nakji

The weather has changed a bit here in Suzhou, and my Chinese friends have said I should switch to a "red" tea to keep warm. I'm thinking of looking for a Keemun - any suggestions? I have been so busy at work I have been drinking my Tie Guan Yin "grand-pa style" all day from my plastic mug. Tsk Tsk.

Ooh, truc. But was it yellow bean paste or a chili bean paste?

I'm not sure exactly what's going on with the growers themselves here, but I know some "organic" teas are marketed and sold here. I've never been to this cafe myself, but I know they run lots of events in Suzhou to raise awareness for both fair trade and organic products. The Green Room

Is there a Chinese sugar syrup like molasses?

Thanks. Actually, I live in Suzhou, outside of Shanghai, so I have the full range of Chinese greens at my disposal. I get my greens from an organic farm, and usually rinse and blanche pretty thoroughly. I've not seen 荠菜 at my local market, but that doesn't mean it's not out there. I'll have a look around for it.

What's your room temperature like where you are?

That's what I did, actually. I'm not sure that's the best method, but it seemed the most direct, since I didn't want to add any more liquid to the hummus. The bottle came with a shaker top, so I guess I took my cue from that.

I have not tried using yellow rock sugar - is it simply dissolved in water, as the pork goes in? I admit the carmelisation is the step I least enjoy, as the clay pot I make my hong shao rou in is dark brown, so it's hard to see the sugar as it reaches a key stage in cooking. Also, the oil tends to splatter - the page in my cookbook with this recipe is barely legible anymore for all the hong shao splatters over it.

Have you ever fried them with preserved green vegetable, Will? I know a lot of green vegetables are treated this way if they're not dressed with pork. The big dried snack ones are very nice - I had some wasabi ones from Japan while I was in Beijing that nigh blew my head off.

It's a shame, because fresh roasted nuts are comparable to fresh roasted coffee. There's just no comparison to the non-fresh roasted kind, if you have them available. Are similar results achievable through oven toasting, I wonder, or is something lost once the shells are gone?

I frequently make Fuchsia Dunlop's version from "Revolutionary Cuisine", which sounds similar to the method your roommmate used. She adds the caramel in the beginning, then adds the meat, stock, and seasonings for a long braise. According to her method, you should blanche the meat first, in boiling water; I think this helps make the meat easier to cut into cubes. Then make the caramel with sugar (she calls for white) and peanut oil. When that's ready, the wine, the stock, star anise, cassia, ginger and meat go in. Dark soy is added once the sauce has reduced. Green onion is added at the very end in her recipe.

Excellent, excellent looking food, nikki. Why is it you always make me want to get on a plane? I can just hear my phone call to my mother now: "Hi Mum? Yes, I'm leaving China and going to Syria. No - it'll be great. The bread there looks divine!" And the figs. I wish we were getting figs like that. I've had that happen to me so many times in Hanoi - maybe it was just random police harrassment? It would be interesting to know. My husband and I were in Malaysia over Ramadan, and during the day, the Chinese restaurants were reliably open. Lots of bars, too, but that could have been just for the tourists.

The double-cooking method made for very crispy-on-the-edges, melting-fat pork. If someone isn't a fan of pork belly, I think they'd still enjoy this dish, because it hides the layers of fat, but also doesn't have the soft texture of hong shao rou.

By Chinese mushroom, do you mean the dark, dried "flower" mushrooms? Mushroom baozi sound excellent. Lapcheung "pigs in a blanket" - I'm making these for my next party. Any dipping sauce, or straight up?

Bittman's got a video up today on the New York Times for a "Quick pickle" lemon preserve. Basically it calls for chopping up some lemons, and tossing them in a 2:1 ratio of sugar and salt, and then keeping them in a bottle; presumably in the fridge. I had some lemons that were hopelessly dry but fresh, and since I lack the counter space and patience to make real preserved lemons, I thought I'd give his method a try. I made a jar in the early afternoon, and had some ready for our roast chicken dinner at 6. They were..okay. Not nearly as bitter as I expected they would be. I'm going to see if they get any softer over the next couple of days and report back.

I'm no baker, but I made Nigel Slater's English Apple Cake from Kitchen Diaries. I'm reading along with this book each night before bed, trying to keep roughly to his entries. Sure enough, October 16th comes up and he makes an apple cake. And poof! Here's this topic. I know a sign when I see one. I finally acquired a kitchen scale, and I will say that baking using weights is so much more easier and convenient. I mean, intellectually I knew this beforehand, but it's another thing to actually bake this this way and have it brought home. No hassle, running around the kitchen, trying to find my errant, seldom-used third cup; or trying to make an French 200g block of butter conform to an American "stick". I may only bake from UK books from now on. Essentially a basic white cake with chunks of apples tossed in brown sugar and cinnamon, it is also topped with a few tablespoons of fresh breadcrumbs. Perhaps that's the "English" part? In honour of the name, I served it with hot bowls of Bird's custard (split vanilla bean added to give it a bit of polish).

I've been using pork belly quite frequently recently to make Chinese dishes such as hong shao rou and stir-fries. Following Fuchsia Dunlop's directions, I've been blanching it before the final braise or fry. I'm wondering what this step does to prepare the meat? I made hong shao rou in a rush one night and skipped that step completely, and noticed no particular difference in the final product. Also, anyone have any bright tips for removing the nuggety white bone pieces? I usually lop the whole area off with my cleaver, but I'd like to not waste the meat.

I don't enjoy a crispy fry - I find them too dry. Limp duck-fat fries sound pretty much like heaven to me. Fresh roasted nuts are incomparably better to the jarred kind. There's a nut roaster on my street that's doing land-office business now that the weather has cooled. People are queuing up for a half hour down the sidewalk for a chance at fresh roasted chestnuts, pecans, and chili peanuts. I don't think I could name a place in my hometown in Canada that offers fresh roasted nuts. Have they gone out of fashion in other places, too?

As per the recipe given in the ready-made hummus topic, I added a little citric acid to a batch I was making last night, and it did wonders for the tartness of it without making it too lemony.

I picked up a bottle of citric acid in Canada over the summer, intended to use it to make fresh cheese. I still haven't used it for that purpose yet - I can't find a reliable source online easily to tell me what proportions to use. I did, however, use a shake in my hummus last night, after reading about it in the ready-to-eat hummus topic, when my lemons didn't juice up enough. I was also making a batch of Jaymes's salsa up, since we were having guests over, and a shake into that did wonders as well. It's great to have this in my cupboard, because I don't have a reliable source of lemons always.

That's useful info. The problem with making baozi is that it's one of those things where you pretty much have to make a large batch, but with only two of us in the house, we'd never be able to eat our way through one in time. I think the first filling I'll try to make is the cabbage, wind-dried pork, chili and yellow bean I tried in Anhui.

Another CSA delivery has prompted me to try two more dishes out of this book. First, we got a big round of winter melon in last week's bag. I usually encounter winter melon steamed lightly in chicken broth at banquets, or in the kid's box lunches, but have never cooked it myself. With the help of Eatyourbooks.com, I turned up Fuschia's recipe for red-braised winter melon. Cooked with ground pork, ginger, chili, and dark soy sauce, it's more the kind of dish that will stand by itself. Red Braised Winter Melon, pp. 230 Then, since I had some pork belly in the freezer, as usual, I decided to try Qing Qing's back-in-the-pot pork, pp. 81. Mmm. Excellent. My husband and I are huge pork belly fans from our days eating it grilled as samgyeobsal in Korea. We didn't really need a new way to enjoy it, but this one has worked its way into our hearts. One teeny-tiny change I made, because I live in Jiangsu and couldn't even think of making rice without a teaspoon of sugar (ok, exaggeration - but, it's close.), I added a tablespoon of sugar to the final dish. It made the seasoning bits even more delicious to spoon up onto our rice afterward. So, we had pork, with pork for dinner. And a plate of fried qing cai, since it's ever-present in the CSA bag.What's the English name for that? My C-E dictionary is only throwing out Chinese cabbage, which is not what I'd call it. Pak choi, maybe? I'll put a picture of it up next time before I eat it.

Happy double nine day! It's the ninth day of the ninth lunar month, and I can barely hear myself think for all the firecrackers going off in the neighborhood. Our next stop in Beijing was a Sichuan place called Dezhe Xiaoguan. In an alley in the middle of Dongcheng district somewhere, our cabbie was in the dark as we were trying to find the place. I thought at one point I'd seen the hutong sign, and stopped the cab, only to see after getting out and paying that I'd read the sign wrong. My husband and I had one of those conversations you have when you've been dropped out of a cab on a dark, quiet street in a strange city where you can barely read and speak the language. Blame was eventually assigned to me. Our faithful attendance of language lessons finally paying off, though, we were able to call and get guided to the right hutong, not a block down on the other side of the road. It's not a difficult place to find, but please note no English is spoken, nor is there an English sign to this place. It's in a restored courtyard home, with first-date sort of atmosphere. Warm, naturally finished wood tables and chairs; traditional blue and white china; Jack Johnson on the stereo. The food, as I noticed in Beijing, came in HUGE portions, and we over-ordered so badly that even our server felt compelled to tell us we'd ordered way to much. We were greedy guts and were undeterred by his warnings. We ordered the cold sesame and chili chicken in a vain attempt to recreate the magic from the night before, and while their version was fine, the chicken flesh was nowhere near as silky as that of Da Dong's. Beef with wild mushrooms was rich and moreish. The beef was cut what I think of as Japanese-style - very thin in sheets with lots of flavoursome fat laced on the edge of each sheet. These mushrooms -I have no idea what kind they are, but have long, hollow stems and tiny caps carried the earthy taste of the beef, and they were bound together in a slightly sweet, slightly hot sauce that made you take mouthful after mouthful trying to get sated of it - but each mouthful led to more of a craving, instead of sating it. It was a Sisyphean sauce. It pretty much ruined my appetite for the two further dishes we'd ordered; the braised green beans with yellow-bean sauce - soft and salty; very nice. Chili-fried radish with smoked ham. The smoked ham is what makes me wonder if the true deliciousness of Chinese country cooking can be truly experienced internationally, without access to these cured meats. This pork was so smoky, so rich, that a few small pieces infused a wok full of radish shreds so much that it was like we were eating crispy vegetable chili bacon. It pained me not to polish off every scrap, but we were just too stuffed. My husband and I routinely finish three dishes between us in Suzhou with room to spare, but the portion sizes there are so much smaller. We got da pao of the extra. There is lots of lovely game and offal dishes on the menu as well, including crispy kidneys and rabbit head, but we couldn't order everything, even though I've been meaning to make a go of enjoying offal dishes. When I go back to Beijing, it'll be difficult not to revisit.

Oh, heavens. Was there a creamy centre? It sounds like something like that should have a creamy centre. Any sense of how the cake achieved ball form? Was it baked or carved that way? I want a "cake ball".

I copied some recipes out of Madhur Jaffrey's "Curries from the Spice Trail" book this past summer, when I borrowed it from the library. Every recipe I've made has been a winner, a real keeper. When I checked her Amazon.co.uk page, opinion seemed to be that this was not her best book. I know World Vegetarian has a lot of fans around here - if you could purchase only one MJ book, which would it be?