nakji

Russian teas! I haven't had one of those in years. Please report when you've tried some. Jasmine tea for me today; the house blend at my favourite tea house in Suzhou.

You're right of course, the only way to know is to try. I'm going to dig around for a recipe to use as a base for the dough. Baozi can successfully be cooked from frozen, right? Steamed once, and then frozen after cooled, you can heat them up again, I think.

Yes, I could never quite get past paying 700 yen for 500 g of kidney beans at my local discount market in Japan. The quality was always fine, but no better than I'd had in any other country. Never mind the gas charge for cooking them!

What's "grilled pistolete"? Is that the bread pictured with the soup? The food looks really, really rich. How far did you make it through the dishes?

So the vegetable filling...was it just a selection of vegetables sauteed together? I was thinking finishing them in some rich chicken stock would make a cabbage stuffing more savoury. The other thing is, all the pork dumplings here seem to have a teaspoon or so of rich broth that is exuded from the filling when they're steamed. I'm wondering if that happens naturally, or if it's the result of gelatin stock like in xiaolong bao.

This is what I did - Two cups of red lentils are boiled with seven cups of water, a teaspoon of salt and another teaspoon of turmeric. While that's going on, in a third cup of ghee, you sizzle some cumin seeds - I think a teaspoon, but I'd have to check. Then add a cup of diced onion. The onions get cooked until they're soft and brown, then a tablespoon of chopped ginger, some chili and a cup of chopped tomato go in. This gets cooked until the tomato gives up the oil, and then the lot gets added to the lentils. They cook together until the lentils turn velvety. The actual recipe calls for two kinds of dal, asafoetida, and some baby spinach thrown in at the end, so it's a little more sophisticated than what I described there. I served it with cabbage sabji, an incredibly easy to make dish which I described in the recipes that rock topic.

Can we talk fillings? I pass by some baozi vendors on my way to work each morning. 4 yuan buys a half dozen, on days when I have time to stop. Which is pretty much never, these days. The casings are chewy and wheaty, much like the ones pictured above. Not fluffy, like char siu bao or convenience store baozi. I love the standard pork filling that I can get from them. But....they also have chicken and pine nut; smoked tofu and garlic chive; black sesame and peanut. I've also had a spectacular wind-dried pork, cabbage and chili oil one from a stand in Wu Yuan. Right now, I don't need to know how to make them, but the day will eventually come when I won't be living here anymore. Are there any tricks to a successful dumpling filling? Or can you just make any kind of mix up, as long as it's relatively dry, and successfully stuff it in a baozi wrapper? I'm tempted to experiment.

Finally, finally got round to buying and cooking the red lentils I've been eying for almost a year. I cooked them in a recipe from Vij's Indian Cuisine that has them mixed with a bit of tomato-ginger-chili masala, and they were excellent, especially when I topped them with a scoop of Madhur Jaffrey's cabbage sabji. An amazing pure veg meal with serious staying power. I had tons left over, of course, so we had the pleasure of having the same thing again for lunch. It was a very satisfying meal, which kept me going through four classes and a parents' meeting. It has, however, done a number on the digestive system - if you know what I mean. I'm wondering - can dal be frozen and reheated successfully?

It bears repeating: I never buy bottles salsa anymore, and my husband was addicted to Old El Paso. Jaymes's salsa is the way forward. Recipe here.

I am actually eating the sabji again right now for lunch. Got another cabbage in the CSA this week, and thought, "Why not?" It's so good, I didn't even get a complaint from my husband, and he hates repeats. This time I had it along with a dal recipe from Vij's Indian cuisine. Nothing groundbreaking, but together - awesome October food.

Can you tell us more about the advantages of having made them by hand offered over her commercial product? Is it that the dough was worked less? My attempts at scones are always less satisfactory than store-bought ones, Scottish grandmother notwithstanding.

Cocktail olives! On sticks! Not what I would have expected at an Adria event, which somehow makes them even more excellent. What were the fishes underneath - anchovies? What eating highlights can we expect this week?

Glad to have inspired you - and it looks like you got an excellent meal out of it. I made the mapo doufu recipe on Sunday, but took no pictures. I'm fairly sure that mapo doufu is the dish that inspired Prawncrackers's signature. Honestly, I think I prefer the method in our own mapo doufu topic. Ms. Dunlop's method asks for you to cut the Chinese leek or spring onions into "horse ears' shape, but then only has you add the onion towards the very end of the preparation. I think this method works fine when using spring onion, which is thin enough to cook quickly at the end. I used thin leeks, however, and they remained uncooked past the point where the tofu was beginning to break up even from the gentle simmer I had it on. Since the leek remains white, and doesn't add a colour element like spring onion does, if I followed this method again, I'd add the leek the same time as the pork.

I found a great recipe for pork, fennel, and onions from Nigel Slater - the man does have a way with twists on simple food. I want to include in this topic a recipe I just made from Madhur Jaffrey's Recipes from the Indian Spice Trail, a book I picked up at the library over the summer and have been cooking from with great success. I had a cabbage left over at the bottom of my veggie bin that I wanted to clear out before this week's CSA comes in. Madhur lists a recipe for cabbage sabji which rocked my Sunday evening. Basically, a shredded cabbage and a thinly sliced onion get tossed in a wok with a teaspoon or so of turmeric, a little salt, a couple of teaspoons of chopped ginger and garlic, and a chopped tomato. You add about a half cup of water over the lot, cover it, and put it on a medium flame until it starts to steam. Then you turn down the heat, cover, and keep cooking until it's mostly cooked and limp. Then, cover off, you cook it until the water has evaporated. Then add into the pan four tablespoons of your oil of choice. I used peanut, which gave it a really rich flavour. Then you fry it until the edges of the cabbage get a little browned. About 20 minutes of cooking time gives you cabbage crack.

Tie Guan Yin Oolong tea has a nice floral flavour, even though it's a green tea. I think it would be great with dark chocolate.

Kaluha is an important part of a balanced breakfast. Oddly enough, I often make rice pudding for breakfast too as a way to add an alternate grain to my oatmeal and muesli routine. I've tried cardamon and lemon zest, but never anise before.

Thanks for all the recommendations, everyone. We decided to focus our meals on regional Chinese food that we don't have a lot of access to in Suzhou. We had a great flight up from Wuxi on Shenzhen airlines, which apparently will still allow you to smoke on board. They also provided a decent box lunch of chicken curry rice, pickles, and a mandarin orange. Simple, but good. I never think to buy pickles at the supermarket; I think because they always come in opaque shrink wrap. I have to correct this. We had a booking our first night for DaDong's Tuanjiehu branch, which is a short walk down from Sanlitun Village, where we were staying at the Opposite House. (A hotel I will forever love for stocking jelly beans in their free minibar.) It's apparently not the poshest interior, but that worked for us, as we were with a crew of our co-workers who were on a budget and didn't want anything too flash. The bill was an extremely reasonable 150 kuai a head, though, including tea, beer, two ducks, and some veg and cold dishes. Exceptional food. I actually wanted to go back again, but as ever, we didn't have enough meals to cover all the ground we wanted to. The room: Cold dishes: Billed as pickled cabbage, the centre dish was actually more of a collection of pickled vegetables, including pink radish, chilis and carrot. We also had the sour crunchy cucumbers. Sesame chili chicken. This classic was actually voted best dish of the night, far beyond the duck. A couple of things won our love - this dish is usually presented on the bone, so you have to delicately whittle the chicken off while depositing lone bone shards and other undesirables onto your plate, causing attention to wander from the otherwise luscious combination of fatty-salty-spicy-sweet that makes up the sauce. I'm aware that many people find this an attraction rather than a drawback; but none were at our table. We are lazy eaters, I guess. In this presentation, the chicken had been removed from the bone, each velvety nugget of flesh suspended in the sauce. This dish broke the ice for our group, as many of us had just met/just started working together. When we started fighting over the bottom bits in the glass, we really came together as a team, I think. The other key point was the chili oil to sesame paste ratio - usually more oil than paste, it's a real exercise to get the chicken into your mouth without collateral oil splatter. No problems with this one. Actually, looking back, I don't know why we didn't order another round. Duck! What else is there to say? Although I didn't get the point of dipping the skin in the sugar, that may be because I'm pre-diabetic from eating Jiangsu cuisine all the time. Some of my companions did not enjoy the "lean" style, preferring more flesh to skin; I don't feel this way. I think we should have ordered three ducks; we had two for seven, but a couple of the lads were not sated on their share. They provided pancakes and crispy sesame buns for wraps, along with pickles, chopped radish and leek, grated garlic, hoisin and sugar for garnish. We also ordered, because I am a sucker for eggplant dishes, the braised eggplant. It was nice to see something other than a sprig of parsley or an orchid for presentation, although I'm not sure how much an improvement "smears" are, as artful as they can be; especially when they are a certain shade of brown-green. The eggplant was melting and tasted fragrant with anise, a flavour combination I'm going to experiment with. A simple green dish to round things out - stir-fried dragon beans. These were cooked simply and made a nice complement to the richer, more heavily flavoured dishes. The menu here is a real brick - I was extremely intimidated by having to choose. Since we didn't have any Chinese friends with us, my tablemates turned the ordering over to me. I always feel somewhat out of my league with everyone's dinner relying on my inexpertise; fortunately the waitress was patient and guided me to their more popular dishes. (Although we did spend several minutes calling "Fuwuyuan!" to no effect, before my husband grokked and switched to "Fuwuyuanr!" Cue three waitresses, running to the table, all for one retroflex.) I wish I lived in Beijing to further explore the menu, because everything that went out to tables around us looked equally intriguing. We finished with an icy plate of fresh Chinese dates, which are now in season. Their charms are initially subtle - aside a from a crisp snap when you bite into them, it's kind of hard to see the attraction. However, they are mysteriously moreish, as if the crackle and snap of eating them is addictive. We also noted that while these are mildly sweet on their own, if you eat one and then take a long pull of Qingdao, they take on a pronounced honey flavour. We experimented at length with this effect until we ran out of beer. Then they brought round sweetcorn granitas, which won one of the lads a 10 kuai bet with the other who thought it was mango until tasting it. The queues were long and competitive; our booking had us ushered in right away. I would recommend making one if you plan to visit.

I leave everything out on the counter semi-covered with the container cover, then walk away for a while. I've never tried to cool things down quickly. Interested in hearing some tips myself, actually.

Actually, you're right, Vache Qui Rit does melt. Shelf-stable is a better way to put it. I always marvelled how banh mi makers could leave it out in their sandwich cases without it losing structural integrity. I know someone who used it as a base for her her own cheese and mushroom pasta sauce, I don't know why I forgot about that. I don't know why, but I love the plastic taste of VQR, but can't stand Velveeta.

Yes, please do tell, at least the original dish, if not how you modified it.

I don't know. There should be some sort of culinary equivalent of the fashion dictum: "Before leaving the house, look in the mirror and remove one piece of jewelery." Like, But then, nothing succeeds like excess.Maybe this belongs in the Culinary Signs of the Apocalypse topic?

A second and third squeeze will fill it up. The key is to not squeeze out what you've already put in.

Right. They only fill up halfway on the first squeeze. Then you need to squeeze them again so the remaining air goes out, but the initial soy stays in. Then suck up some more soy. Keep doing this a couple of times until it's entirely full. I find I have more success if the fish is horizontal rather than perpendicular to the soy. It's fiddly, but it eventually works.

Put the soy sauce in a bowl. Squeeze the air out of the fish with your fingers. Submerge the tip of the squeezed-out fish into the soy. Release, and suction should pull the sauce into the fish. This will get it half-full; yes. But - gently squeeze again, so that the air is expelled, and then dip again. A few squeezes should fill it up. You get the hang of it pretty quickly.

I guess I could.