nakji

There's an interesting article in the New York Times today about the evolution of kitchen design - moving from being a place for servants or of female exile, to being the center of the entertaining and hub of the house in more modern designs. I'm somewhat notorious amongst friends for loving cooking but always living in places with tiny kitchens which they regard as terrible. But I kind of like not having to run all over the room to get everything together for a dish.

Kaffir lime leaves. The smell of them makes me very, very happy.

I think you have to never try and tell yourself it's cheese, and just take it on its own merits - a spreadable substance that won't melt in the heat. I worked with someone from the UK who used it as a base for cream sauce in her pasta because she couldn't get the real thing. I could never work out how she got it to melt!

The book which inspired me to cook Chicken Marsala for the first time. There's knowledge I didn't need! The best part is when one of the characters shows up to save the day by bringing real chicken marsala. I'm still looking for a bottle of marsala in China - no dice so far. I've tried subbing in red wine for it, and it just ain't right, to me. It's one dish I won't make until I can find the real thing.

I can't stop talking about my favourite Xinjiang restaurants here in China, but I can't help it; they're so good. The place I go to most often has a guy in a box with a grill attached to the front - for street access. All he does is grill skewers of lamb. Each skewer alternates pieces of meat and fat, all coated with chili and cumin powder, then grilled to perfection. We usually order about then of these as soon as we sit down. The first time I got one, I thought - "Is that really supposed to be just a piece of fat there?" Then I ate it, and thought, "Why isn't this skewer ALL fat?" In Shanghai, you can find them as well in Yunnan Road - there's a place we went to with a huge queue and SUCCULENT fatty skewers. The man in the "Skewer Box" The skewers:

From the network's point of view, what's the point of having the shows be so personality-driven? Are they just easier to market? Genuinely more popular? Because you think it would cost them more in the long run.

What I love about travelling through Vietnam is how regional the food is there. For instance, the baguettes in Hanoi were short with a mouth-laceratingly crispy crust, and then filled with an herb omelette or (even better) Turkish kebab-style pork. For the veggies - one or two tomatoes, a sprig of cilantro, and some pickled onions. I never saw a steak and egg baguette, but if I had, that would have been a morning must. (As it was, I was utterly addicted to the excellent pain au chocolat you could get everywhere.) Then, in Hoi An, you can get long, thin white baguettes with just a hint of colour; more chewy than crispy. Spread with Laughing Cow and pickled carrots and cukes - awesome.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again : Also, I'd like to see shows with more than one presenter. Like, and hour show where maybe one person does a piece on equipment testing, then another does a visit to a market and makes something with what they bought, then someone else does a short piece on something else - a travel bit, or a bit on dealing with supermarket produce or something. Like a cooking 60 minutes.

I do this as well, as my husband swears he suffers from heartburn from muffins made with corn or other vegetable oil. I live overseas, so I have to adapt recipes constantly. Even if I can find and afford the ingredients in many dishes, I just don't have a big enough kitchen to keep eight kinds of vinegar and six kinds of mustard on hand. But, I don't want to eat the local cuisine all the time. Thus, compromise. So I think, as is being pointed out, that the quality of the substitution matters. Using a poor quality ingredient to maintain the authenticity of a dish may be less successful than using a substituted but less authentic ingredient. I will do crazy things like sub in Hunnanese smoked ham or other Chinese pork products when a recipe calls for parma ham, or even, heaven forfend, pancetta. I just don't invite any Italians over for dinner, or attempt to give the dish an Italian name. Does it taste like the original dish as written? I'd guess not. But I know enough not to blame the recipe's author if it doesn't work out. It's a risk I take. When doing this, I always try to ask myself, "What is the role of the ingredient in this dish?" I mean, I'm sure there are Asian cookbooks out there (And let's face it - this a problem for many regional cuisine cookbooks) that suggest using can use things like canned baby corn in dishes. But the whole point of baby corn is that it's a fresh, crispy vegetable with a sweet taste. If people can't find fresh baby corn, then using a floppy pale tasteless corn will result in an "authentic" but tasteless dish. Using something that mimics the spirit of the ingredient will compromise authenticity, perhaps, but maintain tastiness and enjoyment. I'd like to think when editors ask cookbook authors to suggest substitutions for difficult ingredients, that they make substitutions with the spirit of the ingredient in mind, and not necessarily the form of the ingredient. It sounds like James Oseland is one of these kinds of authors. What I try never to do is make substitutions in the spirit of health. It almost always compromises tastiness.

I think in this case, they "undercook" the potatoes because they're looking for that crispy/crunchy texture. It's not really something we do in Western cuisines so much with potatoes, I guess. I'm really partial to this Chinese potato dish: Forget the name, but I had it at Southern Barbarian, a Yunnanese place in Shanghai; perfect for smearing with fava bean and ham puree. It was like a potato-vermicelli potato chip, salty and crispy.

The lamb ribs and the sugar potatoes are two of my favourite dishes that I get whenever I go to my local Xinjiang restaurant - it's interesting to see them turn up at a Dongbei place. I'm wondering if anyone can shed some light on where these dishes originate? The shredded potato looks somewhat pallid; the version I always get the potatoes have more char.

I always get stir-fried potatoes when I go to a Xinjiang place. Didn't know it was a common Dongbei dish as well. Is it done with the green chili peppers and the potatoes in slivers?

I live down the street from the Kraft factory. When I'm on my way to my evening lessons, I can smell them baking the chocolate cookie portion. How do I know they're making my Oreos? Because all the Oreo packets say "Made in Suzhou". I like the kind with the peanut butter filling - do they make those in the U.S.?

I have gas in my home and use that when cooking normally, but when I travel to Canada and cook in my parents' home, I use their electric smoothtop range. I adapted just as Chris does - I keep a couple of the burners going at different temperatures, and switch the pan between them, and the cool middle of the range. It works fine, but it's not the sort of thing I would do with kids in the house, for example. My complaint was that their pans are all good, heavy bottomed ones that really held the heat. I usually cook with a cheap $10 skillet, which responds quickly to heat changes. I always burn things for the first day or so until I remember to adjust my cooking.

I found this to be true when living in Hanoi. Like, if you were getting pho at a neighborhood pho cave, the herbs would be pre-sprinkled for you - no herb plate. Just limes and chili sauce/chopped chilies on the table. If you went to Pho 24, you'd get an herb plate, but they're a Southern chain, right? Bun cha, on the other hand, always comes with a generous herb plate in Hanoi.

I buy my fruit from a fruit stand on my street. The owner thinks I'm ill-equipped to pick out my own fruit, based on the first two or three times I visited - since I was raised with supermarket fruit, I just picked my choices by size and relative clarity of skin. He was appalled; so now he always does it for me. I'm learning a lot from him; maybe next year I'll be checked out to pick out my own. For watermelons, he does exactly as Shamanjoe says; he gives all the melons in the flat a light thwacking, until he finds one with a hollow thump. Then the challenge is to get it home without cracking it at all. Invariably, it only needs the lightest tap of the knife on the rind to have it split under its own juice. Unfortunately, it's the kind of melon that can only be eaten while standing over a sink.

I was going to say my fridge but then responses here got me to thinking about the hood exhaust fan, which has spent its life sucking the spray off of gas-burnered woks. I'd goo-be-gone it, but I'm starting to think of the grease haze as patina.

Oh, wow. Listen: lesson learned from French Cream Tart - don't use salted butter if it's all you've got, like I did. Waaay too salty.

I thought potatoes were usually the salmonella culprits in potato salad. I've got no citations on that, though.

You can pickle them, if you find yourself unable to eat them fresh anymore (or overnight them to us in the frozen North, if you like).

Well, that depends. Was it from Chris Brothers?

I have this book out this summer, too. In fact, I have a pan of her blueberry orange muffins in the oven right now for breakfast. I too find her recipes quite forgiving; recent ways I've botched recipes and still had them turn out: Yesterday: Making the blueberry crumb cake: seconds before I tumbled the walnuts into the crumb mixture, I remembered the nut allergy of the friend I was baking it for. The crumb layer became a "crunch" layer. And while I was mixing the batter, my mixer gave up the ghost, meaning i had to beat it all by hand. The batter was lumpy, rather than the shiny the recipe describes, but it turned out fine, especially when covered with vanilla ice cream. Last weekend: the French lemon cream tart; I only had salted butter in the house and couldn't go out for more. The recipe calls for something like two sticks of butter to be beaten in; I knew the salt would be noticeable; I did it anyway. Everyone raved, though. I guess people in my family are just used to tooth-achingly sweet pies from Costco. I thought it was too noticeably salty, so I definitely use unsalted next time.

Okay, so I need either something labelled "masa harina" or "Maseca"-brand, then. Useful information, this.

Thanks! So in any recipe that calls for "Maseca", I can use corn flour (non-Maseca brand)? I only ask because we don't have a Latin American grocery handy, and I'm shopping from a health foods store with bulk bins.

Okay, dumb questions from a tortilla beginner: Masa, maseca, masa harina, and corn flour. How do they differ? Or do they? Masa is a fresh product, right? But is there any difference between maseca, masa harina, and corn flour (not corn meal or corn starch)? I'm bringing a small selection of Mexican ingredients and a copy of Kennedy back to China with me this fall for my winter cooking projects.