[Sca-cooks] baby bok choy

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach vicki shaw:
>Thank you for all the interesting information.  As for MY too much
>information down at the botton, well that was just a joke, but you know
>that.

That's okay. Some people don't understand when I speak of opening my 
tool case and getting out my 10-inch Dick. (And other helpful list 
members usually say, "Yeah, I was there, and I saw him get it out. 
And he even let me hold it!")

>I had a roomie once from Beijing who spoke Mandarin and cooked Mandarin and
>she taught me a lot.  The best thing she ever taught me is not to forget you
>are heating hot chilies in the dry skillet and walk away!  We had to run out
>of hte house after she ran to the kitchen and turned off the fire because
>the smoke was burning our eyes!
>She actually ruined me for Chinese restaurants in America.  Once you get a
>taste of the real stuff, restaurants are at best ersatz.

I may have a little advantage here, living in a big city with a large 
and mixed Chinese and Chinese-American community. I haven't had quite 
as discouraging an experience, although there are plenty of bad 
Chinese restaurants out there if you know where to look for them. I'm 
heartbroken to report that The Magic Lantern, my local 
hole-in-the-wall that secretly sold real Chinese food to certain 
select clientele, and half-fried-chicken-fried-rice-and-no-onions to 
those who preferred that sort of thing, is now closed, the space now 
devoted to some yuppie foolishness or other. At around the same time, 
we lost The Joy Luck Restaurant, which for maybe 85 years was the 
primary (and almost the only) place to get family-style Toysan 
cooking, things like steamed pork patties with salted duck eggs, or 
various greens cooked with fermented bean curd cheese (like 
watercress or amaranth greens in a sauce a bit like salty, melted 
Camembert) It seems like some of the Cantonese restaurants are taking 
up some of the slack, but not many. It's probably simple reality that 
the demand for this type of cookery, in the face of changing 
immigration patterns, is not high.

Adamantius