nakji

Does it have the recipe for Ma's green pumpkin pie?

My milk's not great, to be honest. I don't have a crockpot, so I used a pot on a low gas flame. My dal so creamy but with a toothsome bite after about two hours' cooking. I added butter, and a couple of tablespoons each of cream and yogurt. Very nice. I forgot all rules about cooking pulses and added both salt AND tomatoes at the beginning of cooking, to no detrimental effect. Why is bean cookery so fraught?

Here's my list from 2010: Almost done. No truffles, but truffle salt was the closest I got. Next year, I'm going to Europe. I swear. Done. I made fig jam. Yeeeeah...no. And again, no. An ongoing project. Working on basic pasta sauces with a friend. No McGee. I've got to actually buy one of his books. That would help. ***** In 2011, I will eat less meat. I will make more bread. Someone gave me a clay pot dutch oven for Christmas. I will learn to speak better Chinese, so I can talk more with the cooks I see. I will read McGee...this time. I swear.

Happy New Year to you, too! Looking forward to seeing what you've got cooking. What will you be making from the Laura Ingalls book? I remember growing up reading "Farmer Boy" and "The Long Winter" and her descriptions of food have stayed with me all these years.

I've always assumed lemongrass is available in the Southern provinces, but not around here, sadly. It sometimes appears in shops in Shanghai; if I see any, I'll try to root some. In curry, lemongrass is more of a supporting player, so substituting it here seems logical.

I think you'll love wherever you go. One thing I would suggest is that you try your hand at cooking while in Japan. I don't know what kind of accommodation you're looking at, but a hostel with kitchen facilities in a place like Kyoto would give you a chance to take advantage of the wonderful produce available at markets and shops there. When I eventually go back to Japan, I want to visit Kumamoto, to sample Kumamoto-style ramen at its source; and Hokkaido, for the same reason. Now that I think of it, a ramen tour of Japan is an excellent idea. If you're similarly interested but don't have the time or resources, I recommend the Ramen Museum in Yokohama.

No idea, but that certainly is an interesting picture. Is the pomelo dried out by the time the tea is ready?

Oh, that looks incredible. I can't get lemongrass at all, so I've given up making a lot of Vietnamese dishes entirely - but you've subbed lemon zest and kaffir lime leaves, you say? Oddly enough, I can get those. Is it a reasonable substitute?

Ok, I have my dal soaking now. Would you say when I cook them should I go with a 1:1 ratio of milk to water? And is it flat-leaf or curly-leaf parsley?

I have a little, although I didn't realize the notes would be public at first. I also have some recipes that I bookmarked in the beginning to go back and try that I haven't yet. My guess is right now, people are still only using it as an index, and not so much as an interactive site. I'd like to see more notes, too.

This year my husband and I "blind tested" Cokes from Japan, China, and Korea together. The finding: more clove flavour and sugar in Chinese Coke, less bubble. Japanese Coke and Korean Cokes seemed more carbonated, with Korean Coke seeming sweeter than Japanese. I've always assumed they tweaked the flavours somewhat to appeal to the national palate.

At the bottom of the page, across the left, there are some title links, starting with "About". The last title is "Report an Error". It brings up a message screen where you can contact them.

I have not had the soup. Please tell me more about the soup.

For reliably-kid friendly finger food - meatballs of some description? Maybe stuffed with cheese?

The leeks I used were negi - Japanese leeks. Her recipe calls for three "baby leeks or spring onions". I don't think she meant garlic chives - but in any case, mine were too strong. Next time I'll use spring onions instead or add the leeks earlier.

Well, also in his defense, it was in the instructions for his pie crust recipe. The recipe itself is for only one crust, which I didn't think was standard to begin with, but then - what do I know about pie? I think they should have meat inside them. The eight tablespoons is then doubled to sixteen in the recipe extension for a two crust pie. (Is a two-crust pie non-standard in the US?) He should have just called for a stick of butter to begin with, and let me Google that to find a rational measurement equivalency instead. I'll stick with Mr's Slater and Lepard in the future. Pun intended.

I used a thermometer to check the temperature. I think my popper popped early because I was roasting this in a tabletop oven, and it was about a centimetre away from the top element. I pulled the bird when the breast meat was done; let it rest and carved it off and held it in foil, then put the legs and thighs back into the oven to finish. I didn't have a bird centerpiece, but nobody complained.

What kind of noodles did you use, Chris?

I buy a new $10 non-stick pan every year. Does that count as low-cost? How about my $8 wok? I picked them out without the help of Paula Deen or Giada de Laurentiis, amazingly enough.

My words; not his. The Amazon product description says: His description of "low-cost" and my description of "low cost" may have a large variance, however.

I've switched almost entirely to using UK-based recipes for baking, since they seem to always give weight measurements. Nigel Slater and Dan Lepard at the Guardian cover most of my (admittedly humble) baking needs. Occasionally I'll go back to Dorie or Bittman and then get hacked off trying to translate ridiculous instructions like 16 tablespoons of butter (Bittman, I'm looking at you) into reasonably easy-to-measure amounts.

I'd eat that. What was the sauce?

Ah, the traditional mid-Christmas/New Year eastern seaboard blizzard. Sometimes I don't miss North America at all. Ok, I just clicked over there for the first time, because I am not a modernist cuisine-type AT ALL, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that there is some feeling (amongst the bullet points) from Nathan M that cheap pans may (sometimes?) perform better than expensive ones - something I have inadvertently found, mostly from spending most of the year cooking in my cheap-ass pans, but then using my parents and parents'in-law's expensive sets and burning everything when I visit Canada. What are your thoughts? Any idea what he's on about?

So...what else did we get? I got a 24 cm suribachi, which will help me immeasurably with my goma-ae. I also got another silicon spatula, a 2L Chinese claypot (!), and some 5 yr. balsamic.

W00T! Let's go do some cooking over in that topic. My Christmas menu came out flawlessly. There were a few dicey moments. First, my oven kept tripping the breaker on the (scary) wiring in my flat. So I had to move my oven to the living room to roast the turkey, because the wiring is better in there to handle the space heater. Then, the weight of the turkey actually bowed the wire rack to about 1 mm above the element - but it held, and roasted a perfect 5 kilo turkey in 1&1/2 hour. Star! I thought it was going to give out, but it held to do the pans of stuffing and roast my broccoli as well. Christmas miracle, I guess. Instead of vinegar, I put maple and chili on the pumpkin, and used some aged balsamic vinegar that was a gift from my husband on the broccoli. I switched the roast potatoes to mashed in deference to my sad oven and the small jar of black truffle salt I gave to my husband for Christmas, to accolades from all my diners. The gravy was a wash because I didn't get a good fond on the turkey pan, but I took a page from Julia's book and didn't apologize. The sweets came out nicely, too, with the shortbread, mince pies, fruitcake, and World Peace cookies all getting their due. At one point, I found my husband smearing spoons of brandy butter onto the shortbread. Next year, I'll ice them. A friend brought three more kinds of cookies, so everyone left with a tray. We had a savouries round about three hours after Christmas lunch which consisted of hummus and bread, and bacon-wrapped sausages and bacon-wrapped shiitakes. People protested, but they still ate. A very successful year alogether. I feel quite chuffed, although I have only just now finished the dishes.