Photos of my apartment

[EienNiHen]

The drawer: flour, spare peppermint tea, dried red peppers, naicha (Mongolian milk/butter tea), more jello, ground mala, Chinese cinnamon, cinnamon, black pepper, curry, tomato sauce, salt, LOTS more cinnamon, aniseed, sunflour seeds, hot paprika, fancy paprika, more salt, sugar.

What's the difference between cinnamon and Chinese cinnamon?  I do a lot of cooking, so naturally I'm curious.

And I must say, damn but you have a lot of tea.  ^^

[Tintenfisch]

Tintenfisch: You mean my buddy, Genghis Khan? What's scary about him?

Well he just has this look of being asked a question he doesn't know how to answer to.

[D--]

This is half my normal tea collection ... a month ago, everyone who came here said my kitchen looked like a tea shop. Quite a few were African teas and some herbal stuff from the US that I gave away to other people.

Uh oh, you asked it. Now you're going to find out why my website is cinnamonpirate.com.

"Cinnamon" is a Malay word (kalay manis) loaned into Hebrew as kinamom, then loaned into Latin, and eventually into English.

While there are over a dozen "kinds" of cinnamon (sri lankan, vietnamese, arabic, indonesian and the list goes on), almost all can be grouped into two main areas: ceylon cinnamon (cinnamomum verum) or cassia (cinnamomum aromaticum). Cassia tends to be grown as a commercial crop only in China and Vietnam, while Ceylon is grown in Sri Lanka, India, and into the middle east. Both come from the same family of trees (laurels) and are generally harvested during an area's rainy season when the bark is soft and able to peel.

Cassia, in my opinion, is a much lighter, easier flavor for people to handle. It's both sweet and bitter at the same time, and almost seems bland when compared to the "bite" of ceylon. Ceylon is far more pungent and snappy, like the kind of snap you get from gingerbread cookies. Maybe it's due to the toxic cinnamaldehyde that's present in the bark (cinnamon extract is used as a natural pesticide in many areas) are something else, but it's very snappy as opposed to the bitter or astringant cassia.

I use both of them together, along with aniseeed, for making cinnamon tea.

It's tough knowing which you are buying, but usually cassia is sold as &#26690;&#30382; while ceylon is sold as &#32905;&#26690;. Nine in ten Chinese people don't know the difference, and most Chinese dictionaries (not C<->E mind you, C->C) treat them as completely interchangeable words. If sold with the bark on, you may have some success differentiating between the two, but if it's sold as quills (what is called "stick cinnamon" in the USA) it's hopeless. Telling one laurel from another with the bark off and without eating it is impossible for anything but a botanist.

[sa-two]

You've got a tonne of eggs in that fridge, man. How many do you go through in a week? D:

[Nightcrawler]

You've got a tonne of eggs in that fridge, man. How many do you go through in a week? D:

D's a body builder and needs his protein?

[D--]

Actually, it's that I rarely ever eat meat, so all my protein comes from eggs and soy. I also only use the egg whites, which requires using 5 eggs instead of three. Lastly, eggs in China are sold in boxes of 6 or 18 (no dozens), and it's 1.3 yuan cheaper to buy three boxes of 6 than the box of 18. Hence why I have 18 eggs in the fridge.

Yes, I know eggs eventually turn into meat. I mean I just don't like the taste of any meats excluding chicken and fish.

Things like beef or pork tend to make me violently ill. I can handle mutton and donkey, though they're not my favorite. Too greasy.

[sa-two]

I guess you must not dig tofu much either.
(mapo doufu is nummy nummy)

Raging against the Sino-machine, I present my room in YURP.

[D--]

I don't mind doufu, but I hate having to cook it. I'll only eat it when I got to a restaurant. And aside from mapo or mala doufu, I don't really care for it. Jiachang makes me want to hurl.

[The_Big_Joke]

I must say that its a really nice apartment that you have there, it looks so spacey, much unlike the one that i live in (part of the "milion project"  (think concrete houses.. it aint nice to look at) here in sweden... and some of the original horrible things are still in it, althought we are in the proces of makeing it look nice).

[D--]

All the houses here are concrete--including mine. They just spray a cheap layer of plaster on the wall and pain it, but slapping your hand into the wall will only hurt two things: your hand and the paint.

[TechMaster]

Looking nice, D.  Room's clean and tidy (compared to my own XD)

Oh yeah, is it me or did you have like five different soy sauce in your fridge?

[The_Big_Joke]

Can you see that those houses were masproduced thought? The apartment that i live in looks kinda the same as the one under, and above.

[D--]

Oh yeah, is it me or did you have like five different soy sauce in your fridge?

Two. The rest are oils and vinegar.

Can you see that those houses were masproduced thought? The apartment that i live in looks kinda the same as the one under, and above.

Every single room is identical to the floor above it, and the only variety from floor-to-floor is how the direction of the rooms alternates to save on plumbing space.

For example, if mine is kitchen-den-bath, the ones to either side of me are bath-den-kitchen.

[Tintenfisch]

Concrete? Must get pretty darned cold...or hot....did I mention I suck at geography?

[The_Big_Joke]

Radiators are your friends during the winter.