It’s food that brought us to Shanghai. It’s food or drink that takes us most places. Richard is a bit like a “Bisto Kid” capable of sniffing out good food anywhere. We once came across a fantastic fresh water fish restaurant on Lake Iseo in northern Italy because Richard followed his gut feeling. And we found fellow diners who had made the trip all the way from Milan just to come to that restaurant. Our weekends and holidays have always been dominated by new tastes and flavours. Being in Shanghai is no different. Richard is dealing with food related matters all week and then at the weekend we do some more. There is new and exciting food everywhere and Richard is in seventh heaven. When persuading me that a year in Shanghai was a good idea he had said “That’s 52 weekends of new food experiences……. “ See what I have to put up with.
- Our local Japanese restaurant
- Japanese Starter
The nearest restaurant to the apartment is Japanese. It’s on the corner of our compound. With virtually no Chinese or Japanese we still got by and ordered a great meal. Our starter of pickled cucumber, edamame beans and octopus with wasabi was excellent and we went on to have mixed tempura and then wild herb noodles to finish.
The following day I took Richard to a wet market I had discovered and I won’t bore you with the endless pictures of green leaf that I had to take for him to send back to the factory in Kent, but the following from this weekend might be interesting:
From left to right, top to bottom
- Marinated chicken
- Sea cucumbers
- Very long leeks
- Dried fish
- Preserved jelly fish
- Live frogs
- Meat for stir fry including shaved pig's ear
- Making rice cakes
- Chilli bread - an excellent lunch.
- Fresh water chestnuts
- Dried chinese sausage
We bought some fresh water chestnuts, they are the rhizomes of a sedge cultivated in paddy fields all over China, my book "The Chinese Kitchen" told me when we got them home. If you’ve only ever eaten water chestnuts preserved in brine the fresh ones will be a revelation to you. I peeled them and then added them to our rice cooker so that they would be warmed through to eat with our rice and they were absolutely delicious. We also added some Chinese dried sausage to the rice cooker at the same time. These are hanging up drying in various markets (and out on the street) and the same cookery book warned us that, unlike dried sausage from the Alps, Chinese dried sausage should never be eaten raw. The drying can only take place over the winter months – the atmosphere gets too humid for air drying to be an effective preserving method at any other time.
So the reason why we are in Shanghai is food and I’m afraid that if you continue to read this blog, you’ll be getting more food pictures and articles than you perhaps bargained for, because that is the nature of the beast.
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