nakji

I'm having friends over, so I think it'll have to be hotpot. That's all I'm competent to put out for a crowd.

There are many advantages to a small kitchen, I think, especially if you are fairly well organized. I have various "stations" for prep - a breakfast station where the coffee and toaster live; a vegetable chopping board and a scraps bowl by the sink; a dish washing area that is under my husband and cleaning lady's purview; oil and sauces next to the range, where they get used; and spices next to that. Once I get going, I'm quite organized. The only thing I really lack is a decent place to put my cookbooks when I use them. I credit my parents for both kitchen organization and my peripatetic nature. My parents are both from nomadic cultures: my mother the Labrador Inuit, and my father the RAF. My father grew up in Hong Kong and Singapore and taught me how to do a proper mis en place for wok cooking when I was a kid. On Saturdays he would take me to the Chinese grocery to get frozen char siu bao, and we'd heat them up for lunch and he'd tell me about life in Hong Kong. Some part of me always wanted to see if his stories were true, I guess. And I wanted better char siu bao.

Thanks, Bruce! But I'm casting my buckets down where I stand for a while, so to speak. I plan on being in Suzhou for the next couple of years, if everything goes to plan. Good eye on the pantry! Yes, I mainly cook Indian, Thai, Korean, or Vietnamese at home. Occasionally some pasta. I do cook a bit from my Chinese cookbooks, but the good stuff is so cheap and so easy to get steps outside my door...I often cave and jiao waimai - call for takeaway. I usually have vegetables delivered twice a week from a local organic farm, and when they deal me something particularly unique, I haul out Fuchsia, and she never lets me down. This week they're shut for the holiday, so I went to a local veg guy and picked up some lily bulbs. Hopefully someone can help me out cooking those. /More shame/ I don't actually enjoy the ma (麻) flavour from Sichuan peppercorns. My husband is a HUGE fan; we get them at a restaurant usually, and I eat around them. But they are easy to find and buy.

Ikea - a small kitchen's best friend. The spice racks are Ikea, and a lot of the bowls; the cutting board; the strainer...and the tea towels, which I adore. Going to the Shanghai Ikea is a bit of trip, in more ways than one, but they are reasonably priced and convenient for people like me who have to re-provision a kitchen every two years or so. As for the mold (mould?), it can be cleaned. But like many other things in life, it returns. Between the humidity and the poor building quality my best defense is to keep the windows open all day to air everything out regularly. It makes for cold cooking, though.

It is, quite frankly! At least two people can physically fit into it at once, although my husband prefers not to put this to proof.

I can do canals. I've got some pictures of fish coming up as well, but some ichthyologists are going to have to identify them. I can only classify them as "small", "medium", or "large". Pickled mustard tuber will definitely show up. And there are some aquatic vegetables available, although I will admit to having no idea how to prepare them.

I didn't eat breakfast after the coffee - I spent the morning trying to cram in my homework before my regular Sunday afternoon Mandarin lesson. Normally I eat a late breakfast and go right to class, but my teacher had rescheduled our class until 2pm, so I had a chance for some leisurely brunch and a quick trip up the high street for some provisioning. Shi Quan Jie; or Perfect in Every Way Street; is the high street in my neighborhood, and is a historical area protected by the government. Most of the downtown of Suzhou, in fact - the city limits inside the moat - is protected against major development. There is a height limit on buildings, which means the downtown retains a peaceful character. The development is happening around the old city, in two areas called the SND - Suzhou New Development; and SIP - Singapore Industrial Park. In fact, most factories are located there, and most of the services for the Germans and Japanese that come to work in them are there as well, including a large selection of restaurants that cater to these groups. It looks like a completely different city. My favourite nut roaster is on SQJ - They specialize in chili peanuts, fresh roasted chestnuts, and sweet pecans. At 4 pm, there's usually a queue down the street, and the sweet chestnut smell wafts down our alley. I didn't buy any, because I wanted to go to my regular sweets shop for nuts instead. A little further along is NorthBay coffee, where Jackie roasts fresh Yunnan and Sumatran beans every week. He learnt coffee roasting from a Japanese friend, and runs a creditable shop that looks over the street. I think he uses Chemex pots - he always does his brewing in behind, so I never see. It's an excellent place for a decent cup of coffee. Over the bridge and down another alley along a canal is a place my husband and I favour for dim sum. Mainly because they're close by. If we're not in before 12, there's no hope of a seat. We weren't very adventurous in ordering, I'm afraid. We try not to eat meat for more than one meal a day as a focus, and I'd already taken out some pork belly for dinner, so we went mainly veg. The ordering apparatus: The shrink-wrapped dishes - I think this is because the dishes come from an outside dish-washing service. the kitchen here isn't large enough to have one of their own, I guess. The tea: One thing I learnt the first week in China is that no proper meal is complete without cold dishes. You know, although having lived in Asia for a while, each country has its own take on Chinese food. For example, in Korea, it was always Jjajjangmyeon -a take on zhajiangmian - noodles with black bean sauce; invariably served with yellow radish pickle and sliced raw onion. And sweet and sour pork. In Vietnam, in Hanoi - well, for obvious reasons - there were not a lot of Chinese restaurants. I suppose it's different in HCMC. And in Japan, while I am sure there are numerous very excellent and authentic Chinese restaurants, I never made it to any. I will not speak of my hometown, except to say this summer when I went back to my local Chinese place and asked for cold dishes, the staff were like, "Jeez, we're Canadian. We don't even know how to make that stuff anymore." So, the first week I was here, I paid close attention to my co-workers as we went out for dinner. "Cold dishes" I thought. "Huh." We ordered my favourite: cucumbers with vinegar. We also ordered lotus with orange sauce: When it arrived, my husband said, "很黄很暴力"

Every year I ask my mum to freeze me some rhubarb for when I get home in July, since I miss it otherwise. Kerry, do you think this would work with frozen rhubarb, or would it be too watery?

Absolutely! Anything in particular you'd care to see?

So - first off - Kitchen. This is actually probably the nicest kitchen I've ever worked in. I'm famous amongst my friends as always being stuck in small kitchens. Usually they look like something out of a war zone - way too small and completely overstuffed, as if we're waiting out nuclear fallout. "I've got cupboards with cans of food; filtered water, and pictures of you," to quote the Postal Service. This is owing to my habit of picking up interesting looking ingredients everywhere I go. Something tells me I'm not alone with this amongst eGulleters? Not only are they overstuffed and too small, they're usually lacking some key feature that I've had to jerry-rig. For example, when I lived in Hanoi, I had no hot running water. So I used a large pot. My first kitchen in Canada was so small, I couldn't open both the oven and the fridge at the same time, because the doors knocked into each other. So I never made ice cream and baked at the same time. The main flaw with this kitchen is the lack of storage. The cupboards may look nice and white, but they harbour mold. Part of Suzhou's grand plan to keep me at a constant cough. All of my supplies then are laid bare, much to my husband's annoyance. The only thing that really bothers me is that my spices are exposed to light, but I go through them fairly rapidly anyway. My coffee set up is a pour-over filter I picked up in Japan, that decants into a teapot. I keep the teapot on top of my running toaster oven to keep it hot in the winter, as the kitchen isn't heated. Here's my set up: I can hear weinoo gasping in New York. Yeah, it's not very professional. That bullet-shaped thing on the left is a blender attachment. /shame/ Since I only drink a cup in the morning, my infrastructure is minimal. This morning's bean was /more shame/ Starbucks, since my local roaster was out of his Yunnan product. I'm going to go by later this week to see if he has roasted more. Other than that, there aren't any other places that sell whole beans nearby. Tea, on the other hand - there's lots of that. Later this week I'll go round to some tea shops and show you what's on offer there.

Busted.

恭喜发财! Greetings from Suzhou, and Happy New Year. I've been living here since August 2009, since moving from Japan. It's a pleasure to be bringing you the beginning of the rabbit year, as I'm 2/3 of the way through a full cycle in the Chinese zodiac, having moved to Asia in 2002 - a Horse year. Will I make it all the way through? I'm not sure yet. I'll be blogging to bring in the new year this week from Jiangsu, Suzhou as we say around here. To put that on a map for you, it's about 20 minutes on a high-speed train outside of Shanghai. Suzhou's famous for its gardens and canals - locals are fond of quoting the famous saying, "Just as there is paradise in heaven, there are Suzhou and Hangzhou on Earth." I'm not sure how close Suzhou is to paradise, but I've been pretty happy living here. This week, I'm not quite sure what we'll be seeing, as I haven't stayed in China through the holidays. Last year, to bring in the Tiger, my husband and I took some time off to tour around Malaysian Borneo, but since the Rabbit year is meant to be more quiet, I've decided to hang out at home, soak in the atmosphere, and blog for you. The New Year is a time when many shops close and most people journey back to their hometown. I say "journey" because it often takes several days to negotiate the traffic and crowds to make it home. Trains and buses are often sold out completely, and planes aren't much better. That's why I'll be staying close to home - no sights of Shanghai for us, I'm afraid. I've stocked the larder, so if every restaurant shuts down, and the market is deserted, there'll still be food to see. Through the miracle of the Earth tilting on its axis, I've actually already lived Sunday, and am now recapping my first day for you. I'm going to take you on a brief tour of my high street and my daily shops, brunch at my local Cantonese place, and a "Kitchen God" inspection of my kitchen. You all, of course, being my kitchen gods - although I'm warning you now, I have not set out any cakes. Since I'm not Chinese, there's a lot that I see and experience here that I don't have much or any understanding of - I hope that everyone who does can weigh in on things. Part of the joy of living in a foreign country is learning about the cultural traditions your host country has to offer, and living in China is one of the richest and most exciting experiences I've had overseas so far.

When I think "pudding cake" I don't think of a cake baked with pudding mix. I think of a simple cake baked in a square or rectangular pan that is cakey on top, and forms a rich, thick sauce on the bottom. Almost like a molten choc pudding, but together in a pan. And lemon flavour.

I move a lot, so I try not to get attached to my equipment. Right now, though, it would probably have to be my wok, since I've put a lot of time into getting it seasoned nicely.

My husband loves puds like these. I favour chocolate ones served with Nestle canned cream like my mum used to make for Sunday dinner, but hy husband likes caramel or lemon. Those he used to make out of boxed mixes, but I'm sure I have the chocolate one on a card in Canada somewhere.

Leather, for some wines.

I see what you did there. Punny. I've given up on finding palatable bread at all, and am trying to get into the "no-knead" habit.

Thanks, David. I recently got "How to Bake" by Nick Maglieri out of the library, and he includes several "old fashioned" style cakes in the cake chapter, including a spice cake with boiled frosting, angel food cake, and a good-looking carrot cake without too many frou-frou additions. I just wish I had an excuse to make one - it makes me want to run a good old-fashioned cake walk.

Another really excellent curry: just the thing for a cold night when you've got lots of time to cook things down. Madhur Jaffrey's Sumatran Lamb Curry. There's something about the step of separating the coconut cream from the thin liquid beneath, and adding it in quite a bit later after cooking the curry down that makes it very rich. She uses bell pepper mixed with cayenne to give it a mild heat, but since I had mild red chilis, I used those instead. I want to say we had the leftovers for lunch, but there were none.

I envy your bread selection...

No takers? These might be more helpful:

Was it bacon fat that was involved? My brother has a recipe like that.

Sounds fantastic! Can you share?

Tweed squares! I have to make these, basically, like NOW. My husband said he's never tried them. Maybe they're a Nova Scotia thing? I see the recipe provenance is Natalie MacMaster.

Over in the old-fashioned cake topic, BarbaraY mentions a gumdrop cake recipe that her grandmother made, but has since lost. We all must have recipes that we're searching for like that - and Google only takes us so far if we don't remember the exact name. What are you looking for?