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Ok...China oly has UHT milk for sale here, and i really want toast with butter and marmite on it!

As soon as i get the chinese characters written down for bread flour and yeast, i will be making microwave bread, so that's the toast sorted out (nearly...it'll be toasted on a gas flame...), BUT:

How do i make butter from UHT milk.? There doesn't seem to be any butter for sale around here, and when i asked, no-one knew where to buy it, or where to get real milk from...there is a distinct lack of cows (or goats...or sheep) in this part of the world!

I was quite intrigued and fascinated by your question. My first thought was that UHT milk just wouldn't make milk at all. I did a quick search on the net and found this link. It comes from pretty near you so perhaps you will find the information they give useful?

http://www.forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopi ... 98&t=78277

Let us know how you get on!

I know you can buy butter in tins and presumably order it online but I suppose it would be expensive?

Fee, don't shoot me for this, but it might help until you can find a source of either cream or butter.

Soy Butter

½ C. Soymilk
2 tsp. freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 C. canola oil

Place soymilk into food processor.
With motor running, pour oil into soymilk. Or whisk really hard
When mixture starts to stiffen, add lemon juice.
Makes about 1 1/2 Cups.

I just emailed a friend who spent a couple of months in the Szechaun area of China earlier this year. He seems to think Chongqing had a rather infamous branch of Carrefour (something to do with a riot or stampede or something similar). He also thinks Carrefours in China stock coffee, butter and cheese. Worth a try if you can locate a store?

Just in case you want to know The Chinese race can't break down milk in their digestive system. After 6 years old humans are naturally weaned off milk and loose the ability to break it down. For some reason American and Brits and other western Europians have managed to evolve to keep eating the stuff - many can't though. All the Chinese I know says its like eating sick!

Bloomin' Carrefour gets around!

as an aside
I think Carrafour was the "shop" a permaculture friend was telling me is the best for organic stuff and if Green Peace want any agreements they are the first to agree - how genuine they are I don't know. We don't have one here. What do you think MMM? (especially at 6:30 in the morning!!! )

Dunno Healer cos I don't buy many veg cos I grow my own. Super U also have a section of organic fruit and veg too. But when I do need to buy stuff, mainly in winter, I just buy cheaper non-organic.

Of the supermarkets I go to over the last few years they've really got into the providing of more and more bio, eco and fair trade products though which is a good thing.

P.S. You will soon get used to me being known as the early bird!

Lidl's in France have a big bio section too. But then I tried THREE supermarkets in Nontron yesterday trying to buy a bunch of spring onions, bio or otherwise. No chance!

We have a Carrefour about 40k away and often visit another one in San Sebastian so I know they get around.

Whereabouts are you Healer?

No you don't get "spring" onions here - white paris onions in june - the first onions available are the closest. I thin my seedling in spring so effectively get spring onions - probably how it all started! I'm in 49 - department not age (agggh not quite )
We grow all our vegi and fruit - accept apricots for jam and lemons! (advacado as a treat!)

Back to the Chinese and the milk though - wee fairy you may find if you start eating dairy products the locals will start side stepping you as if you have a bad smell about you - because you will have. No offence but milk products are very noticable as a smell on someone if you are not used to it. Even when I stopped eating milk products for over 4 years I really noticed it - and felt heavy and "sicky" smelling when I started eating them again. You are probably getting a lot healthier with out them!!

I've heard that Africans think that we stink too because of our diet!

Graye I've never seen a single bio thing in Lidl! Maybe they sell different things in other parts of the country. When I moved to Brittany from Ain there were several things that were quite different (i.e. Boursin in those irritating foil containers instead of a sensible plastic container, not to mention the flavours are different here) and other things that don't exist here at all. There was far more choice of everything in Ain. Plus wonderful Argentinian lovely tasty tender steak, that I'd kill to get hold of again! Even the stewing beef in Brittany is a joke. You could cook it all night and it would still only be useful to make a pair of shoes out of.

I used to grow all the French spring onions as spring onions perfectly successfully - just sow in spring and pick when ready in summer. There are tons of French varieties. But something has gone horribly wrong here and I can't get anything (English or French) to germinate in my soil any more. So I sow them in tubs in potting compost.

Thank you for the soy butter recipe.

Its not that i want huge amounts of dairy products - i ca use the UHT milk in tea and coffee, so that's ok, its just that toast is not toast without butter on it! And, i have a huge jar of marmite waiting for toast, and its not the same without butter!

I'm about an hour out of Chongqing, so i'll try to take a trip there at some point, i'm pretty sure i know where Carrefour is, and where Metro (another 'western' shop) is.

I have heard that chinese people think that westerners have an odd smell about them because of the dairy intake, but i'm also convinced that the sezchuan have a strange smell about them beczause of the chilli intake! My students think that i smell sweet, so i must be doing something right!

Hi fee fairy - I noticed I called you "wee fairy" before uuupps sorry, a fraudian slit of the fingers!

Do you do/know anything about traditional chinese acupunture? The old masters go by the smell of the client. I find this when I'm healing as well. So if you smell sweet it sounds good

Funny you should say that, i want to learn Acupuncture. I'm hoping to lear enough mandarin to be able to learn acupuncture ehre, maybe next year.

I do know that right now, i smell like onions...i've had a cold and i've been using the old scottish remedy of Whisky in a hot drnk before bed, so i'm sweating out all the toxins. Strangely, yesterday i was bed bound all day, but after last night's whisky, i feel a lot better! Hopefully, after tonight's all will be well again!

I hope so anyway, if you have a cold for 3 days here, they take you to hospital for some sort of drip...I'm trying the whisky trick, ad lots of tiger balm (a mix of camphor, mint, eucalyptus and other yummy smelling oils) on the chest and throat, and it seems to be working!

I'll keep listening to my students to see if ay of them think i smell off! I do think there is a lot in the ways that the body works. I could definitely smell toxic stuff this morning after sweating all night, and when we went for our medical, one of the things was the ENT doctor, who i thought would be interesting in looking at ears, nost and throat, but all he did was get me to stick my tongue out, he looked, and said 'oh, ok' and that was it. Some of the others, he looked at their tongue and then looked at everything else, so i guess my tongue must have looked healthy! I suffer from Urticaria too, and have oticed that whenever my immune system's under attack it flares up, so its an early warning signal. Bodies are great things...

Where were your friends in China? I'm in Hechuan, which is about an hour away from Chongqing, and about 3 hours from Chengdu.