nakji

I don't know why I thought five! I am taking notes for my 1 year old. Heinz beans may be difficult here, though. Funny how energy factors into both of our cooking decisions.

Mmmmm, toffee biscuits and meat sauce. That's not a bad thing, necessarily. How did the cranky five-year-old receive it?

That looks refreshing! What's honey rum - rum made from honey, I guess? Is midsummer a big holiday where you are? Here's a Dark n' Stormy, matching our weather today in Shanghai. It's made with Nova Scotian rum from Ironworks. It's similar to a Gosling's or a Whalers, per my husband, who drinks more rum than I do.

I was looking for something to do with minced chicken I had on hand. I was going to make tsukune, but then got really lazy, so I made it into a stir-fry with negi, eryngii mushroom and zucchini strips. I was making it for my son, so no salt and only a touch of soy went in. I served mine with a drizzle of soy, some sesame oil, and some chiffonaded basil stirred in. Dessert was cold dragon fruit.

A Rogue Farms 7-Hop Double IPA. For all the hops, it wasn't particularly bitter. Very easy drinking, but I'm not sure I'd look it up again.

Living in the cheese desert that is Asia, I was excited to find an Italian cheese specialty shop on Xia'anxi (Nan) lu in Shanghai. Aside from Grana Padano, mascarpone, and the other usual suspects, they had two cheeses that I'd never heard of before - Toma and Verena. My wallet only stretched to getting one, so I bought a small block of the Toma as it was the nicer of the two to eat out of hand (salty and mild, with the other being just mild). I see from a quick Google that this cheese in from Aosta, and I have a few recipes in Marcella Hazan's books from Aosta, but none that call for Toma. Aside from just gobbling it down with a glass of wine, I wonder if anyone has a suggestion for making the best of a salty, mild cheese? I'm thinking it would be good melted over fried eggplant slices...

That's another of the recipes I was interested in, so I'm glad you made it, Smithy! Funnily enough, I had made a note to make this AFTER I get around to getting a food processor. Did you use Greek yogurt as a sub for the labneh? Because that's what I'd have to do, lacking the patience to make labneh myself.

The year's almost half over! I wonder how everyone's getting on with their goals. I didn't make any goals at the beginning of the year, as I was knee-deep in school work, but the summer holidays always act as a "reset" button for me, and now I'm facing down a summer with access to good flour and an oven. I'd like to learn to start making a reasonable loaf of bread. I'll be following the "Bread" topic to get my feet wet.

I will! I'll have to find some time next weekend to have a crack at it. The dish stood out on their menu as not being very Yunnan-ese, but much of the clientele was American, so it made sense in that context. They had some other lovely Yunnanese-style (I think?) potato dishes, but I preferred the dishes we got up north in Zhongdian, with their yak and cheese dishes.

I'm keen on making the barley with feta - I think someone made it in the "Cookbooks" topic. I borrowed the book from a friend and only copied the recipes I thought I'd likely make. That one made the cut, along with the chicken with cardamom, which I've made two or three times now.

Fuchsia Dunlop is always a good place to start, thanks for that. The pork was boneless and lean, and had a thin batter, as she describes. The sauce was intensely dark and sweet/sour as I recall. I had the dish at the Linden Centre in Dali, so I think it was somewhat adapted for foreign palates.

That brik does call out, doesn't it? Oozing egg never fails. I missed your post about the swiss chard above - that was actually the first recipe I made from this book as well. Super.

I guess microwave use goes hand in hand with freezer use for a lot of people in the west - and chest freezers are not used much here either. It's a good question as to what everyone is using the microwaves for, then. I use mine to sterilize my son's bottles. I miss my Japanese microwave, which had a sake setting. liuzhou, I wonder if, in your collection of Chinese cook book, if you've come across a sweet and sour pork recipe made mainly with black vinegar? I had hope the recipe Smithy requested above would be that sort, but it is a ketchup-based one. I had a vinegar-based one in Yunnan that I really enjoyed, and would love to try it again. Google searches have not yielded anything with the deep, dark, black sauce I remember.

I completely agree about the hummus. I found it bland. I actually cooked from this book last night, making the zucchini-turkey meatballs with sumac sauce. It was the third time I'd made the sumac sauce, which actually serves quite nice as a crudite dip (or for potato chips, which is how we had it). It's hard to get turkey mince here, but I finally got my hands on some, and decided to have a go at these. I thought the mince was too damp before I started frying, but in fact they held together beautifully. They were tender and flavoursome. I think the next time, though, I'll make them with pork, as I didn't find much turkey flavour coming through with the spices and herbs, and pork is so much cheaper. I also tend to think of cumin being more appropriate for stronger-flavoured meats such as lamb or beef, so I dialled back the cumin called for in the recipe, and would do so again. We had them with mini-pitas and stir-fried corn, and both my husband and son were big fans.

I agree that blanching would help older scapes - like asparagus, checking at the bottom can sometimes tell you how long ago they were cut, or how fibrous they may be. When I cook them, I usually sauté with oil and salt; or throw them into a green curry (cut down) in place of snake beans. I've had problems with old scapes before when I've bought them in Farmer's markets in Canada - I think the growers may have been offering them as a by-product? In markets in China, I think they're grown as a crop - the ones I buy here are never old or woody. I'm not sure where you picked yours up, but this may be an issue with the ones you had.

I have tried to cook from ebooks, but I find it uncomfortable. Ideally, I wish my whole collection were electronic, because I move quite often, and not having to ship a large collection of heavy books from country to country would be an improvement over my current state. That's why I have moved my music and general book collection over to electronic format. That being said, I downloaded a sample of "Jerusalem" when it was released, and it just felt strange, somehow, reading a cookbook that way. I have Dorie Greenspan's app for "Baking, …", but it actually doesn't have the recipes I like from that book, and for some reason, the videos leave me cold. I also like being able to have a bookshelf full of books to page through and get inspired by. Not only for the decor/cosy value, but also because I don't "browse" my ebook collection. And having the books there means that other people in my home who cook can access them, too.

Welcome! As someone who has also moved around a lot, I sympathize with the out-of-control pantry. Hopefully you'll share some of the dishes you've collected during your travels.

I'm going to add these here as a code for those looking for more photos after basquecook's great topic. My husband and I went to Yunnan two summers ago, starting in Kunming, then going on to Zhongdian (Shangri-la, as it styles itself these days), before finishing in Dali. I snapped just a few pictures along the way, and was saddened to hear recently that much of the reconstructed "old town" in Zhong Dian burnt down. In Kunming, we went to a restaurant called 1910 La Gare du Sud. Dry-fried green beans Yunnan mushrooms Pork meatballs Chili-fried Beef It was admittedly an odd assortment of dishes to order - note they all sort of look the same, which we could have avoided if we'd paid closer attention to the menu and chosen a different vegetable; a soup; a fish, etc. but we were tired from walking in the heat, and it was what we wanted to eat. It was all great, but the green beans were the best I've had in that style before or since.

I've ordered delivery from this place, and was unimpressed. Taken as North American-style "Chinese" food, I thought it was poorly executed. The meats tasted interchangeable, as did the thin, watery sauces punctuated with what tasted like canned fruit. The spring rolls and egg rolls looked exactly the same - perhaps they do in the US too? In eastern Canada, where I'm originally from, an egg roll has a thicker wrapper and is folded into a rectangular shape, as a opposed to a spring roll, which has a thin wrapper, and is usually a cylinder. The General Tso's chicken had broccoli that tasted both watery and burnt. I'd never tried it before, as it wasn't a popular dish in Nova Scotia when I was growing up, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't supposed to taste like that. I haven't bothered ordering from them again. They are perhaps better in the restaurant, but if I want a spring roll or noodles, I'll just go to Crystal Jade.

The Greek wine sounds intriguing. With a lot of French wine in Shanghai suspect or at the very least, over-priced, I'm always interested in less famous wine producing regions. Currently I'm on a Spanish kick. I opened a bottle of "Idola" Catalonian white last night. I have no other info about it, as the label is otherwise obscured by the Chinese label. It tastes chardonnay-ish to me, however, and is excellent on its own. I've also been getting a cava from Penedès, from Jané Ventura. At my price level, sparkling wines often tastes the same to me, but this is a real exception. It's quite dry, and has a distinct liquorice flavour, which I think makes it pair quite well with Chinese dishes.

Happy to. It's a riff on a chicken-cabbage salad. I shredded three poached chicken breasts, half a head of red cabbage and a carrot, and tossed that with a cup of chopped, mixed herbs - dill, cilantro, thai basil, mint. The dressing was three juiced limes, one chopped chili, two chopped garlic cloves, two tablespoons of sugar, one of fish sauce, half teaspoon of salt, and oil to taste. It would benefit from some ground peanuts as well, but I didn't have any when I was preparing this.

Hopefully your weather has gotten warmer since March! I was watching Masterchef Australia today, and one of the chefs added a chopped, seeded habanero to her pineapple sorbet, and served it with melon macerated in a ginger-mint syrup.

mm84321, that looks divine, what with the tourneéd veg and all. I confess ignorance to what a navarin is, though. The temperature hit 30 degrees Celsius today, which called for something light and refreshing. I had a cabbage in the crisper left over from a student's biology experiment (turns out she only needed one cabbage, not two), so I made a Vietnamese-style salad with chicken, herbs, and carrot, with a chill-lime dressing.

Those greens and tomatoes look superb. There's something so right about tomatoes for breakfast. I had no tomatoes, nor bread, so I made up some blueberry muffins using Alton Brown's recipe on Good Eats. I should have looked up Dorie's instead, because these were too wildly sweet to my taste, at one cup of sugar. I still ate three.

I agree about the hummus - I was disappointed with it, but chalked my lack of success up to using canned chickpeas. It was too dry for my taste, but of course, hummus tastes vary. I've bought a bag of dried chickpeas to experiment with this weekend, because I have a tub of tahini I want to use up before I leave my apartment for the summer. On a more successful note, I made the swiss chard with pine nuts; and the sumac sauce for the turkey burgers. Both were huge hits, and my husband has requested that we use the sumac sauce for chip dip in the future. To this end, I've got a bag of ruffles for further weekend experimentation.