Silver Case

Got home late tonight. And quarrelsome.

Fixed Ling some instant ramen shit.  I tried to dress it up for her a bit, so I put in some wakame (wow, the stuff I brought from hokkaido fair was explosively fragrant compared with the tired old confetti we had before), some chopped up bits of tofu, some fried garlic, and lastly some slices of what is called ‘szechuan preserved vegetable.’

I occasionally eat at a  very authentic Szechuan restaurant here in Singapore. It is monstrously hot. I’m told by my colleague, a native of Wuhan, that the heat, regardless, is still toned down from the heavy stuff in Szechuan, but it is still plenty hot. Anyway, one of the starters they serve is slices of some unknown preserved vegetable. Hard to describe the taste.  It’s almost like a pickle, but without the dill-ness or sourness or the sweetness. Some mysterious Other flavor.  Anyway, it’s tasty.  I bought a bag of it a few days ago.

For myself I took the rest of the tofu, cubed it up, got some sesame oil frying, tossed that in, along with several spoonfulls of my wicked szechuan-style chilli paste (a half cup of peanut oil brought to 400F, then toss in a half cup of diced up dried red szechuan chillis and several tablespoons of ground black pepper. It makes noxious tear gas, foams, and then falls down.  Will keep indefinitely I expect).   I also tossed in some of this mystery vegetable and cracked an egg over it.

Wow, that vegetable is way way way salty.  It was ok as a seasoning in my dish. Inedible as a food item.  Unfortunately it leeched way too much into Ling’s ramen broth.  Apparently you use it for soups, or else you soak it for day(s) to leech out so much of the salt, then it is edible as a snack.  So that is what the two remaining balls/bulbs/lumps of the mystery vegetable are doing now — de-brining in a few liters of water.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Food.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.