It is a long while since I posted anything but the Cooks Diary gets filled in whenever there is anything interesting. I need to get going again, so here goes with some lesser known facts unlikely to help you in the kitchen at all, but interesting if, like me, you have a butterfly brain.

Five-spice powder is a seasoning in Chinese cuisine. It incorporates the five basic flavors of Chinese cooking sweet, sour, bitter, savory, and salty. One common recipe includes Chinese Tung Hing cinnamon (actually a type of cassia), powdered cassia buds, powdered star anise and anise seed, ginger root, and ground cloves. Another recipe for the powder consists of huajiao (Sichuan pepper), bajiao (star anise), rougui (cassia), cloves, and fennel seeds. It is used in most recipes for Cantonese roasted duck, as well as beef stew. It is also used as a marinade for Vietnamese broiled chicken. The five-spice powder mixture has followed the Chinese diaspora and has been incorporated into other national cuisines throughout Asia.
The formulae are based on the Chinese philosophy of balancing the yin and yang in food.
Although this spice is used in restaurant cooking, many Chinese households do not use it in day-to-day cooking. In Hawaii, some restaurants have it on the table.
A versatile seasoned salt can be easily made by stir-frying common salt with Five-spice powder under low heat in a dry pan until the spice and salt are well mixed.
Quatre épices is a spice used mainly in France, but also found in the Middle Eastern kitchen. The name literally means "four spices"; the spice mix contains ground pepper (white, black, or both), cloves, nutmeg and ginger. Some variations of the mix use allspice instead of pepper, or cinnamon in place of ginger.
The blend of spices will typically use a larger proportion of pepper (usually white pepper) than the other spices, but some recipes suggest using roughly equal parts of each spice.
In French cooking it is typically used in soups, stews, vegetable preparations and also in sausages and salamis.
Allspice, also called Jamaica pepper, Kurundu, Myrtle pepper, pimento[1], or newspice, is a spice which is the dried unripe fruit of the Pimenta dioica plant, a tree native to the West Indies, southern Mexico and Central America. The name "allspice" was coined by the English, who thought it combined the flavour of several aromatic spices, such as cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves.