Food

A salad is usually a mixture of un cooked ingredients. In Britain it mainly has lettuce, as well as tomato, cucumber, onion, and other things. We often put salad dressing on salad.

I love spicy food, especially curries - the hotter the better! My sister prefer mild curries.

Those cakes are too sugary for me. They have a sickly taste.

They had some delicious savory snacks at the party. They were very moreish.

The breakfast buffet was very poor quality: the coffee tasted bitter and the fruit juice was sour.

The food on the plane was bland and tasteless - it was like eating cardboard!

I don’t feel like anything heavy. I just want something light; a salad would be fine.

We should try to have a balanced diet, without too much or too little of any particular thing.

A diet of junk food can cause long-term health problems. Processed food in general is not good for you.

At most good restaurants, you usually have to make a reservation beforehand. If something happens, or you are ill, you may need to cancel the booking. In the UK a meal in a restaurant is typically three courses: a starter, a main course, then a dessert. You can often order side dishes. Some restaurants may have a set menu, or you can order individual dishes. Restaurants often have specials advertised on a board. They often cater for vegetarians, non-meat-eaters.

I suppose that most people think of Beijing duck when they think of Beijing and I did try some of this tasty traditional dish, but with so many people from all over the country living in Beijing there really are a lot of different foods from all regions of the country. One dish that I really enjoyed and I didn’t expect to find was kebabs. These tasty snacks are originally from north-west China, but they’re very popular street food in Beijing. They’re especially popular as a tasty snack at lunchtime for school pupils. They have less meat and more vegetables than we are used to, so they’re a bit healthier.

One dish that did have a strong taste was hotpot. The dish I had was made in the Sichuan style, so it was very spicy. What I found interesting was that the hotpot was put on a hotplate in the center of the table, and we were given a dish of raw food and we chose what we wanted and put it into the pot ourselves, and got it out when it was ready. It was great fun and very sociable.

One of the highlights for me was learning how to make fresh noodles with a chef from Northern China. The recipe of egg, salt and wheat flour is quite simple, but to make the noodles by hand you need to be quite a skillful chef.

Something which is much simper to make are dumplings. The basic ingredients are flour and water, but the beauty of this dish is that it’s very flexible. You can fill them with whatever you like. I especially enjoyed one with raw prawns, but all sorts of meat and vegetables can be put in them.

These days a lot of young people actually enjoy Western food like pizza and friend chicken. Our national food is often too spicy, especially for children and foreigners, and also it takes too long to cook. I think that it’s delicious though!

I suppose Western food is quick to make and is tasty too, so everyone can eat it without too much trouble. I think that a lot of people like food to be convenient because they’re so busy nowadays.

I’m not keen on sushi at all. It’s so strange eating something that hasn’t been cooked. I know it’s very fresh and healthy but I just don’t like the taste and I can’t stand the texture - it’s too chewy for me.

I’m going to talk about a Chinese dish - fried rice. It’s a rice dish and most people in my country enjoy it. Unlike in most countries, we fry the rice with onion in olive oil before we add any liquid. We don’t cook it in water, but a kind of soup, which can be made of meat, fish or chicken. And it gives the dish a beautiful yellow color.

Firstly, I think that it’s popular in my country because - and not a lot of people know this. It’s very simple to cook, and as I said before, you can use all types of ingredients. Anything that you can find in the fridge.

I love it first of all because it always reminds me of home. My mother’s very fond of cooking it and if I was unhappy, she used to make it for me and it always cheered me up. I don’t live at home now and so when I‘m feeling homesick and missing my family. And secondly, I like it because it’s a great meal to make for friends.

You can get fried rice everywhere nowadays, but it isn’t always that good. If you visit my country, I recommend that you try to taste fried rice there. It really is special and I promise that you will find it different to any fried rice that you have tasted before.