The restaurateur, who has been in London for more than a decade, was shocked and amazed by this turn of events. “I really like English culture, and I do think English people deserve the word ‘gentlemen’,” he said, “But you really take human rights too far here. The government needs to be more strict, and less easy about handing out British citizenship and welfare and so on. If you are too soft, you’ll end up like the United States, with everyone carrying guns. People are too lazy here, too, and because of the prevalence of supermarkets and fast-food joints, they are forgetting how to cook. Honestly, I think Great Britain was Great a hundred or two hundred years ago [NB this is exactly when Britain was abusing China in the most ungentlemanly manner], but these days it’s just ‘Britain’”.

Interesting to hear a Chinese immigrant complaining about excessive human rights, and praising colonial-era Britain… and I appreciate that he thought the loss of cooking skills was one of the major causes of the decline of a once-Great country…

The most beautiful building, glimpsed through Gramercy Park

Foodwise: delicious crisp tofu and bulgogi beef sliders at a newish Korean place, Danji; an utterly perfect, simple lunch at the Gramercy Tavern; and a lavish, dreamlike brunch for Daniel Boulud’s 20th New York anniversary. Oh, and I cooked a Sichuanese feast for the friends who put me up, with fresh produce from Chinatown. (And apart from the food, it would almost be worth going to New York

just to have another look at the portrait of Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein in the Frick Collection.)

The Kinmen (also known as Jinmen and Quemoy) islands lie barely a couple of kilometres off the coast of Fujian Province, but have been under Taiwanese administration since the end of the Chinese civil war. In the 1950s, during the First and Second Taiwan Strait Crises, they were bombarded by Mainland forces, and the islands were littered with hundreds of thousands of artillery shells. Local artisans gathered up the shells, and transformed them into knives, which have become a famous local product.

This is one of the Kinmen knives I bought in Taipei last May. It’s a lovely knife, pleasingly weighted, and the shopkeeper who sold it to me said that the military-grade steel makes it particularly durable. Bombs into kitchen knives; destruction into creativity, nourishment, life and pleasure.

Ice blocks, Kashgar Sunday market

The first time I went to America, I couldn’t understand why, whenever I checked into a hotel, the first thing the bell boy told me was where I could find ice. He might point out an ice dispenser in the lift lobby, or tell me which number I could call to have some ice sent over. Ice, it seemed, was the number-one preoccupation of American hotel guests, whatever the season. As a Chinese convert, though, the first thing I want to see when I check into a hotel room is hot water and the means to make tea. In the old days in China, every hotel or guesthouse would provide tealeaves and lidded mugs, and a fuwuyuan would bring you a thermos filled with hot water as soon as you arrived – one of those lovely, old-fashioned thermoses with floral patterns that evoke the style of pre-war Shanghai. Fresh supplies of hot water could be obtained from a service room on every floor where a giant steel samovar simmered away, day and night. These days, you’re more likely to be faced with an electric kettle, but the tea-making facilities are non-negotiable. A cup of tea always has to be part of the welcome, whether you are arriving at someone’s home or office, or checking into a hotel.

So hotel rooms in America always feel strangely ill-equipped. If you’re lucky, you might find a coffee maker which you can just about use to boil water for tea, but this seems to be the exception. If you call room service for boiling water, it will have cooled down too much by the time it arrives to make a decent brew, and you may be faced with a hefty charge. On my recent trip to America, I travelled as usual with a tin of my favourite tea leaves, but was unable to use them at all. And I just can’t understand why anyone would come in from the bitter cold of a New York winter and want to drink a glass of water packed with ice! But people in the States seem to be addicted to it. One British friend of mine who has settled there can barely drink anything without ice; I noticed people on planes ordering iced drinks with an extra cup of neat ice on the side, just in case; waiters were barely unable to process my outlandish request for water without ice. And when I requested hot water – I had a bad cold, I’m used to drinking ‘white boiled water’ (bai kaishui 白开水)in China, and the thought of consuming ice was unbearable – they clearly thought I was insane.

In China, cold drinks, especially in midwinter, are regarded as a bad idea. My Chinese doctor elaborated: “Iced drinks slow down the movement of your qi. Normally we say that your skin protects you from the onslaught of external cold. Drinking iced drinks is like allowing spies to infiltrate your body.”

The privileged among us really do live in one of the golden ages of eating. Like rich Romans of classical times, who served peacocks at their banquets, or the upper classes of Tang Dynasty Chang’an, with their predilection for Silk Road spices, we can pick and choose what we consume; we can have Sichuanese food tonight, Italian tomorrow and Japanese the day after; we can buy fresh uni, fennel pollen and verjuice; we can eat meat at every meal, or decide to become vegetarian for intellectual reasons. We can fuss over the provenance and purity of our coffee and chocolate. We can throw away vegetables that are a little wilted, or good food that we simply forgot to cook because we were out at some fancy new restaurant. Our biscuits are double-choc or triple-choc, our ice creams are threaded with extra nuggets of luxury. The world is our oyster.

Eggs, cabbage, mushrooms

Such decadence is always a privilege, and more precarious than it might seem. It’s impossible not to think of this in the midst of a raging recession, and, even more seriously, a period of mass extinctions and unstable weather. And that is perhaps why, lucky as I feel to be part of the British Established Middle Class (according to the new survey!) in this era of rich and varied eating, and satisfied as I am with the kou fu that comes with my job (kou fu 口福is a wonderful Chinese phrase that means ‘the good fortune to happen upon delicious food’), I try not to forget that eating well is a privilege, and that rice, cabbage and tofu is enough for an everyday lunch.

Potato, cabbage, broccoli, sardines

Of course the great thing about Chinese cooking is that modest, cheap meals can be so extremely delicious and satisfying. I’m a great fan of fermented tofu, which has such an electrifying flavour that it really can enliven the taste of a bowlful of plain rice and vegetables (lao gan ma 老干妈 chilli and black bean sauce and gan lan cai 橄榄菜 ‘olive vegetable’ are two other scrumptious relishes). Some pickled vegetables, a spoonful of dried shrimps (see my last blog post), a few chillies, or a single slice of streaky bacon – all these can make the plainest, cheapest foods taste amazing. And rather than meat, why not have with your rice or noodles a single egg, fried both sides and finished with a streak of soy sauce?

Fruit leather rabbit

Simnel cake

Above you’ll also find a couple of other pictures of simple lunches I’ve had in the last week or so. Both meals took about half an hour to prepare. On the upper right you can see some stir-fried spring greens with dried shrimp, with steamed eggs and stir-fried mushrooms – I cooked the mushrooms in a little duck fat I had in the fridge, with garlic and spring onions. I was pleased because a (Taiwanese) friend who had come over to fix my kitchen door, and who had politely declined an offer of lunch, was simply unable to resist the cooking smells and ended up sharing everything with me, very happily. And on the left is a meal I rustled up on a day when there didn’t seem to be any food in the house: the end of the spring cabbage I cooked for the first meal, again with a few dried shrimps, one tiny leftover head of broccoli (including the stalks, peeled and sliced) with ginger and garlic; two potatoes slivered and stir-fried with chilli and Sichuan pepper; and then a tin of sardines because I was particularly hungry! I make no apologies for the careless presentation of the dishes in the pic on the left, but this was a quick fix on a busy day, and I wanted to show it exactly as it was – basic, but delicious.

And there’s also a pic of some of the Easter feasting – namely my first Simnel cake (!), and an Easter rabbit I cut out of Iranian fruit leather at my small niece’s request (she’s obsessed with rabbits).

I’ve included a couple of peppercorns in the photograph on the right so you can see how extremely small they are.

Recipe ideas:

1. Stir them into beaten egg, with some finely sliced spring onions, white pepper and salt if you need it, and make an omelette: I do this in a wok, scrambling the egg in the base of the wok until it’s nearly cooked, and then leaving it to turn golden on the base before flipping it over to fry the other side.

2. Use them to add a bit of extra excitement to fried rice. This morning I used up some leftover rice as

Fried rice

follows: Break up the rice so it doesn’t stick together in large clumps; Heat a little oil in a seasoned wok, add a spoonful or two of papery dried shrimp and fry gently until they smell amazing and are faintly golden. Add some beaten egg. When the egg is half-cooked, tip in the cold, cooked rice and stir-fry over a high heat until it is piping hot and fragrant, and making popping noises against the side of the wok. Season with salt or light soy sauce to taste. Add finely sliced spring onion greens and continue to stir until you can smell them. Stir in a tiny amount of sesame oil if you please, to enhance the aroma, and then serve. This would be even more delicious with brown rice, in my opinion.

3. Add papery dried shrimp, dried laver seaweed (紫菜) and finely sliced spring onion greens to the clear stock in which you serve wontons or boiled jiaozi dumplings (full recipe in my book Every Grain of Rice).

4. Fry generous amounts of the shrimps in hot oil until crisp and fragrant; set aside. Add a little more oil to your wok, add very finely sliced spring greens, Savoy cabbage or other greens and stir-fry until barely cooked. Add the fried shrimps, with salt and soy sauce to taste, and finally spring onions (full recipe in Every Grain of Rice). This is possibly my favourite way to eat cabbage.

The shrimp are so thin that they can be used directly from frozen, and they keep for ages in the freezer. An indispensable stand-by ingredient.

You can see a picture of the regular Big Brekkie on the right…

Just in case you were wondering if I have to eat EVERY wild animal I meet, here is a pic of me interacting very amicably with a koala, who lived to tell the tale.

And here’s a picture of another local sausage, this time laced with chilli – anyone who remembers eating Sichuan hotpot before a long, hard-seat train journey in China will know exactly what they mean!

Afghan mantu

I’ve long been fascinated by the connection between Turkish mantı dumplings – and all their relatives across central and eastern Asia – and Chinese mantou (my paper on the subject from a Chinese angle will be published this summer in the Proceedings of the Oxford Food Symposium, along with a paper from the Turkish/Central Asian point of view by the Turkish food expert Aylin Oney Tan). So I was completely thrilled to come across these Afghan mantu in a gorgeous Afghan restaurant in Adelaide – the Parwana Afghan Restaurant. It’s a family business just outside the city centre where the warmth of the welcome and the charm of the ambience match the deliciousness of the food (I only came across it because the daughter of the owners was a volunteer at the Adelaide Writers’ Week and came to talk to me after one of my events, but it turns out to be highly rated by the local restaurant website, urbanspoon.com).

Afghan mantu - uncooked

Of course the highlight for me were the mantu dumplings: pretty little things stuffed with carrot and sauteed onion, steamed, and then slathered with a tomato and lamb stew and garlicky yoghurt, and sprinkled with paprika and dried mint. The cook and co-owner, Farida Ayubi, said they were normally stuffed with mutton and onion, but she preferred them this way, and was also keen to accommodate vegetarians where possible. The dumplings were a very interesting variant on the mantı /mantou theme: the steaming method (and original mutton-and-onion filling) connects them via the Uyghur mantı of Xinjiang with China, while their yoghurt and paprika topping is reminiscent of the serving of tiny, mutton-stuffed mantı in Turkey.

Korean mandoo

Aren’t the uncooked dumplings (shown left) pretty?! Apart from the mantu, we enjoyed rose shabat, a pink drink made with rose syrup and floaty with basil seeds, which look like frogspawn and give a mouthfeel slightly reminiscent of Taiwanese bubble tea; fabulous slices of aubergine simmered in tomato sauce and topped with yoghurt (banjan borani), fragrant grilled, marinated chicken thigh kebab served with nan bread, salad and chutney (lawang kebab), and cardamom- infused basmati rice with caramelised carrots, sultanas, slivered almonds and pistachios (Kabuli palaw).

Cantonese prawn and chive dumplings

On another day in Adelaide, I lunched on Korean mandoo (right), which were what the Chinese these days generally call bao or baozi (although similar dumplings are still sometimes known as mantou in Shanghai) – little twirled dumplings, served steamed or pan-fried, with a green salad, a scoop of potato salad, pickled cucumbers and a very good chilli sauce. And on yet another day, these divine pan-fried prawn and chive dumplings (left: jiucai xiabing 韭菜虾饼) were part of a dim sum lunch (always known in these parts as yum cha) at T-Chow, in Chinatown.

The answer, [Prof Mark Sutton, lead author of a UN Environment Programme (Unep) study published on Monday] said, was more vegetables on the plate, and less animal protein. “Eat meat, but less often – make it special,” he urged. “Portion size is key. Many portions are too big, more than you want to eat. Think about a change of culture that says, ‘I like the taste, but I don’t need so much of it.’”

By filling plates with vegetables as well as the meat, people will be better nourished. “Most people don’t notice,” he said, citing a recent UN event at which the chef used a third the amount of meat, more vegetables to make up for it, and more than 90% of guests were just as satisfied.

You know what I’m going to say… which is that if you want to eat less meat without any sacrifice in gastronomic pleasure, do cast a glance in the direction of China. The traditional Chinese diet offers such splendid ways of enjoying meat in moderation, and vegetables in plenty, that you can feed your conscience as well as your palate (this is largely what my latest book is about). Share your meat with a family or friends, or cut it up and use it to give flavour to a wokful of vegetables; use fermented black beans and pickled greens to create scrumptious umami tastes in cheap vegetarian ingredients. Interestingly, the scientist quoted above says pork and chicken – the most favoured meats in China – have the lightest environmental impact.

Ironically, of course, just when we need the Chinese to tell us how to eat well, they seem to be embarking on exactly the same path of destruction as the Western world: demand for meat in China has quadrupled in 30 years. On one of my most recent trips to Chengdu, a banquet I attended included a beefsteak for every person, individually plated in the Western style and served with knife and fork. Also served were individual steaks of salmon (pictured above), another recently-popular food, and one that is often farmed intensively, with fairly gruesome environmental consequences. (And yes, that is a Pringle you see on top of it, as a garnish.) All the other courses were served in the normal Chinese style, with chopsticks.

Perhaps it’s time for us all to remember Confucius, of whom it was said: ‘Even if the meat is plentiful, he does not let it be more abundant than the rice.’