nakji

Tomato nabe! Brilliant! No doubt delicious with a range of mushrooms - have you tried it, Hiroyuki? And do you think diced tomato or tomato juice yields a better result?

My food sourcing just got a lot more local with two new discoveries: my local coffee shop is roasting coffee from Yunnan province FRESH WEEKLY! I love living in coffee-producing countries. I also finally found the live animal market, which means I can have my chickens killed to order. Having to look the chicken in the eye first means I hope to be using my meat more carefully. In the meantime, I'm avoiding milk products and other processed foods domestically produced for safety reasons. I can't avoid getting my dairy from Australia, I'm afraid.

The procrastitask: thirty Cambridge IGCSE practice papers to be marked. The procrastibake: Mark Bittman's baking powder biscuits. Very nice, especially after I upped the butter a bit, and drizzled them with maple syrup when they were hot out of the oven. I can't think of a better breakfast.

Last night I made kalguksu with shabu-shabu beef for dinner. Brilliant now I'm near a market with a noodle-maker that turns out five kinds of fresh noodle a day! I used a broth based with gochu-garu, instant dashi, soy sauce, garlic, negi, sesame oil, ground sesame seeds and a little cooking sake. I couldn't find minari, so I substituted fresh pea shoots instead, along with shiitake, enoki, shimeji, and another, unidentified kind of mushroom. Now I can almost perfectly recreate our favourite kalguksu experience from Korea, there's only one thing I'm missing: the restaurant we used to eat at had a dipping sauce for the beef that was a kind of thick soy-based sauce that had some wasabi and something else tangy in it. Anyone have any idea what might be in it?

Oh, wow, has it been a year already? Two happy events coincided recently to get me making nabe again. First, my dear friend visited me from Japan, bringing a nice-sized bag of Ajinomoto dashi powder. Second, I won a hot plate burner at our school's year-end party, bringing the table-top technology home to me. I know it's not strictly necessary to make nabe on the table, but I think it adds to the fun. I usually make a yuzu-flavoured broth, but that's not available any more, more's the pity. My friend showed me how to make a miso-nabe, but I'm wondering what else might be a good base for my broth.

Yes, it's exactly like citron tea. Which I have been known to use in place of marmalade.

I really, really, enjoy tie guan yin, and order it every time I go to a teahouse. Visitors also all go home with a small bag tucked into their luggage, I can't help spreading the love. I liked jasmine tea for so long, but now I find I can't go back, as it's too perfumey.

Koreans drink a kind of jujube tea call dae-chu cha - it's kind of a dark reddish-black colour. It doesn't have any tea in it, it's more like a jam. Here's a link - If it's what you're looking for, try your nearest Asian/Korean supermarket.

Oh, yes, do you mean hangchongsal? The incredibly-marbled-almost pure white strips of pork? We used to call it "squeaky pork", because it squeaks when you bite it. That stuff is even better than pork belly. Why don't people eat more of that? And, while we're on the topic of Korean cuts of meat, how about anchangsal? "pork diaphragm" as it was always translated for me. Incredibly flavourful.

Those look like great places, thanks! I'm especially interested in the hawker stall-type places, as I have access to lots of great Cantonese in China. Resortan Buharry sounds like just the sort of atmosphere I love. I do have a family history of diabetes, so consider me warned about the tea!

I got a really excellent bottle of sake from my friend who visited me from Japan. She also brought a killer bottle of yuzu-shu, which we're enjoying as a post-prandial drink on the rocks. I also won a table-top burner from our staff Christmas party, so we're looking forward to thirty nights of nabe in January! (We really need to stop eating all this pasta.)

And I will! The next time I go one, I'll bring a camera to record the menu options, which are pretty extensive. The atmosphere is great, too, as the older shops aren't heated. I think this heightens my enjoyment of the tea.

With all the new cookbooks I'm sure we've received for the holidays, has anyone started throwing out/giving away/selling their books to make room? What criteria do you have for keeping or throwing away your books? I'm already beginning to look in askance at some books that were gifts, and I only have one small shelf of cookbooks. It seems obvious that you'd get rid of books you never use, but has anyone ever thrown away a copy because they've used it too much?

I had dry pot (Gan Guo) for the first time the other night at a local restaurant in Suzhou, and really enjoyed it. They had several kinds available - frog, pork, chicken, and fish. I've never seen a recipe for in in any of my books, and was wondering if anyone had any experience making it? I couldn't work out how it was made.

I agree with the discovery of new-style Oolongs - I now have that as my regular-morning-tea-take-to-my-first-class-cup in a (BPA-free) Lock-n'-lock tea thermos. (Also purchased in Shanghai) I'm also enjoying tea in gaiwan for the first time, and enjoying exploring the rich selection of tea houses available to me in Suzhou. I hope to drink my way through some menus over the coming year.

This used to be a big question for me when I lived in Japan and fuel was quite expensive. Traditionally it has been so in Asia, right? Hence all the quick-cook recipes that involve stir-frying. Or is that just a myth...?

Cookbooks or books about food? Two good, but different categories, I think. I thought Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours helped me start to bake things with more slightly more sophisticated flavours than the typical chocolate chip cookies I had been used to, but in a way that was accessible to less adventurous palates in my family. She gets my vote for an important cookbook. As for books about food, I thought Omnivore's Dilemma covered a lot of areas that had previously been examined more comprehensively, I thought, by Margaret Visser's "Much Depends on Dinner", especially the bits about corn. I received "In Defense of Food" for Christmas, though, and I'm looking forward to reading that. I'd really like to read through McGee; as a matter of fact, it's on my list of resolutions for this year.

It depends on what kind of beginner they are, I think. I would consider myself a beginner at Chinese cooking, and before moving to China, I purchased "The Modern Art" by Barbara Tropp, Yan-Kit So's "Classic Chinese Cookbook", and Fuschia Dunlop's "Revolutionary Chinese Cuisine". I never, ever cook from Tropp's book. I have used it only once; to season my wok. For that, it was excellent. In my edition (the paperback) there are no photos, but rather lots of technical diagrams. If you like diagrams, it's the book for you. I get halfway down the page, and my eyes slide away into the ether. I've really, really tried to cook from it. Really. But I get bored halfway through her extremely technical descriptions. I've never read a care and usage handbook for nuclear reactors or a C++ programming guide, but I imagine they read similarly to Barbara Tropp's recipes. I can't help but think it could have lost pages and pages of copy with a few well-chosen photos. Nevertheless, if you're a beginning cook as well as a beginner to Chinese cuisine, then you may appreciate this level of detail. A further photo critique: my copy has no photos, so if you've never made these dishes before, it's hard to guess what a correct finished dish may look like. However, since I think this book dates from the early eighties, it has a lot of substitution-type ingredients. The recipe for dry-fried beans, I think it is, calls for balsamic vinegar if you can't get Chinkiang. Useful if you live in a place where you don't have access to a lot of ingredients. Anyway, I think of this book as Chinese cooking for engineers. Yan-kit So does employ a lot of photos, to great effect, I think. She has a pictorial guide of ingredients in the front which I find extremely valuable for visits to the market. The only criticism I can level is that I wish she'd included their names in characters and in pinyin, but this is of minor importance if you'll be shopping in an English-language environment. Her recipes are written simply, and are easy to read through at a glance. I find with her recipes, I got an immediate sense of how the dish would be cooked from start to finish, and after reading two or three recipes, I could see a common method emerge for a lot of the dishes. I'm sure that is there in Tropp's book, but because I have the attention span of a gnat, I was completely disinterested in following through her recipes to find it. I don't actually find myself cooking from this much, but I do use it as a reference book. Chinese cooking for people who don't want to spend a lot of time reading tomes of information. I do cook quite a bit from Fuschia Dunlop's book. I'm not sure exactly why - whether I find the photos more inspiring; or perhaps it's because there are fewer seafood recipes in this book than in So's book, as my husband doesn't eat fish or shellfish. Either way, I probably cook from this once a week. Like So's book, the recipes are easy to read through and grasp the method. Additionally, there are many photos of finished dishes to grasp the idea from, as well as details about the back story of each dish and lots of Chinese "atmosphere". However there's not a great deal of method discussed compared to Tropp's book. Cooking techniques and ingredients are discussed in the first section, though without the technical diagrams of Tropp or the helpful photos of So. Chinese cooking for an intermediate cook who really wants to get on a plane but is using this as the next best thing. To sum up, I'd say that if you're new to cooking in general, Tropp's book will hold your hand, but won't give you a lot of visual inspiration. So's book will hold your hand and give you more pictures to get you started. Dunlop is probably a good choice if you're confident in your basic cooking skills and feel comfortable with new ingredients, but are looking to expand your horizons a bit.

My mother always served her gingerbread with lemon "sauce" - I haven't thought of that in years. I have a jar of nice lemon curd in the kitchen left over from the holidays - I'll have to make some now.

Oh, radish leaves. Yes. I like daikon radish leaves blanched, then tossed in a Japanese sesame sauce.

Chris, that all looks spectacular! Where did the recipe for the red oil chicken come from? And what kind of noodles did you use for the dan-dan? My prep list was all on my handy kitchen whiteboard. Things got wiped off as they were finished. It helped that my friend, Ami, was visiting from Japan, and she turned out to be a super sous-chef. My husband, on the other hand, turned out to be a miserable photographer. I kept asking him if he was getting pictures of the food, to which he assured me he was - and when I checked them, they we all pictures of people eating the food. Nice. Fun, but of minor interest to y'all. We had a fusion Christmas, which meant some dishes were Chinese, some entirely western, and some a mix of the two. The fusion dishes, where I made the most of Chinese ingredients in western dishes, were probably the most successful. Chinese dishes were quick pickled cucumber with Chinkiang vinegar, sesame oil, and garlic - I made this recipe up after trying these at my favourite restaurant in Shanghai. I still haven't got the flavours quite right, but it could be that I haven't soaked them long enough. My neighbour brought braised chicken in what he called a "health" sauce - soy with big chunks of ginger, cassia, and other herbs. He did just the drumstick part of the chicken, which made it perfect for party eating. My co-worker made red-braised pork, from her native Hunan. We resolved we would have to get together in the new year so she could show me, because every time I try to make it, it comes out too bland and greasy. The fusion dishes were my favourite - corn soup seems pretty common on menus in Suzhou, so I kicked it up by adding thin-skinned green peppers, the kind that are halfway between a chili and a green pepper, and Hunan smoked ham, sliced thinly, with the fatty layer scored to render out the fat to flavour the green peppers. Then I used creamed corn and - fusion! - evaporated milk to make the rest of the soup. Smoky, corny goodness. The other hit was my jaozi quebecois: In other words - my tourtiere. But, after reading umpteen recipes for it, not being able to find cloves, and deciding the whole thing seemed too bland by half, I used ground pork sauteed with green onion, garlic, Shaoxing wine and star anise. Packed that into Mark Bittman's pie crust (oh, I cursed - but it came out), and I cut a plum blossom into the middle instead of a lily. I had middling hopes for it, but it was the first thing that disappeared at the party. I barely got a slice myself. Next time I might include cilantro and dust the crust with sesame seeds. I'm undecided. We also had roast Chinese leeks and a bird stuffed with roasted chestnuts and shiitake mushrooms fresh from the market, but those tastes were decidedly western.

I had my first "an ji bai cha" (white tea) today, from a tea shop in our historic district - a great place run by a dynamic young couple. The menu had four (!) pages of various teas - two pages of straight-up tea, plus another two of floral and herbal tisanes. Served in gaiwan with a fresh thermal pitcher of hot water to infuse as you like, it was a lovely experience. The white tea was a lot smoother and lighter than I expected, with virtually no tannin taste - I can't describe it very well, except to say it tasted very "clean".

I used par-boiled spuds in hot olive oil and finished with bacon fat yesterday, and received many compliments. One person even called them, "the business." I was quite chuffed. The nice thing was, I was quite busy in the kitchen, and didn't pull them out of the oven as soon as I might have otherwise - to their benefit, I think. They were very crisp and crunchy on the outside, while still being soft and creamy in the interior. I'll do that again.

Ha! Ce'nedra! I just made "fusion" tourtiere - I had no white cooking wine in the house, and they were asking $10 for cloves at the western supermarket (I ask you!) so my pie will be flavoured with Shaoxing and star anise, too. Chris, that is some busy work right there. My plans are endangered - I'm not sure I'll be able to get my preserved pork for the soup tomorrow, because I don't know if I'll have time to get to Wal-mart. I'll have to fly by the seat of my pants and see what resents itself tomorrow.

Last year's resolutions are here.