Delightful scorpions and seahorsies!  Both easily available in kebab form here in Beijing!  Okay, not so easily available, all the Chinese people I know draw the line at eating scorpions and seahorses.  But not at grasshoppers and fish heads, oddly enough… all seems the same to me.

Hope I didn’t kill anyone’s appetite.

What you see in the foreground here is tea.  To be specific, puer tea harvested from wild, natural growing tea trees that are poetically described as 千年古树 (1000 year old ancient trees).  What many people don’t realize is that the tea plant, camellia sinensis, grows as a tree in the wild.  It’s cultivated as a bush at tea plantations for convenience of picking. 

The background is the rest of our dinner.  Nice and classy.

I’ve been experimenting with various combinations of putting fruits and nuts in my salads.  This one is bits of almond and green raisins.  The larger chunks are cucumbers, tomatoes, and chinese pear, all on a bed of lettuce.  The balsamic vinaigrette that I later poured over it was perhaps not the best dressing to use… something more like an Italian vinaigrette might have been better.

The bread crust was not especially crunchy or hard, the way I like it.  Still, it was slightly nutty with bits of raisins in it, which made it go very very well with the wine and the others.

The wine was a Yering Station 2007 Chardonnay, from the Mornington Peninsula in Australia.  I once spent an afternoon helping put netting over a friend’s wine grapes on the Mornington Peninsula.  Learned quite a bit about the process of wine-making.  I quite like Australian wines.  They’re well made, cheap at the price, and without the pretention of French wine.

And the coup de grace: Liver paté, a simple olive oil dipping sauce, and Denmark Havarti cheese with jalapeno.  

This brought to you courtesy of being bored.