Check out the cool vegetable we found in the market this week. It tastes like a cross between broccoli and cauliflower. Someone called it 花菜 (huā cài), flower vegetable, which is the same word used for cauliflower in Chinese. A wiki search tells me is is called Romanesco broccoli or Roman Cauliflower. So there you have it. Your vegetable lesson for the day.
Since I'm on the topic of food and feeling way behind in my blogging, here are the latest installments in my Chinese cooking experiment.
Chairman Mao's Red-Braised Pork (毛氏红烧肉). I don't know if I cooked it too long or didn't buy the right cut of pork, but it wasn't as good as I had hoped after smelling the fragrant broth cooking for a couple hours. The meat was a little tough.I also made dan dan noodles (担担面) and fish-fragrant eggplant (鱼香茄子) a couple of weeks ago, both of which were way too much work for mediocre results, not half as good as what I can get at the noodle shop and the restaurant down the street.
A friend just taught me how to make some really easy and delicious green beans with a mystery spice paste I have sitting here on my desk. I need to translate the ingredients before I feed it to my allergy guys. Food sleuthing continues.
3 comments:
I love hearing about your food adventures! I know what you mean about too much work for mediocre results - I rule those things right out after i make them if i don't love them! But if you keep going i bet you're going to find some real winners - and then you have to share the recipe! :)
I got some Romanesco broccoli with my CSA two years ago. It wasn't nearly as nice looking as yours though!
We can get Romanesco broccoli here (New Zealand). I can't recall seeing it fresh - our supermarket is rather small, so other places might have it - but we regularly buy it in a frozen mix. It's sweeter than regular broccoli, we quite like it.
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