On the lefthand side of the board are garlic stems (known confusingly as suan tai 蒜薹 in Sichuan, suan miao 蒜苗 in Hunan and suan xin 蒜芯 in at least some Cantonese areas. In China, they are often sold complete with their little bulbs on the top of each stem; here in England, where they can be found in some Chinese greengrocers, they are usually trimmed and bulbless. Raw, they have a strong and forthright pungency, but when you stir-fry them they become sweet and mellow. They are heavenly stir-fried with cured meats or firm pressed tofu.

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?

Another time, an old college friend who lives near Washington DC left a message on my mobile phone saying that she and her husband were about to drive past a Chinese supermarket, and thought it would be a great idea to stock up on all the ingredients they’d need for a serious Sichuan and Hunan cooking session based on recipes in my books, so could I please remind her what they should buy? Luckily I picked up the message soon afterwards, so I zapped off a short list, as follows:

MOST VITAL
Soy sauce, light and dark (or an organic tamari soy sauce)
Chinkiang vinegar (Chinese brown rice vinegar)
Sichuan chilli bean paste (made with chillies and fava or broad beans)
Chilli oil OR – better – ground Korean or Sichuanese chillies to make your own chilli oil
Toasted sesame oil (pure and unblended)
Dried chillies (not small deadly ones – larger ones are milder)
Whole Sichuan pepper
Shaoxing wine
Potato flour (a.k.a. potato starch)

Groundnut or rapeseed oil for cooking

ALSO USEFUL
Fermented black beans (the dry ones with salt and ginger)
Sichuanese preserved vegetable – ya cai OR Tianjin preserved vegetable in jars
Dried shiitake mushrooms

My friend picked up my email on her Blackberry, and within the hour I received the photograph above!

Apparently the cooking session was a great success.

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?

Chengdu spice stall

My acupuncturist friend Simon came for lunch the other day, and one of the dishes I cooked was that old favourite mapo doufu (Pock-Marked Old Woman’s beancurd). For some reason we ended up talking about Sichuan pepper, and Simon mentioned that he had some stocks in his pharmacy. I doubted that it would be as zingy as the best stuff, so I sent him home with a sample of the pepper I use (a gift from my chef friend Yu Bo), with strict instructions to try his regular pepper first, and then try chewing a bit of mine. His comments, copied below with his permission from an email he sent me yesterday, are a good illustration of what it’s like trying fantastic Sichuan pepper for the first time!

“I tried the Hua Jiao the next day and the experience was truly remarkable; I fished out some peppers from my pharmacy and chomped for a few seconds introducing the fragrant oils to my taste buds…..the result was a flavour that resembled the vibrancy of a shrivelled balloon long forgotten from a distant party, forlorn and wilted. Then I produced 4 small fruits, innocuous in appearance but with an altogether more forthright, aromatic fragrance. For continuities sake I repeated the chomp, the beckoning of saliva to carry the flavour to the somewhat disappointed taste buds and then…..the dragon seemed to stir in the East from it’s winter slumber and the awakening yawn sent a fiery blast rippling like molten lava around the edges of my tongue and before I could fully rejoice in the New Year fireworks a dozen giant centipedes in heavy workman’s boots started tap dancing on both my bottom and top lips…Wow, what a party, it carried on for at least an hour. I now truly know the difference between quality Hua Jiao and a pseudo shell of an aged pepper.”

Incidentally, I reckon the main reason for the scarcity of decent hua jiao in Chinese supermarkets is that they are mainly run by the Cantonese, who have little taste for the numbing sensation that the Sichuanese adore. Outside Sichuan, and Sichuanese restaurants abroad, Sichuan pepper is mainly used in spice mixtures, and for its medicinal qualities, so a lack of ma zinginess is not really missed.

Sliced potatoes with pickled greens - to be eaten with rice

According to this piece by Lauren Keane in the Washington Post, the Chinese government is hoping that the potato will help to provide greater food security as the country’s population peaks. Earlier this year, the article says, the government signed an agreement with the International Potato Center to jointly launch a potato research centre in Beijing.

Of course, persuading the Chinese to eat more potatoes will not be easy. Most Chinese people I’ve talked to about the importance of potatoes in, for example, the British diet, are incredulous - you mean, English people are willing to eat potatoes as 主食, a staple starch food?!!!*&@%^&*!!

Years ago, when I cooked a roast beef supper for some Sichuanese friends, with roast potatoes and vegetables, they ate the food – and then demanded some rice. As far as they were concerned, it was OK to have some potato as a 菜, a dish, but not as a substitute for a normal staple food based on rice or wheat. Only desperate peasants would be content to do without rice. Generally, in Sichuan, people ate a few potatoes here and there, usually either stir-fried with vinegar (醋熘土豆丝）or a little chilli and Sichuan pepper（炝土豆丝), or as a side ingredient (配料) in a stew.

Potatoes as a secondary ingredient

Most people in China still seem to regard potatoes as as a poor peasant food or a famine staple, along with maize and sweet potatoes. It was the arrival of these New World crops in China from the late Ming Dynasty that enabled the cultivation of marginal and mountainous lands unsuitable for rice and wheat, and allowed the exponential growth of the population over the Ming and Qing. But it was only people living in these marginal areas who would consider these starchy foods as potential staples, because they had to – anyone who could afford the choice would eat rice, or wheat in the north. This, no doubt, is why people could never understand why someone like my father, living in a rich country like the UK, would adore potatoes and find the idea of doing without them for a few weeks in China profoundly unsatisfying.

Chinese friends of mine remember being forced to subsist on sweet potatoes during times of extreme hardship in the 1960s and 1970s. Now, in better times, you’re most likely to see potatoes as one of a few simple vegetable dishes at a home-cooked supper, or as a nostalgic poverty food in a ‘rustic’ restaurant. When I lived in Hunan, ‘rustic’ restaurants would sometimes make 锅巴饭 pot-sticker rice with potatoes or sweet potatoes – a reference to the hard times of the past when people would try to make the rice go further by adding other ingredients.

But as McDonalds and KFC seduce the younger generation in China into eating burgers and fries, will perceptions of potatoes change? The Chinese government is clearly hoping that they will, as the land dries up or is covered in concrete, and as the number of mouths to feed approaches its likely peak of 1.5 billion.

Do any Chinese blog readers notice a generational difference in attitudes towards potatoes?

If any of you have tried asking for ya cai in Chinese shops, you may have found that the staff there point you in the direction of beansprouts, causing great confusion on both sides. This is because the Chinese characters for Sichuanese ya cai are exactly the same as the characters for beansprouts, and most people outside Sichuan have not heard of ya cai! Perhaps my photographs of the sachets will help you track it down.

A delicious supper of odds and ends this evening: some butternut squash with dried mustard greens and bamboo shoots leftover from a dinner party last night, mushrooms stir-fried with garlic, steamed broccoli with sesame oil, and fried eggs with gan lan cai 橄榄菜, one of my favourite relishes. With rice of course. It all took about fifteen minutes.

Incidentally, I bought the oil at the Wild Beef stall at Broadway Market run by Richard and Lizzie Vines, producers of fantastic grass-fed beef. I’ve been using their meat for a while in Chinese dishes, and I highly recommend it. Their cattle are grass-fed and traditionally reared, and the meat is delicious. Yesterday Zhang Xiaozhong and I used some of their beef shin in a Sichuanese cold meat dish – magnificent. They do mail order as well as market stalls, in case anyone’s interested…