nakji

I hesitate to take a lot of credit for my own cooking, because I'm still in the stage of my cooking life where I follow a lot of recipes, instead of creating my own dishes. That being said, I do have enough experience now to assess whether a recipe is trustworthy, or is going to result in something I want to eat. None of my friends cook at all, so when we do eat somewhere else, it's inevitably at a restaurant. Like you all, I am very fussy where I eat out, because I'll only choose places that I know can make something better than I can, or can source superior ingredients. Fortunately, there's no shortage of places like that in Suzhou.

Well, I'll keep an eye out, and if anything's eaten alive on my morning commute, this'll be the first place I report it. Until then, I'm taking my crabs steamed.

I got the idea from the house rice at Soup Stock Tokyo, a chain of fast-food soup restaurants in Japan. But I think it's a fairly traditional Japanese usage for sesame seeds, especially gomashio. I like this rice with a side of soup, or any main dish. It's also nice packed into a bento or as onigiri. I'd never seen Jenni's method, but that also looks like something I'd want to try. Jenni, I assume basmati rice is generally used with this method?

That's the ticket~ I've got some bean paste that should have a healthy layer of chili oil on top. I'll give it a go and see what I come out with.

Oh, that's another thing I like to do with them. Toast them lightly, add some salt, and turn them in to a freshly cooked pot of rice; stir to distribute seeds. Have the rice as you would regularly.

That's a great tip, thanks. I got a whole pack of chives in my veggie bag this week, so we'll take a spin with those. Although I suppose they're more traditionally used for jiaozi fillings. The baozi have really been working out as packed lunches this week, though. Right out of the freezer into my lunch bag, then a quick nuke in the microwave before eating. I think I'll make some instant miso soup nuggets this weekend to round it out as a meal, now that it has gotten cold. I want to make two different kinds of filling, and mark them some way so I can tell the difference - Maggiethecat mentioned in another topic that a chopstick dipped in red dye can be used to put a red dot on the top of them, but I'm lacking red dye. What else could I use? A grind of pepper? Sesame seeds on top?

Eaten alive? I had some just this weekend, but they were steamed first. Incredible, too. There's a lady I see selling them on my commute to work from a basket on the roadside, but the amount she's selling are in the kilos. I doubt anyone's having a live crab on their way to work. How would you manage the soy ginger dip?

There are lots of Japanese-inspired dishes you could make out of them. Check out Torakris's eGCI course on Japanese food, where she makes goma-ae, or sesame dressing. I like it on any green vegetable, and this time of year on pumpkin.

Don't fret. I've gotten the smoky taste out of my food and my wok only has about a year's seasoning on it. I have best results with greens, maybe because there are few other competing flavours.

Eating char siu bao with my Dad. He'd get them from the Chinese grocery in Dartmouth and bring them home for Saturday lunch. We microwaved them because we didn't have a steamer. I loved how red the inside was, and the ones we bought always had a small red dot on top of them, too. I used to wonder how they made the red dot. Actually, I guess I still do. Baozi pen?

Thanks. I think I'll use a little sesame oil, then to add flavour.

Chris, I'm wondering, do you have help in the kitchen, or is it just you? When I was growing up, my parents always had my brother and I doing minor prep work for as far back as I can remember. Homework waited until dinner was done. "Many hands make light work" and all that. Or is everyone else already engaged? Or, like me, do you prefer to work alone in the kitchen with the music on? Right now I'm starting to train my husband in the kitchen, as I'm planning to start grad school part time next year. He doesn't cook at all, and never learnt growing up, as he had a stay-at-home Mum. Along with a full work schedule, I won't be able to be the primary cook anymore, and I figure by the time I need him, he might be able to turn out a meal in under an hour.

Yes, I've been extremely happy with both of her books that I've got, although I've been cooking from "Revolutionary Cuisine" for longer. I just picked up her Sichuan book recently. I'm now waiting with bated breath for her next installment. Dongbei? Yunnan? Fingers crossed. I froze the baozi and had some reheated for lunch. What a great freezer staple for the winter! And the filling stayed fresh and soft. I can't wait to experiment with curry baozi, chicken baozi, pizza baozi, and the rest. I wonder, if using ground chicken, should water also be incorporated?

I carve pumpkins each year for Halloween with my high school kids. (Favourite question: "Teacher - should we bring our own knives?") You're expecting the kids to watch while an adult chops them open, right? An old sharp knife and a rubber mallet to split the skin work a treat, if you can't manage nuking them whole. Use the mallet to get the knife all the way in, then use it as a lever to crack the shell. Then roast, if you're stuck with the convection oven, or take it home and microwave it until the flesh becomes soft.

An excellent tip, I'll remember that. Cranberries, kiwis, and ...something else for yellow. Hopefully there's dried pineapple available. If I get into Shanghai in early November, they may have glace fruits available at Isetan or Marks and Spencer. They'll be expensive, but I could work with a mix.

Another one of our favourite places to go is a Xinjiang restaurant "Yakexi", on Shi Qian Jie. Xinjiang ("New Frontier") is a province in the west of China that's recently seen confrontations between the Han Chinese and the Muslim Uighur populations. For a while, the government had not only shut down all internet service in the region, but also all mobile phone SMS service. The tension, however, has not affected the popularity of Xinjiang restaurants in Suzhou, which are always jammed. The region is famous for its raisins and other fruits, and lamb dishes. Yakexi also makes its own fresh yogurt drinks. When you walk in, the waitresses are in national dress, and there are dishes of raisins and peanuts on the table for starters. You get barley tea immediately, and they also have pomegranate juice, and Xinjiang beers in lager and stout. Xinjiang lager is a lot lighter than Qingdao, and much fizzier, but still drinkable. We always order Gan bian sijidou (干扁四季豆）, which they make with sichuan peppercorns in place of the more typical pork for flavour. There are also slivers of pickled garlic throughout, which are gorgeous. There's a man in a booth outside the restaurant grilling lamb skewers. We usually order ten, they're so delicious - chunks of lamb and lamb fat sprinkled with chili and cumin. He also has an oven for making nang (nan) bread, which is excellent for sopping up lamb juice. Some Xinjiang restaurants make a kind of pizza out of their nang, added minced lamb, herbs, and yogurt to the top, but I haven't found it on the menu at Yakexi. Carmelised potatoes inexplicably go quite well with spicy lamb. When I'm feeling the lack of Western food most strongly, I order this along with the lamb skewers, and it somehow cheers me up. More vegetables - tigerskin green peppers in black bean sauce. This one is made with quite thin-skinned green peppers that fry up with delicately thin flesh. The charred taste of the skin makes them taste like roast peppers. I never get to order this when it's just my husband and I, since he prefers the green beans to the peppers. When we go with a larger group, we can add another vegetable dish. And the final touch: rack of lamb ribs. The lamb has been braised, I think, in star-anise flavoured stock. Then it seems to be grilled to put on a bit of crust, then covered in a green and red pepper sauce. The flesh just slips off the bones, and my mouth is watering just thinking about it. I think that their menu has been heavily influenced by Han Chinese dishes, but the lamb is excellent. There are a few more Xinjiang restaurants in Suzhou that offer even more lamb options that I'd like to visit.

There's something kind of sublime about people who would think it's easier to carry around a melon than to bathe! You'd have to be really afraid of the water, I guess. It doesn't look like the Korean melon "chamwe" that are so popular in Asia. Chamwe are more oblong than the one pictured.

Forgive my pickling ignorance: why lime instead of salt? And could you make these by salting instead liming?

Do you think a fruitcake could withstand using only dried fruit and no glace fruits? My supermarket has a wide range of dried fruits available, including dried kiwi, dried dates, dried figs, raisins, and papaya. I also have relatively easy access to dried cranberries. I have always used Jeffrey Steingarten's recipe for white fruitcake, which I prefer to darker-style fruitcakes.

Thanks for the pizza-man tip. Do you put cheese in yours? I do like "Revolutionary Cuisine" and use it quite often; not sure how it compares to Japanese Chinese cookbooks. I find the flavours in this book really reflect the food I find in China, though. I noticed that the pork filling was quite tender. It's a nice trick to know - if I'd tried to mock up my own filling, I never would have done that. The shiitakes and the cabbage really supplemented the filling, I thought - gave it a bit of crunch and depth of flavour. I think they sell dumpling steaming paper at the shops here, I'll have a look the next time I'm at the shop. There's also a dumpling "net" I've noticed for sale; it's what inspired me to use the cheesecloth in the first place.

What's an ink crozet? Perfect rainy day Saturday soup: A green pumpkin/zucchini hybrid, sauteed with a half onion, chili, cumin seeds, fresh ginger and allspice. When it was limp, I threw in two tomatoes. Cooked that down until the tomatoes were soft and floating oil, then added in 500 ml good chicken stock. I simmered for ten more minutes, then added in a half cup of coconut milk. Whizzed 3/4 of the pot in the blender and left the rest chunky, seasoned it with some citric acid and sugar, and garnished with cilantro.

Baozi are done and delicious. I followed FD's instructions from "Revolutionary Cuisine" for spicy pork dumplings. I doubled her dough recipe because I wanted to make enough for freezing. I also deviated from her filling recipe and added a cup of sauteed greens - some random greens that came with my CSA bag - as well as a half cup of chopped shiitake mushrooms. The filling in this recipe has you beat in five tablespoons of cold water into the meat. Is that to make it more tender? Or to help it cook inside the dough? I lined my steamer with some oiled cheesecloth, but there was still a bit of sticking. Does it matter how quick you pull them out of the pan in terms of stickiness? I thought the ones I left sit for a few minute more were harder to get out. I was surprised how easy they were to make, and how non-fatty but delicious the fillings are. I love the street dumplings in my neighborhood, but I can't help but think that there's a reason they taste so rich. I'm thinking: fat. They were so good even my husband, who is on record as baozi-neutral, snarfled several hot out of the steamer. He has requested pizza-man, a la Japan, for my next attempt. No idea how I'd get the filling in, though.

We spent one afternoon wandering around the Houhai area of Beijing - kind of a fashionable club-cafe-shop district set on a lake, with traditional hutong branching off in all directions like a maze. We had a good poke into some of the shops, and I picked up a small clay pot of yogurt to sip, which seems to be the thing to do as a tourist in Beijing. I'm not sure of the name of the dairy, but the yogurt was excellent - so thick and tangy it was hard to sip. I was at a loss with what to do with the nice pot once I was done, however, so I left it in a small cairn of like pots near a shop. Hope that was the done thing, too. There were quite a lot of stalls on the lake selling cold noodles, but my husband and I have a minor obsession with Yunnanese food, so we searched out a place called "No Name" listed on our Beijing iPhone app - just follow the GPS map and you're there. Awesome. Of course, we ordered more eggplant, because it had been almost 24 hours since I'd had some last. This was grilled, with a mix of pork, chilis and herbs on top. Rice noodles with peanut sauce and steamed chicken. The peanut sauce looked like a dark miso, and had almost a bitter taste. I'm interested in how they got it so dark. Anyone have any idea? I'd never seen peanut sauce like this before. Fried Yunnanese cheese, with a chili-herb dressing. Much better than a similar one available at Southern Barbarian in Shanghai, which comes under-seared, in my opinion. Overall, much nicer, lighter dishes than Southern Barbarian in Shanghai, and closer to Southeast Asian dishes. Resolved: my first long-distance trip in China will be to Yunnan. The restaurant itself had a beautiful view over the hutong from its roof terrace, and the wonderful light was our last chance to absorb some vitamin D before the dust blew in the next day.

Interesting! In Canada, packaged foods, along with most (all?) other consumer products, have to be labeled in both English and French. Frozen versions of Cottage Pie, (billing themselves as Shepherd's Pie?) are labeled Pate Chinois. Wikipedia maintains it's a separate Quebecois dish. Can you comment on how the French version "Hachis Parmentier" differs from a typical English preparation?

Is that a French take on cottage pie?