nakji

The autumn is the most beautiful time of year there! Of course you should check out Zenkimchi's site, but one thing I would really recommend doing is to go hiking, if you're up to it, in Bukhansan park, up near Uijeongbu. You can reach the summit easily in the day, then hike down and have dubukimchi and o-gyeobsal at one of the many little huts that dot the rivers at the bottom of the park. Of course, you can load up on gimbap, kyul, and cucumbers before you hike up the mountain at the shops that line the paths on the way into the park. All accessible by subway - the orange line, I think. Other than that, fall is the BEST season for street food. Anywhere is fine, but notable (and popular) spots to find good street snacks are the hoetteok vendors along Insadong - choose the one with the longest queue, they'll have the freshest product. And back in my day, there was a good white-bean waffle vendor outside the gates of deoksugung palace near City Hall station. I'm jealous!

Like calling the chanterelles! I'm hoping my source comes through with another bag this week, so I can try them in rice. Please keep posting;)

I just received about 500g from a friend - I'm tempted to mix it in to regular jasmine rice as about 1/4 of the mix and cook it in a rice cooker. Will it come out too mushy this way? Based on the colour, I suspect it's been commercially processed, if that matters.

Thanks for all the suggestions! My current region is Nova Scotia, but I don't know if we have false chanterelles in the area. The forager was one with creditable experience, and the cleaned, stripped mushrooms were eaten with a steak and a nice tempranillo, with no unduly strange alcoholic reactions. My parents, who'd had another bag previously off the same forager, said they'd cooked them whole and not particularly enjoyed them. I cleaned this batch with a nut pick, lacking a brush, and stripped them as described. They were exceptional sauteed in a bit of butter with pepper. The taste was more of maple than pine for me - I would love, love to try these mushrooms in a Japanese dish, but no hopes of getting another bag before I head back to China sadly. A family of pheasants lives in my family's back garden! My father and I have eyed them hungrily from time to time, but to my mother, they're friends. She'd be annoyed if I hauled out the .22!

Aha. So it just provides the recipe name, book and page number information.

So the idea is that you enter in the ISBN of books you already own, and EYB will index only those recipes for you? What's to prevent you from entering in the ISBNs of books you don't own to access a wider library of recipes?

A pound of chanterelles landed in my lap thanks to my mother's foraging co-worker. My plan is to saute them simply in butter to serve alongside steak. I would have liked to use them in a takigomi-gohan application - cooked in rice and dashi to bring out the piney flavours - but the family wouldn't go for any application that didn't involve dairy and meat. So. Questions: What's the best way to clean them? What does "stripping" mean? Does this mean tearing the mushrooms vertically rather then slicing them with a knife?

Kimchi. In Korea, they have special fridges that are supposed to help keep the kimchi at its appropriate temperature, but one of the side benefits is not getting waves of kimchi smell blown about the kitchen every time you open the fridge.

Mix it with soy sauce and vinegar for a potsticker/dumpling dip.

Even better, one of those wooden spatulas with the hard edge for scraping non-stick pans.

Nova Scotia lobster salad - knuckle and claw meat, with a hint of chopped radish for textural crunch. Soft red potato bread and lettuce. Served to my 89-year-old grandmother to celebrate the start of her "birthday week".

For me, it's my silicon spatula. I'm cooking in other people's kitchens this summer, and I can't count the number of times I've reached for it already only to realize the kitchen I was in didn't have one. Making scrambled eggs, getting lobster salad out of a bowl into a container, deglazing a pan for bacon dressing - three times yesterday I wanted it and it wasn't there. I'm going to start packing it as a matter of course now. Also: tongs.

I love a good aloo gobi for dinner - potato and cauliflower are hearty, so it's filling, but they're also cheap and last in the crisper well, so I can buy the ingredients early in the week and still rely on the ingredients being usable at the end of the week. It reheats well for lunch the next day, too.

So...what kinds of vinegar are people using? I use Maille or Kuhne since that's usually all I have available. For Asian dishes, I use Mizkan rice vinegar; unless I'm finishing a dish or making a dipping sauce, when I use a fine Chinkiang.

A whole stuffed chicken! I've never thought of grilling a full chicken like that before, although I've heard of doing turkeys in that style. Do all the juices just drip onto the coals, or do you try to save them somehow? I had a holiday in Malaysia in February this year, and I'll be heading back in three weeks for some more roti canai and satay love. Everywhere we ate we had something we loved, so as soon as I got back from my trip, I ordered "Cradle of Flavor" and had it sent to my parents' house in Canada for some holiday cooking with my Dad, who spent a couple of years of his childhood stationed with his family in Singapore. Especially delicious were the grilled chicken satay we had in Kuala Lumpur. I wanted originally to take a stab at the satay recipes for this cook-off, but the only chicken around the house was a Costco-pack of chicken wings. Since I didn't want to go and buy more chicken when we had two kilos of wings sitting around anyway: Grilled Coconut Chicken with Lemon Basil. This recipe has you cooking your chicken in a curry paste-and-coconut milk based sauce, then grilling them off after the chicken has mostly cooked through. Since I used chicken wings rather than a whole cut-up chicken as called for, it actually turned out to be a pretty quick dish to put together - after I'd done all the prep for the curry paste, of course. And as I said before, the skin-to-meat ratio was succulent. Paste: Made with fresh turmeric, lemongrass, garlic, and more. Initial cooking on the range, in the curry sauce: The curry sauce had lemon basil, coconut milk, and kaffir lime leaves. Onto the grill: Turned: Thoughts: These cooked rather quickly on a gas grill, and were tender and juicy, which is what I'm looking for in a grilled chicken. The flavour penetrated, and there was significant finger-licking involved in the eating. I served the extra curry sauce, reduced, on the side for mixing in with rice. I cooked these on a gas grill, so it was irrelevant this time, but in Malaysia, whenever I saw chicken (or anything) being grilled, the grill master furiously fanned the coals once the meat hit the grill. I asked why over here. But through both the satay and the coconut chicken recipes, author Oseland says nothing about fanning your coals. I haven't read through the book carefully, but I can only conclude he considers it an unimportant step for cooking chicken on a western grill. Does anyone fan their coals when they use their grill?

It's summer, and fresh raspberry season, so I dug out Dorie and made a tart: "Quick Classic Berry Tart", p. 377. As you can see, I under-baked the crust, but for my first attempt at both pate sablee and pastry cream, I was very pleased. The tart came out perfectly, despite such user errors as putting the egg into the pate sablee at the wrong time, using salted butter, and not having any jam to glaze the berries with. It was quick and easy to put together, and the best part was watching the family polish it off in one sitting.

I usually use rice vinegar. It's mild and cheap where I live. Of course, you could always try to make your own: Making vinegar topic Making wine vinegar topic

Thanks! I won't be back in Shanghai until September most likely, but when I am, it's on my list. Any other menu stars to recommend?

I just checked a copy of "Out of Old Nova Scotia Kitchens" from my library, which has a lot of old-school, Maritime/New England-style recipes. Off the top of my head, Blueberry Grunt and Hodgepodge come to mind. Baked Beans?

Bento rice is usually eaten at room temperature; some safety precautions are necessary, but it's generally safe. Isn't the problem when it's kept in chafing dishes?

That is my main complaint about sauces and marinades for my grilled chicken; they never seem to truly penetrate. I made the Grilled Coconut Chicken with Lemon Basil last night (pictures to follow). Braising before grilling worked great for infusing the flavour, and rather than using a whole chicken, I used what I had on hand: chicken wings. The ratio of skin to meat meant the flavour really carried through the chicken, and there was no bland white meat untouched by the sauce.

I just saw this yesterday when I was searching availability for The Essentials of Mexican Cuisine - I didn't know it was a newly available book. I can't imagine ever being able to cook from it, but I'd love to hear more about the dishes from Oaxaca.

I never use my paring knife. When I moved into my flat last summer, I bought one (from Ikea) without even thinking about it. But I can't recall using it this year. I never peel fruit; or do any fancy knife work. I use a vegetable peeler to peel potatoes on the very rare occasions I eat a potato.

Now that I'm back in the land of backyard grills, I'm in. I made an incredible African Chicken on the grill earlier this year in China - over charcoal, of course. Now I'm in Canada, I'll have to use the gas grill I have to hand. I'm thinking of doing the Grilled Coconut Chicken with Lemon Basil from "Cradle of Flavor", pending a visit to our local Asian market and availability of key ingredients.

Thanks for all of your wonderful suggestions! I wish I'd had more meals in Toronto. We were handicapped by being jetlagged enough to screw with our appetites, which are usually prodigious, but we did our best. We made it to The Hoof Cafe and Pho Linh, which were both spectacular, although in different ways. We got the charcuterie ploughman's plate, the sausage and links, and some pork belly at the Hoof Cafe, which our friends had been wanting to visit, but who had always been stymied by queues at the weekend. We went on Monday at lunch, and got a table no problem. Informed service; succulent pork. Worth a visit. I wondered about a lack of menu aside from the chalkboard on the wall? They asked if we wanted drinks, but saw no other options presented other than the coffee. But later, we saw mimosas go out - perhaps we were meant to dialogue with our server? I'm sure if we hadn't been so jet-lagged, we would have sorted it out. Pho Linh was in a neighbourhood near a bookstore we had a plan to visit, so it worked out perfect for lunch one day. We were a bit late - around 1:30, which in Hanoi is right at the start of siesta, so usually a dodgy time to hit a restaurant. I got a little more worried as we walked up, as the surrounding pho restaurants on that street seemed empty. Pho Linh had their shades drawn against the heat, so I was cheered when we stepped in and the house was full. The pho was as good as any bowl I had in Hanoi, with the bonus of having even better quality beef. My husband and I both got bowls of pho bo tai, and then, to the great amusement of our server, a sinh to and a cafe sua da each. Hot soup and cold drinks was a recipe for messing with our stomach, but we dodged disaster, perhaps because it was so hot out, and we'd been doing so much walking. We also ordered some spring rolls - the ones pictured on the menu looked dry and unappetizing, but when they came they were appropriately crispy and sensibly sliced for ease of chopstick eating. We saw, but didn't visit Wanda's and Libretto, due to lack of appetite/time/other plans, so we're saving them for a future trip. We ate at the Lakeview the first night we got in, as it was the only thing in the neighbourhood left open. I cannot complain about the Vanilla-peanut butter shake I had; nor the poutine. Just the sort of food to land you solidly on Canadian soil. Toronto is such a great eating city; I'd never get bored.