More Alien Foodstuffs
Tuesday, March 15th, 2005At this rate, I think that the types of food that I’ll encounter on my prospective SE Asia trip will be mundane…
Tonight I am going to make a noodle and veg stir-fry to go with some leftover slow-roasted five spice pork which has been kicking around the fridge since Saturday. Thinking about the flavours, I thought some mushrooms would go well in this dish and remembered a sachet of what I took to be shrivelled, dry cloud’s ear mushrooms which I had bought in a Chinese supermarket in Reading a few weeks ago. I didn’t think I would have any use for them, but they seemed perfect for this dish. So I shook out a few of the leathery, thin ‘shrooms and bit off a small piece to taste.
— Now, I have recently bought some evil salty liquorice from Sweden which is encrusted with a layer of near-concentrated ammonium chloride, so I am used to strong stuff. It is just that I did not expect a mushroom to taste anything like it.
I soaked the things in a few changes of boiling water, but along with their salt, all the flavour leached out of them so that I was left with limp, tasteless, semi-transparent roundels that looked less and less like mushrooms. In fact they looked more like flowers with fused petals and each with a ring of small, slightly darkened, flattened seeds in the centre. Or the transection of something else—I am a classically trained Zoologist, but I can’t be wholly certain that it is not of an animal nature.
Perhaps somebody can enlighten me. The stuff was labelled ‘Assem Skin’. The rest of the label was not in English. Google has no answers.
Denni