Ian came for dinner 16 August 2013

My long time friend Ian, a friend of over 20 years, came for a visit last evening.  Ian is now living in Kent and working as a Headmaster.

It is lovely when an old friend comes for dinner.

  
I have cooked many different dishes for him over the years.  When we first met, I was such a banana - could not read Chinese, could not write Chinese.  If God wanted me to be "white" He would have made me one!  I am pleased I am discovering my roots.

I told Ian I found the recipes of two of the dishes from the Chaoshan 潮汕 websites and thanks be to God, we have those websites.  Now - that was nearly 10 years ago and I could not remember the websites, even if you were to kill me.  

So we had Cai Tao Guê 菜頭餜 and this has already been posted in another blog about Chaoshan food called cooking with little Charlemagne. It is customary to fry slices of Cai Tao Guê 菜頭餜 and we ate it with diam zio 甜醬.  

It was my Teochew friend, Brenda from Singapore, we told me all about diam zio 甜醬.  She is not a banana like me and therefore could cascade some of our culture to me.  We cannot go out to the shops and get a bottle of diam zio 甜醬 in London and again I found a diam zio recipe from a website many years ago - and again, I cannot remember where.  It is very easy to make.  Just mix some plum sauce with light soya sauce and I added some Teochew chilli oil 潮洲辣椒油 to the sauce - that is because I like my food to have a little kick!  

Cai Tao Guê 菜頭餜

We also had Teochew Hung Guê 潮洲粉餜.

In the restaurants in London, it is called Chiuchow funguo 潮洲粉果

They use the wrong character for guo 果 and the character they use is for fruits. Some people use this guo 粿 character. What is interesting is that I cannot find this character 粿 in my large Chinese English dictionary 遠東漢英大辭典.

Teochew Hung Guê 潮洲粉餜

After the Hung Guê 粉餜, we had zabcai 什菜.  

zabcai 什菜

I just bought the vegetables in a supermarket.  I try to avoid getting vegetables or ingredients in Chinese shops for I think they have over priced Chinese goods and it is really a rip off.  

Then dessert and Japanese green tea.

綠豆凍 and cake

And we had Japanese tea in English tea cups.  Why not?  I gave away all my Japanese tea cups - part of my restructuring / reorganising for living a simple life.  The Japanese tea smelled like the matcha, which Brenda, my friend, sent to me.  This Japanese tea was given to me by my lovely AhMue 阿妹, whose husband had lots of business dealings with Japan and her family does not drink tea and I therefore benefited from this and got the lovely tea.  I nearly threw out the tea as part of my restructuring and thank goodness Christina, my other Chinese friend persuaded me not to and said Japanese tea tastes good too.

A final point. I have to remember Ian does not eat tomatoes as these do not agree with him.  Must remember that - I nearly added tomatoes to the zabcai 什菜 and if I did, it would be really zaogao 糟糕 !!

Can you spot the tomatoes? ^_~