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My son introduced me to a the wonderful Youtube channel of a young Chinese woman who gardens, harvests and cooks in her family's traditional manner.  There is very little dialog and it is in Chinese, with completed dishes named with their Chinese charactors.  It's hypnotic and beautiful and sent me trying to find various foodstuffs (a flat cabbage, for instance).  I came across one video with some english subtitles and she used something called "chicken fir oil" 

Google has not been helpful.  Back in the 80s I had a book called the Von Walentz Guide to Ethnic Ingredients and I would love to find a modern counterpart.  Something with all the many greens and cabbages of the world, the different eggplants, vinegars (persimmon vinegar, who knew?) and maybe it would tell me what chicken fir oil is. 

Suggestions anyone?

Thanks,
Zephy

I love my Von Walentz Guide to Ethnic Ingredients. For Asian ingredients consider Charmaine Solomon's Encyclopedia of Asian Food | Eat Your Books or Asian Ingredients: A Guide to the Foodstuffs of China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam | Eat Your Books. I tend to use more targeted volumes such as Asian Greens | Eat Your Books but they aren't Von Walentz.

As for "Chicken fir oil" a few hints about the type of recipe would help. But the first thing that came to my mind was Korean Fire Chicken. Is it possibly a typo for which "Chicken fire oil" is actually intended? Otherwise I would assume fir infused oil which is common enough to be an EYB ingredient for nearly 50 recipes.

However, there is also a Chinese fire oil for which there are recipes on EYB - but that would be too easy an answer and nowhere near as fun as guessing.

As far as vegetables go I found this site to be quite useful: Vegetables - A Guide to world vegetables.. there is a reference book as well published by the site's author in 2019 (not in EYB library - ISBN is 9780367400941. - 

A Produce Reference Guide to Fruits and Vegetables from Around the World

Nature's Harvest

By: Donald D Heaton

What's the channel out of interest?

Thanks

Hi Mjes,

It could be fire oil, I suppose, although I haven't seen her using a lot of chilis so far.  I don't know if the captioning is hers or Youtube's.  Google gave me all sorts of possibilities, including a fir fungus.

I will check out your suggestions.  Maybe I need a gardening book, too?

Zephy

Oh this is fun, thank you!

Zephy

Here is a link to the channel.  https://www.youtube.com/c/cnliziqi/featured. It's beautiful to look at and the work necessary to prepare some foods is just astonishing.

Zephy

I enjoy growing uncommon vegetables and fruits. If you are into gardening as well as cooking, the seeds for many of the Asian vegetables and fruits listed on this webpage are available from 
https://www.kitazawaseed.com/
If you want to try your hand at oca, mashua, yacon, ulluco, skirret, crosnes, or mauka, then the place to go is https://www.cultivariable.com/
For celtuce, hyacinth bean, strawberry spinach, and almost any herb I go to https://www.rareseeds.com/

They are all US companies, I don't know if they ship internationally.

If you get into the South American vegetables from Cultivariable, there is a great free, downloadable cookbook that you might like (see the EYB note for the link to download): Traditional High Andean Cuisine by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations https://www.eatyourbooks...onal-high-andean-cuisine