I am often hugely thankful that I am not one of those foodies who love to eat but hate to cook. With few exceptions (my pre-pubescent attempts at baking, or trying out a recipe for the first time, for example), cooking for me is and has always been a pure and simple delight - a magic combination of meditation and creation.

Last night as I cooked for the first time in over two weeks, I felt this sensation very strongly. The meal I made wasn't complicated - a salad, a cold aubergine dish and a lotus root stir-fry - but in it's methodical and straightforward tasks I was totally happy and at peace.

I ate a great many delicious and wonderful things while I was away, but goddamn it's good to be back in my own kitchen!

Food and photos from the past two weeks coming soon...

Hello all, and welcome to the new home of Jessie and the Giant Plate!

It's been a long process setting this thing up, but it's finally done and I am over the moon with the results.

HUGE thanks to Werner at Brocade City for helping me with ftp, css and all that other nonsense.

I've uploaded most posts from my old blogger account; for all posts, and comments, go to www.jessieandthegiantplate.blogspot.com Please note that I will no longer be uploading new content to the blogger page.

Hope you all like the changes you see - comments and suggestions much appreciated!

I'll be away from Chengdu for the next couple of weeks so won't have much time to blog, but will hopefully return armed with many beautiful new photos, stories and recipes.

Until then, man man chi!

In a country where you can eat so well for cheaply, you may wonder why you’d ever want to pay much for a meal. In fact, until quite recently, I considered it a little crazy to pay more than the absolute minimum to fill one’s belly; the cheapest food is the best food here, I thought, so why should anyone spend any more of their hard-earned cash than they have to?

But though I still love the inexpensive basics of Sichuan cuisine (Mapo Tofu, Gong Bao Chicken, Fish Fragrant Aubergine etc), my attitude towards fine dining in China has recently undergone a bit of sea change. Perhaps it's because having eaten the classics so many times, I now appreciate the variety of dishes on offer at more expensive restaurants; or perhaps because now, being able to cook these dishes myself, I want something else when I go out – whatever the reason, I am currently on a mission to try out some of Chengdu’s more fancy restaurants, and have recently been to two excellent ones.

The first was at Rong Jin Yi Hao, where Cam and I went for our friend Clare’s birthday. Situated next to the river in the west of town, the restaurant is only 1 floor tall, very unusual for Chengdu, and even more unusual, made almost entirely out of glass. As you enter from the main road, it’s a bit like stepping into a rather glamorous greenhouse: lush fabrics drape from the ceiling, ancient-style furniture lines the walls, and customers lounge on plush purple sofas.

But enough about the decorations, on to the food! Almost everything we ate at Rong Jin Yi Hao I had never had before – particularly memorable were the ducks tongues, served with peanuts and deep-fried quails eggs…

…and these tangy, crunchy Strange-Flavour Broad Beans.

And though I wasn't exactly full when I left Rong Jin Yi Hao (a unfortunate side-effect of fancy restaurants, where rice is almost never served unless you ask for it), I would certainly recommend it for it's unusual and modern interpretations of Sichuan cuisine.

The second fancy restaurant I went to recently was Baguo Buyi. Established in 1996, Baguo Buyi has built a reputation for serving high-quality, authentic Sichuan food, and with 25 restaurants across China, is one of the most famous Sichuanese restaurant chains in the country. The Chengdu flagship branch, originally right in the downtowm, has changed location several times but is now settled in a huge, purpose-built complex (also housing a boutique hotel and tea-house) in the south near the airport expressway.

If all this makes Baguo Buyi sound a little forbidding though, think again – the staff are incredibly friendly, and the interior, though not exactly cozy, is beautiful. The mutli-story building, decorated in a grand-cum-rustic style, contains private dining rooms of various levels of sumptuousness, and tables for all group sizes in the public dining room. The best tables here have a view of the stage for the nightly face-changing, dancing and fire-breathing show, which, although a little noisy, was fun and of a pretty professional quality (the show is free for diners, lasts about 20 minutes, and starts at about 7pm).

Given all that I'd heard about Baguo Buyi my expectations were naturally high, but on the two occasions I ate there it didn't disappoint. Pick of the cold dishes was rabbit with green peppers, the meat strips lying on a bed of wood-ear mushrooms and draped in an aromatic sesame oil dressing swimming in green peppers;

and the pea jelly, the spicy sauce nicely offset by the crushed peanuts.

The hot dishes weren't perhaps quite a good as the cold – the chicken with chillies was, I thought, stingy on the meat and overpriced to boot (though my American co-diners loved the addition of fried potatoes). But the disappointment of that dish was more than made up for by two gorgeous pork dishes: belly pork with green beans was totally sublime, the chunks of meat meltingly soft, the beans cooked yet crunchy, the sauce satisfyingly sweet; and the twice-cooked pork with bread rolls was a nice twist on an old favourite.

So, would I want to eat at Rong Jin Yi Hao and Baguo Buyi everyday of the week? Of course not - even if money were not an issue the food at these restaurants is far too rich for everyday eating. Nonetheless, I will be sure to go them both again - both when I want to linger over my meal, and enjoy some very high quality Sichuan cuisine.

Baguo Buyi 巴国布衣
55 Shenxianshu Nan Lu (the branch I ate at)
神仙树南路55号
Tel: 028-85551168
Also another branch in Shuang Nan:
8 Guang Fu Qiao Bei Jie
广福桥北街8号附19号
Tel: 028-85095777

Rong Jin Yi Hao 容锦一号
Song Xian Qiao Tou 送仙桥头
Tel: 028-87337726

(Some parts of this post first appeared in Chengdoo Citylife Magazine, Issue 23)

Last Saturday, while I was at the Earth Day event at the Bookworm, I picked up some purple potatoes grown by a local organic farm. I would have bought some anyway, but I was particularly impelled to do so having had a conversation with a Chinese friend about them the very night before. Rui waxed lyrical about the purple potatoes he'd eaten in Gansu province, and how they are very hard to find in Chengdu. Seeing them not 12 hours after Rui's words, of course I had to buy him some, and a few for myself too.

This week I've been rather busy and haven't had much time to cook, but the other day, almost a full week after I bought them, I finally got to use my purple potatoes. I decided to make a simple potato salad, using a mixture of the purple potatoes and normal ones, dressed with lemon juice, sesame oil, garlic and sesame seeds, and sprinkled with some finely chopped red onions and cucumber. The result was both rather pretty and rather tasty – although having said that, I couldn't really discern a difference in taste between the purple and normal potatoes in the salad; and at about 3 times the price of normal varieties, a purple potato habit is not one I think I should get into.

When I used to live across town from the university where I taught, I would often stop on my cycle home to eat a snack which is the closest thing I've found to a Chinese hamburger (in a good way). Most days this snack vendor was there, next to a bus-stop on the road running along the river, and at rush hour they did a pretty brisk trade among the commuters.

What first caught my attention and caused me to pull over somewhat recklessly, were the many small bamboo steamers built into the vendor's portable stall, stacked several high and now and then emitting little puffs of steam. Once I'd got closer, I saw that the snack itself consisted of a small pouch of flat bread, stuffed with chucks of beef that was cooked in the tiny steamers with ground rice and chillies. Once this mixture was done, it was placed into a small bowl and mixed together with spring onions, fresh coriander, more chili powder, and ground Sichuan pepper; the finished mixture was then stuffed into the pouch of bread, and was thus ready to eat. The result, was totally delicious - slightly spicy, slightly numbing, but also wonderfully fresh-tasting.

Since I moved house a couple of months ago, I don't go up to the river so much, and so don't get to eat this snack as often as I'd like. The other day however, I set off at 5pm with camera in hand and a mission: to eat the snack again, take a photo of the stall and, most importantly, find out it's name.

The lovely couple running the stall, Mr Pa and Sister Zao remembered me, and happily posed for photos. They are there everyday, they told me, from 5pm till 8.30pm, with another hour in the afternoon spent by the gates of a big middle school up the road. And the snack's name, it emerged, is 'zheng long niu rou ga bing', a name not easily translated ('ga' means corner/nook/recess/out-of-the-way place), so I will for the sake of convenience just call it 'steamed beef bread pouch'!

I should also add that the snack is actually not native to Chengdu, but, as it's sign proudly proclaims, is a 'Famous Leshan Snack' (Leshan is a city about 2 hours south of Chengdu, famous as the site of Dafo, the tallest stone Buddha in the world).

The snack was easily as good, if not better than I remembered it, and I happily munched away while sitting by the river. There is another snack in Chengdu which I've heard referred to as the Chinese hamburger - a rather greasy concoction of egg, dough and minced pork - but I much prefer this version.

Steamed Beef Pouch stall
Corner of Bin Jiang Xi Lu and Jiangxi Jie
滨江西路和浆洗街路口
Everyday, 5pm till 8.30pm