I boiled the soybeans, green and tender in their bristly pods, and we ate them before lunch, with a sprinkling of seasalt. The cucumber will find its way into a spiced Sichuanese salad 炝黄瓜 very soon.

I did ask owners of the farm if they’d considered growing wo sun 莴笋(known in English as celtuce or stem lettuce), which is one of the most versatile and subtly delicious of southern Chinese vegetables, but unfortunately they said it didn’t much take to the English climate, and that their attempts to nurture it had fizzled out.

Later in the year, they tell me, there will be plenty of pak choy and gai lan… I can’t wait.

Do any of you blog readers grow your own Chinese vegetables? If so, which ones?

Sichuanese black garlic

“Hmm, this black garlic is delicious.”

“Actually it’s made from the single-cloved garlic of Sichuan.”

“Is that like the wild elephant garlic of Iran?”

Such is the conversation when you invite the cookery writer Anissa Helou over for a quiet Sunday night supper. I’d promised her something very casual, but ended up thinking about the  menu all weekend, of course. This is what we had:

A sweet, treacly black garlic clove each: these were a gift from the Sichuanese chef Yu Bo.

Smacked cucumber with a Sichuanese chilli-oil dressing.

Stir-fried venison slivers with yellow chives (made with superb venison from the Wild Game Company at Broadway Market in East London)

Stir-fried mixed mushrooms with garlic

Wild chrysanthemum tea from Hong Kong

Baby pak choy in chicken stock

Brown rice

A little fermented beancurd to go with the rice

The meal was a good example of the economy of Chinese cooking: we only ate a total of 150g meat between us, but, cooked like this, it was plenty. After eating the baby pak choy with our chopsticks, we drank the stock as a soup; and the fermented beancurd (eaten in tiny quantities) was absolutely delicious with the brown rice. The whole meal took just 30-40 minutes to make.

After dinner, we drank some wild chrysanthemum tea I brought back from Hong Kong, and ate tangerines and gianduja chocolates from Turin. Yum.

P.S. I’m afraid we had eaten almost everything before we thought of taking photographs, so y0u have to imagine what the dishes looked like….

Using a cleaver is addictive, because it is so ruthlessly efficient. It is also a contagious habit, as my mother and certain of my friends (as well as some readers of my books?) would be able to tell you.

The photograph on the right is reproduced with kind permission of Martin Leeburn.

Hong cai tai... oh yum...

I’m back in Changsha, where I lived for a few months while researching my Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, for the first time in five years. It’s wonderful to see some old friends, including Peng Tieh-cheng, the son of legendary Hunanese chef Peng Chang-kuei (of General Tso’s chicken fame). He’s in Changsha for the same Hunan food conference as me, and I hadn’t seen him for about six years. Peng Tieh-cheng tells me his father, who is now 93, is in good health, and still popping into their main restaurant in Taipei every day.

I’ve had some rather lovely meals in the last 24 hours, and one of the highlights of all of them has been the simplest of dishes: stir-fried red rape shoots (hong cai tai 红菜苔), served at lunch with a little dried chilli, and at dinner with slivered ginger. Only the tenderest tips of the shoots are used, and the thicker parts may actually be peeled of their skin. Stir-fried, they have an exquisite flavour and mouthfeel, sweet and juicy, with a hint of dark sleek bitterness in the leaves. Hong cai tai have a similar appeal to asparagus, although I think they are even more delicious. When they are in season, they are served at almost every meal.

‘Seasonal greens’ are often served as an afterthought at Chinese meals, but I think they are one of the glories of Chinese cuisine. In Sichuan, I adore purple amaranth 苋菜 stir-fried with garlic, served in its bright pink juices, and water spinach 空心菜 wokked with chilli and Sichuan pepper; in Shanghai alfalfa sprouts stir-fried with strong grain spirits 草头; in Hangzhou tender young greens blanched and then served in a delicate stock; in Hong Kong Chinese broccoli 芥蓝 blanched and then sizzled with garlic and rice wine. Cooked well, with a little salt, oil and garlic or ginger, and perhaps a dash of wine and/or stock, they can have an almost buttery deliciousness. And of course they’re very healthy as well.

This is what they look like raw

I wonder if any of you are as addicted to leafy greens as me. In London, I often eat leafy green vegetables, Western or Chinese, and I really miss them if days go by without my fix. Sometimes I’ll cook them in a Western manner, but more often I’ll reach for my wok or steamer, and cook them in one of the many Chinese ways I’ve learnt, because they are so damn good, and also quick and easy.

Any of you like to share your thoughts and cooking tips for your favourite Chinese greens?

Illustration on left by Sebastian Wilkinson

Funnily enough, I was a member of the Chinese delegation.

With A Dai in Cavoretto

I was there to accompany A Dai, the co-owner of the Dragon Well Manor restaurant in Hangzhou (龙井草堂). On Saturday we gave a joint presentation explaining the work of his restaurant, which specialises in what the Chinese call ‘natural, original, primordial’ (原生态) ingredients (what Westerners might call organic, artisanal food) and strives to preserve traditional cooking and food-production skills.

Diverse delegates

Over the course of the conference, we also met many wonderful people, including Vietnamese rice farmers, organic honey-makers from Jiangsu, NGO workers from D.R.Congo, Guinea-Bissau and South Korea, the fantastic and inspiring Australian chef Kylie Kwong and the Tibetan cheese-makers.

We also tasted what seemed like 5000 different kinds of salami and cheese, stocked up on fabulous chocolates at Guido Gobino, ate ludicrous amounts of meat and pasta, craved and fantastised about simple vegetarian food, and basked in glorious autumn sun. On our last day together, we drove into the Piedmontese countryside with Monica, a Slow Food volunteer. The autumn landscape

Autumn vineyards

was an exquisite patchwork of vineyards, purple, red, yellow and green. For lunch, we visited a restaurant run by friends of Monica’s, where we had the finest meal of the trip, a feast of raw veal, taglioni with white truffles, agnolini, bollito misto, cardoons and peppers, and robiola and castelmagna cheeses. Later, we visited her aunt and uncle for coffee, and played 1930s waltzes on their wind-up gramophone.

A few memories of the trip:

The view over Turin from our lovely old hostel in the hills of Cavoretto, with snow-capped mountains in the distance.

The Congolese delegates looking at my badge and saying: ‘But you don’t look Chinese.’

White truffles

The scent of white truffles.

Helping a confused Tibetan monk to find his bus home.

A Dai and Monica discussing football for an hour in the car, despite having no common language. (A Dai knows all the teams, the players, the football chants.)

Tasting and comparing honeys from Uganda, Japan, Italy and many other countries.

Running into football legend Giovanni Trapattoni in the rural restaurant – which, as you can imagine, made A Dai’s trip!

The garden of the Master of the Nets

You can read my article about Suzhou cuisine in today’s Financial Times Weekend.

Here are a few photographs from my various trips there: one of my favourite garden, the Garden of the Master of the Nets (网师园)；one of the Wumen Renjia restaurant courtyard, and other of the wonderful Mrs Sha, who runs it; and a couple of food.

Wumen Renjia

Mrs Sha Peizhi

Some appetisers

Delicious eel and pork noodles at Zhu Hong Xing

I am trying to figure out whether there is any way to reduce sodium in these
recipes, though. Like many Americans, I have high blood pressure and am trying
to manage it through diet modification. That means really watching salt intake.
I see that my soy sauce has nearly 1600 mg of sodium per tablespoon. It tastes
fantastic, but wow! That's a huge number. And that's hardly the only source of
sodium in Sichuan and Hunan cuisine.

Eat salty dishes like this...

Thanks for writing to me, Tom! This is actually quite a common question about soy sauce and Chinese cuisine in general. I think the important thing to remember is that salty and strongly-flavoured dishes are used in China to ‘send the rice down’ 下饭 – which is to say that they are normally eaten with quite a lot of unsalted (and usually completely unseasoned) rice, noodles or bread. So although a dish or a relish in itself may be salty, it is actually eaten in fairly modest quantities.

So what I would suggest for you and others with similar concerns about salt intake, is to reduce the amount of salt, soy sauce and other salty seasonings in dishes if you can do this without sacrificing flavour, BUT also, and more importantly, to make sure that you serve salty dishes with plenty of plain rice or noodles, and other, lightly-seasoned dishes – for example, you could serve General Tso’s chicken or Mapo doufu with plain, unsalted

...with plenty of plain rice...

rice (brown rice if you want to be really healthy – I often do this when cooking at home), and one or two very lightly-salted stir-fried vegetables. You can also remember that Chinese dumplings are often dipped in vinegar rather than soy sauce (Chinkiang vinegar is very good for this), and that Chinese people traditionally eat far more fan 饭 (rice or other staple grain food) than cai 菜 (accompanying dishes). So if you eat in the Chinese way, a dish like General Tso’s chicken, served with some simple vegetables and rice, can be shared by 4-5 people – which means that the salt will be spread very thinly around!

...and lightly-seasoned vegetables

Do also make sure you rinse your fermented, salted black soy beans and salty preserved vegetables before using them in dishes like twice-cooked pork and dry-fried beans, since they can carry a lot of excess salt.

Personally, I prefer to adjust my salt intake in these ways, rather than buying ‘low-sodium’ products, just as I prefer to eat a little bit of rich and glorious real butter to some synthetic ‘low-fat’ spread.

I do hope this is helpful. Any blog readers have any other suggestions?