no need to track the position of the sun or moon, or attempt to match any solar event – an equinox or solstice, say – with any particular Gregorian day.

The Chinese calendar, however, is defined almost entirely by astronomical events, and therefore requires the accurate and precise prediction of when these events will occur. The core requirement of the Chinese calendar is that each month must begin with the day (starting at midnight in Beijing – for astronomical calendars, location is crucial^[3]) containing the new moon. Now if, for example, the moment of a new moon occurs very close to midnight, then correctly determining whether the new month begins on the previous day or the next requires a very good astronomical model, and an error would result in the lengths of both months, and the numbering of all the days in the second month, being incorrect.

Like most calendars, the Chinese calendar aims to remain in sync with the solar year. In order to do so, it divides the solar year into 24 segments called solar terms, each corresponding to 15° of solar longitude. The odd-numbered terms are minor solar terms, and the even-numbered ones are major solar terms. Then, to compute the number and arrangement of the months (of which there are either 12 or 13) in a Chinese calendar year, the following rules are applied:

• The 22nd solar term, 冬至 (Dōng Zhì/"Winter Solstice"), always begins on a day contained in Month 11.
• If there are 13 new moons between a winter-solstice-to-winter-solstice period, then one of those new moons is the start of a leap month. The leap month is selected by finding the first month in this period which does not contain the first day of a major solar term.
• The leap month is given the same number as the month that preceded it; it is a second go at the same month, if you will. For example, the upcoming Chinese calendar year contains 13 months, and the months are numbered: 1, 2, 3, 4, 4 again, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.^[5]

I find the generational differences in the use of the Chinese calendar interesting. My grandparents now use the Gregorian calendar for everyday things, but still celebrate their birthdays according to the Chinese calendar^[7]; I'm not sure they even know their Gregorian birthdays offhand. (I'd certainly need to look it up, whereas I do know their Chinese birthdays.) My parents, on the other hand, celebrate their birthdays according to the Gregorian calendar, and it's their Chinese birthdays that would need looking up. However, my grandparents don't know offhand what their Chinese zodiac signs^[8] are – it's apparently something their generation didn't pay much attention to – whereas my parents most certainly do. (And nowadays the zodiac signs are everywhere: as cheap trinkets, as not-so-cheap trinkets, and incorporated into all sorts of personalised gubbins.) So while the use of the Chinese calendar as an actual calendar has fallen away, the use of it to provide an aspect of personal identity has increased.

And finally, since this is a food blog, here is the foodstuff which I most strongly associate with Chinese New Year: the traditional tray of sweets.

[Image: A circular tray of sweets, divided into sections, sitting on a red tablecloth.]

On either side of the tray are bowls containing dried seeds of some sort – the internet suggests watermelon. In the centre of the tray are 利是糖 (lì shì táng, which translates roughly as "lucky money candy", since the wrappers resemble the red envelopes in which monetary gifts are given), the one true candy for Chinese New Year. It's just your average boiled sweet really, but you've got to have them, and I think there's only the one company that produces them; they must rake in the profits every winter. I can't identify the rest of the things in that tray, except for the single slice of dried lotus root (it's the thing that resembles a wagon wheel above and to the left of the sweets), but they'll mostly be dried fruits and nuts and suchlike, and they'll all be deliciously sugar-laden.

¹ Disclaimer: I have spent almost all of my life living in non-Chinese-majority countries, so my experiences of things Chinese predominantly reflect my family's particular views and traditions and may therefore be extremely idiosyncratic.

² In this post, I use "solar year" to specifically mean the tropical year, "lunar month" to specifically mean the synodic month, "day" to specifically mean a civil day, and "midnight" to specifically mean local civil midnight.

³ The pedant in me notes that it is not strictly necessary for an astronomical calendar to take location^[4] into account, but I have yet to meet one that does not do so. That way lies wailing and gnashing of teeth.

⁴ The super-pedant in me clarifies that I of course meant location on this planet. Which is Earth. (For now.)

⁵ Note, however, that due to the variable length of the lunar month (presently ranging between 29.27 to 29.84 days, with an average of 29.53 days^[6] – and besides, it is never an integral number of days anyway), the number of days in a Chinese calendar month varies from month to month and year to year. In the above example from 2012-13, the first round of Month 4 has 30 days, but the second round of Month 4 – the leap month – only has 29 days. Next year, Month 4 will have 29 days again, and the year after that, Month 4 will have 30 days.

⁶ Dershowitz, Nachum, and Edward M. Reingold, Calendrical Calculations, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 193. Much of my understanding of the Chinese calendar, and calendrical systems in general, is indebted to this inimitable work; any errors in my understanding are entirely my fault.

⁷ I'd never considered it until now, but the extremely variable nature of the Chinese calendar creates a lot of edge-case birthdays, and I wonder how people with them handle it. For example, any given Chinese calendar month will sometimes have 30 days, but some years it'll only have 29 days – what do people born on the 30th of the month do? I figure they probably just celebrate on the 29th, or the 1st of the next month, but I don't actually know. And leap years don't insert single leap days but entire leap months – and it's not always in the same place either! How do people cope? I should probably ask.

⁸ According to my father – and this is backed up by at least one website on Chinese astrology – the change in zodiac sign occurs not at Chinese New Year as commonly believed, but at the 1st solar term, 立春 (Lì Chūn/"Start of Spring"), which occurs around 4 February. This isn't something most people will know, though, unless they have consulted (or are) a Chinese astrologer.

[Image: Dried shiitake piled up in a heap. The dark brown tops of the mushrooms bear a characteristic cracked pattern, though some also appear to have been cut and scored to accentuate the natural cracks.]

It's 2012 already! How did that happen? And it's Lunar New Year soon as well!

I've decided that January on this blog is going to be a themed month — not themed around a type of food, like the dim sum months I have each August, but themed around a type of post. Each week in January I'll cover 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.

Since today marks the end of the 22nd solar term, 冬至 (dōng zhì/winter solstice), I thought it appropriate to choose an ingredient that includes the character 冬 (dōng/winter) in one of its names: shiitake[see footnote]. These mushrooms are used both fresh and dried, and come in different grades of quality (and cost).

Shiitake go by several names in Chinese, including 香菇 (xiāng gū/"fragrant mushrooms"), 冬菇 (dōng gū/"winter mushrooms"), 北菇 (běi gū/"northern mushrooms"), and 花菇 (huā gū/"flower mushrooms"). In English, they may be called "shiitake", "shiitake mushrooms", "Chinese mushrooms", or "Chinese black mushrooms". The ones pictured above were labelled 精品白花菇 (jīng pǐn bái huā gū) in Chinese and "super white flower mushroom" in English. (精品 means "good quality" and 白 means "white".)

I'm not entirely sure of the nuances/differences between the different Chinese names. I think 花菇 (huā gū/flower mushroom) is reserved for the higher grades of dried shiitake, as the crackled pattern that naturally forms on top of these is reminiscent of a flower. However, it's worth noting Carolyn J Phillips' warning that this pattern can also be created by cutting inferior-grade mushrooms with a razor blade! I've also formed the impression from Google searches that 北菇 (běi gū/northern mushroom) is only ever used for dried shiitake, never fresh, though I could be wrong in this hypothesis.

Dried and fresh shiitake differ in terms of flavour and texture, and tend to be used in different ways. I personally consider the dried ones to be generally much more useful than their fresh counterparts; the drying process concentrates and improves the flavour, and gives a nice chew to the texture after the mushrooms are reconstituted. Good-quality dried shiitake are wonderfully perfumed — at home, if I don't double-bag them then the entire pantry ends up smelling of them.

To use dried shiitake, soak them in warm water for at least 30 minutes, then use as required. The soaking water takes on plenty of mushroom flavour, and can be used as stock for making soups or stews — though do make sure to let any grit settle to the bottom first, and then pour off the liquid carefully, discarding the gritty sediment.

Shiitake are used in many Chinese dishes. Sometimes they're left whole and constitute a prominent part of the dish, other times they're chopped finely and used to add to the general flavour and texture. Here are some examples:

And here are some links to other people's posts about dried shiitake and other mushrooms:

• Carolyn J Phillips: Magical mushrooms
• China South of the Clouds: In Kunming: dried mushrooms in oil
• Chinese Soup Lady: Chinese mushrooms
• Liuzhou Laowai (on eGullet): Mushrooms and fungi in China
• Sybaritica: Chinese dried black mushrooms (shiitake)
• Wikipedia: Shiitake

Footnote: The name "shiitake" is derived from Japanese, not Chinese. However, I believe it to be the most commonly-used name for these mushrooms in English, so I'm using it here in preference to any other. A similar dilemma arises for "tofu" vs. "beancurd"; Fuchsia Dunlop recently discussed this on her blog. It's worth also noting that "shiitake" in Japanese literally means "shii mushroom", so "shiitake mushroom" is perhaps a little redundant, along the lines of "PIN number", though it can be useful to aid comprehensibility.

No blog post this week, sorry. I've been sleeping very badly recently and can't think straight. Here is a photo of some pumpkin-shaped dim sum instead (taken at Shanghai Blues in Holborn).

[Image: A square white plate containing three deep-fried pumpkin-shaped items, with bits of cucumber for the stem. A small pile of shredded carrot and daikon salad, sprinkled with black and white sesame seeds, is also on the plate.]

[Image: Cooked pig's ears, sliced around 5mm wide, intermingled with finely-julienned cucumber and a few leaves of fresh coriander, all coated in a light dressing.]

Some of you may have been able to guess from my post on texture in Chinese food a couple of weeks ago that pig's ears were coming up. Here they are!

Pig's ears are used in many cuisines beside Chinese. Jerry Hopkins' Extreme Cuisine (a title I have some issues with, but I won't go into that here) states that pig's ears can be "boiled, fried, sautéed, braised, grilled, stuffed, made into a gratin, or added to a stew or soup". Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Meat Book suggests cooking them for 2-3 hours and then crisping them up on a hot griddle or on the barbecue[see footnote 0].

In Chinese cuisine, however, pig's ears are often treated in a way that I haven't come across in other cuisines. In fact, although Alan Davidson's weighty and comprehensive Oxford Companion to Food insists that "the cartilaginous meat has to be softened by lengthy cooking", the author is missing a trick by failing to mention that a shorter cooking time is also possible. Simmering for as little as 20 minutes renders the ears not only edible, but enjoyably crunchy. The pork flavour is subtle; there's not much meat here, nor much fat, just plenty of crunchy cartilage.

Once cooked, the ears are usually cooled, sliced into thin strips, mixed with a flavourful dressing, and served as a cold dish. I like them served as pictured above, mixed with julienned cucumber and a dressing based on chilli oil.

When I made this dish myself in preparation for this post, I didn't have a recipe to follow, since the ones I found online were all in Chinese. I've described below how I made it, but I have since posted a recipe translation by pulchritude, which I would urge you to also take a look at.

My made-up method: clean a pig's ear (shaving it if necessary), then simmer it in boiling water for around 20 minutes. Leave to cool, then slice into long strips around 5mm (1/5") wide. Optionally, add some cucumber cut into similar-sized strips. Then mix with a dressing made from 3 Tbsp light soy sauce, 2 tsp sugar, 1 tsp sesame oil, and 3–6 Tbsp home-made chilli oil, including some of the sediment from the chilli oil if you like[see footnote 1]. Leave a little while for the flavours to soak in, and serve cold or at room temperature as part of a Chinese meal.

On Chinese menus, this may be listed as 紅油豬耳 (hóng yóu zhū ěr), 紅油耳片 (hóng yóu ěr piàn), or 紅油耳絲 (hóng yóu ěr sī). As I mentioned in my post on 紅/hóng/red, the 紅油 here is chilli oil, literally "red oil". 豬 (zhū) is "pig", 耳 (ěr) is "ear", 片 (piàn) is "sliced", and 絲 (sī) is "shredded". In this context, "sliced" and "shredded" pretty much mean the same thing — a pig's ear is quite flat, so slicing it results in long shreds. You'll note that 豬/pig is omitted in a couple of these names; as with many other Chinese dishes, pig is assumed to be the default animal unless otherwise specified (see also 肉/ròu/meat).

Footnote: [0] Note that Hugh, like me, is British, and hence barbecuing to him means cooking quickly on a grill above the heat.

Footnote: [1] I found this dressing in Fuchsia Dunlop's excellent Sichuan Cookery (published as Land of Plenty in some countries), where she explains that it is "typically used for cold chicken and rabbit meat, as well as various types of offal". The quantities given are stated as being enough for 300g–400g of cold chicken meat; a pig's ear weighs around 200g, so with the addition of cucumber this is about right for a single pig's ear.

One aspect of Chinese food that can be confusing at first for those unfamiliar with it is the importance of texture. Some dishes and ingredients may appear subtle or even bland in flavour, since their purpose is primarily textural.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is tofu/beancurd (豆腐/dòu fu), particularly the ultra-soft "flower" beancurd (豆腐花/dòu fu huā or 豆花/dòu huā) which I discuss in my post on hot-and-sour flower beancurd. Beancurd in Chinese dishes is generally much softer than the type used in Western vegetarian/vegan dishes as a meat substitute, to the point where it can be a bit offputting if you're not expecting it. Personally, I love its smooth, wobbly-soft texture, particularly in combination with strong flavours such as in mapo tofu or with other interesting textures such as beancurd with century egg.

Other examples of foods that have little flavour but interesting texture include pork skin, pig ears, jellyfish, and cartilage. Pork skin has a different texture depending on how much you cook it; it can be chewy or almost meltingly soft. Pig ears are chewy, too, but in a good way — chewiness is often prized in Chinese cuisines, but was deprecated in the British food with which I grew up, so it took me a while to be able to appreciate it. Cartilage is another food it took me a while to get the hang of, but now I happily crunch away at it when eating chicken feet at dim sum. In fact, the last time I cooked chicken feet myself, I overcooked them and was very disappointed to not have that crunchiness in there.

One interesting word used to denote texture is 滑 (huá), which means "smooth/slippery". Good cheung fun will display this quality, and this aspect is often explicitly mentioned in the name of the dish; for example I've seen prawn cheung fun listed as 鮮蝦滑腸粉 (xiān xiā huá cháng fěn), literally "fresh prawn slippery cheung fun". 滑 is also commonly associated with chicken (雞/jī), where it's used to describe the texture of perfectly-poached meat, neither undercooked nor dry. Finally, you might see it in connection with puddings such as coconut mousse (香滑椰汁糕/xiāng huá yē zhī gāo) and egg dishes such as beef and scrambled egg with rice (牛肉滑蛋飯/niú ròu huá dàn fàn).

QQ is another important texture, and one that I don't have an English term for. sung wrote about this yesterday, in his post on beef noodle soup/牛肉麵 (read the comments too). In his words, QQ "describes the springy or bouncy texture upon biting into food e.g. good fishballs should be QQ, as should certain types of Chinese noodles". There's more discussion of the term in the comments on another post of his, on QQ vermicelli/粉絲.

Another hard-to-translate texture is crispness/crunchiness, specifically the type of crispness manifested by very fresh prawns, or rehydrated black fungus. I'm never quite sure how to describe this in English, as it's not quite the type of crispness manifested in certain baked or deep-fried foods (which would be 脆/cùi in Chinese). It's more like the crispness of raw carrots or lettuce, but to me the words "crisp" and "crunchy" in connection with prawns bring up associations with deep-fried battered prawns, which is a long way from the intended meaning.

According to Prawncrackers on eGullet, the Chinese word for this type of crispness is 爽 (shuǎng in pinyin, song in Cantonese). This texture can be achieved in prawns by brining them before use; I've also seen the suggestion of adding sugar to this brine. Another poster further down the same thread uses the term 彈牙 (daan ngaa in Cantonese), or "bouncing teeth", though Prawncrackers points out that this term may be better applied to fishballs, as with the QQ mentioned above — then again, according to Steamy Kitchen, good prawns are QQ!

At this stage of my learning about Chinese cuisines and languages, I can't give you a neat little list of all the important textures and their translations. But I can suggest a few dishes that are worth looking out for if you're interested in exploring texture in Chinese food (some of which are also mentioned above):

• beancurd with century egg (皮蛋豆腐/pí dàn dòu fu)
• cheung fun (腸粉/cháng fěn) — particularly prawn cheung fun, if you can find somewhere that has crispy/crunchy prawns as I describe above
• crispy roast pork belly (燒肉/shāo ròu)
• Dongbei lapi (東北拉皮/Dōngběi lā pí)
• hot-and-sour "flower" beancurd (酸辣豆花/suān là dòu huā)
• pig's ears in chilli oil (紅油豬耳/hóng yóu zhū ěr)
• jellyfish salad (涼拌海蜇/liáng bàn hǎi zhé)
• shredded potatoes (土豆絲/tǔ dòu sī)
• wood ear salad (涼拌木耳/liáng bàn mù ěr)

東 (dōng) is the Chinese character for "east" or "eastern". I've mentioned this character before, as it forms part of the name 東北 (Dōngběi), a region which is home to a couple of dishes I've posted about previously: 地三鮮 (dì sān xiān) and 東北拉皮 (Dōngběi lā pí).

Dōngběi was once known as Manchuria. It includes the three northeastern provinces of China: Jílín, Liáoníng, and Hēilóngjiāng. 北 (běi) means "north", so Dōngběi is literally "east-north" — the opposite way around to how we'd say it in English.

Another context in which 東 appears on menus is as 東風螺 (dōng fēng luó), literally "east wind snail". According to Baidu Encyclopaedia, this refers to a number of sea snails in the Babylonia genus. I've seen these on dim sum menus, as 沙爹東風螺 (shā diē dōng fēng luó), which are sea snails in satay sauce, and as 咖哩東風螺 (kā lī dōng fēng luó), which are sea snails in curry sauce ("shā diē" and "kā lī" are phonetic transcriptions of "satay" and "curry" respectively).

Probably the most common dish with 東 in the name, however, is 東坡肉 (Dōngpō ròu). This is a dish of wine-infused pork belly, cooked using multiple methods (blanching, frying, braising, and steaming) over several hours. 東坡肉 is named after the 11th century poet and politician Sū Shì (蘇軾), who is more commonly known as Sū Dōngpō (蘇東坡); according to Wikipedia, he took this name from a farm he lived on, called Dōngpō (東坡), literally "eastern slope".

Other place names you might see on a menu are 廣東 (Guǎngdōng), the southern province which is the home of Cantonese cuisine (including dim sum), and 山東 (Shāndong), an eastern coastal province whose cuisine, like Cantonese cuisine, is considered one of China's eight culinary traditions.

[Image: A tall pile of thin, browned, crispy deep-fried slivers of potato. A few pieces of dried red chilli can be seen among them.]

So, I said I'd be back in September, and here I am, just under the wire.

I realise I've been a bit flaky recently in terms of this blog. I took July off to move house. I missed a post at the start of August, then halted the dim sum month entirely. It's true that in my personal life I've had A Bit Of A Year, for various reasons, but I do really want to keep up this project, because I enjoy doing the research, testing the recipes, writing the posts, and reading all the useful, critical, amusing, and generally lovely comments that people are kind enough to leave.

So my plan is as follows, for now. I'm going to keep the structure of concept post followed by character post followed by dish post, but I'm going to post once a week instead of three times a week. I'll see how this goes, and possibly adjust it a bit so each month has a theme instead of each-three-weeks having a theme, but this is what I'm going to do for now. Hopefully this will let me maintain quality while still posting regularly.

I'm also going to make things easy on myself today, by posting a dish that I have no intention of attempting to make at home. It's also on-theme since it's a variation of a dish that I posted about at the end of a previous hiatus, 土豆絲 (tǔ dòu sī) — shredded potatoes. While that version is a fresh, snappy stirfry of julienned potatoes, this version is basically a large, fragrant pile of crispy deep-fried ultra-thin shoestring fries. It is delicious.

The version pictured above, which I ate at Royal Palace in Surrey Quays, was listed on the menu as 香辣土豆絲 (xiāng là tǔ dòu sī), literally "fragrant-spicy shredded potato". Judging by Google Image search, 香辣土豆絲 is usually, but not always, the deep-fried version. I've seen this particular name twice on menus; once it was deep-fried, the other time it was the lightly stirfried version.

I said above that I'm not going to try to make this at home, but if you'd like to then the Beijing Haochi recipe looks pretty good.

[Image: Three long, deep-fried, rice-paper-wrapped cylinders sitting on a white paper doily on a white plate. The pink-orange colour of the prawn filling is visible through the wrapper.]

I have no recipe to offer you for today's dim sum dish. I tried to find one in my cookery books and on the internet, and failed on both counts. So instead, have a photo of it (above), and an encouragement to order it in restaurants!

Paper-wrapped prawns (紙包蝦/zhǐ bāo xiā) can be found in the "fried" section of the dim sum menu. The English name and Chinese name match up quite simply: 紙 (zhǐ) is paper, 包 (bāo) means "package" or "to wrap", and 蝦 (xiā) are prawns. The paper here is rice paper — not the very thin, shiny stuff that Brits of a certain age may remember purchasing from sweetshops, but the sort of thing used to wrap Vietnamese spring rolls.

You may also see these listed as 威化紙包蝦 (wēi huà zhǐ bāo xiā). Don't try to extract meaning from the characters 威 and 化, since this is another phonetic Cantonese transliteration ("wai faa") of an English word, "wafer" in this case, referring to the texture of the deep-fried rice paper wrappers.