nakji

Well, certainly not in mine! But it's an excellent excuse to plan a trip to Europe some time next year. That sounds like an excellent goal. Any cakes in particular?

My soup will be a corn soup with lop yuk or some other sort of cured ham. I can pick some really quality stuff up at Wal-mart. You can always substitute - if you can't find decent greens, try using spinach, celery or whatever looks fresh and good - improvise. What other specialty items are you relying on finding?

Have you tried fried rice in it? I'm not a huge fan, but fried rice fresh out of properly seasoned wok over a high flame - that's worth eating.

Exactly! My Asian fridge will bear no more than one of each category of condiment! We don't get new ones to try until the old one is all used up.

My thoughts on soup: at a big party, I keep a pot going in the kitchen, then as people come in from the cold, they get offered some in a Japanese tea cup as a warm-up. I let it go during the whole time, and if anyone is feeling peckish long after the meal is done, it's a fill up that doesn't make you feel bloated. Some people may want a quick hit before going back out into the cold as well. Just because in Asia, alcohol isn't as commonly drunk, especially for women - so it's a nice way to warm up cold feet.

Ooh, that's a lot of steamed dishes. What kind of pickles are you thinking of making? Also, I think you need a soup. Does he need a soup?

Nice! And fish means "surplus", doesn't it? So it's like you're welcoming in a fruitful year. I have some carp paper cut-outs I'm going to hang as decoration over my table. Doesn't Barbara Tropp have a recipe for sauteed oranges? And something with walnuts? Those would be nice, and seasonal. There is definitely a balance to be struck. They'll pry my shortbread out of my cold, dead hands. But why not incorporate what's available, right? It'd be a waste not to. I served kimchi, and sweet potatoes with yuzu marmalade the years I made Thanksgiving in Korea. My family always had Chinese food for New Year's Eve, so I associate this cuisine with the holidays anyway. Of course, we had to sit through Dad's lecture on nasi goreng and the hawker stands of Singapore, too. Even my husband can quote him now. I'm also making corn chowder with lop yuk, which - if you've never tried it - is really something special; a real twist on a classic.

Here were my resolutions for 2009: Done (delicious) Done (hooked my parents on it too) Done (thanks Chufi!) No love (moved again) Done (the Art of Eating) Right. This year: In 2010, I will eat truffles, too! I've never had one either. When are they in season? I will make preserves of some sort, ideally when I'm home in Canada for the summer, so my family can remember me when I'm away. I will find time to write more about what I'm cooking. I will learn how to make pasta. I will teach my friends how to cope with cooking in a foreign country. I will read more cooking theory such as Harold McGee.

Oh, turtle. The restaurant near my flat sells turtle in a variety of dishes. Whole. Didn't turtle soup used to be quite common? Why did we stop eating it? Were we using endangered sea turtles?

Oh, that sounds great - I love dishes that use less common types of vegetables. What kind of radishes did the recipe call for? Small red ones? I love cooked radish - especially daikon braised in dashi with soy and mirin.

I've spent the last week or so in a tizzy to stock my pantry full of things to make those familiar dishes from home for Christmas - shortbread, mince pies, tourtiere. There's a bit of guilt to all this, though, as I can't help but feel like I'm surrounding myself in a cultural fortress, locking out what China has to offer me. In her memoir, "Shark Fin and Sichuan Pepper", Fuschia Dunlop writes that, Am I afraid to cook Chinese food for Christmas? I can't resist a gauntlet thrown like that. I don't want to end up one of those ex-patriates that lives on off-brand boxed macaroni cheese and overpriced German muesli. I've decided to add some Chinese dishes to my Christmas dinner in celebration of my host country and the ridiculously delicious foods available here. When in Rome, etc. I don't want to make dumplings, as I won't have time, what with all the cookie baking I've got on my plate. Nor do I want to do any stir-frying, a la minute sort of dishes, as I want to hang out with my friends, not be futzing around in the kitchen bent over a wok while everyone is eating all my double-Devonshire toffees in my living room. Not that it takes a long time, but all that chopping...no. So I'm leaning towards a braised dish, like red-braised pork, as it'll have those lovely flavours of Christmas like cinnamon and star anise. I'm also thinking of getting a whole roast duck and shredding it into a salad with pomegranate, cilantro and a honey-soy-mandarin orange dressing. Fusion. And buying some dumplings. Anyone else, through custom or curiosity, adding Chinese dishes to their Christmas feasting?

Great! I have cinnamon and nutmeg on hand, and I should probably be able to find some cloves somewhere. Hopefully. A couple more questions: Does this pie get better with age? Or should it be made fresh for consumption right away? And - anyone have any foolproof pastry recipes that don't call for a food processor and crisco? I have butter and butter. Actually, I could probably render my own lard, but that might be taking it a bit too far before Christmas. I have cookies to make too.

I'm beginning to think I'd like to get this book. Normally I'd shy away of anything with "Thomas Keller" on the cover, since I have neither a lot of time nor a ton of special equipment in my kitchen. I'm still enough of a novice cook to be intimidated. However...I make a lot of soup, and that cauliflower one had me salivating. Then I saw that chicken pot pie, and I was sold. That's just the kind of food I want to be able to make well. Solid iterations of classics, but with refined touches that make it special if someone is coming over for dinner. I'll have to hold out for February for mine, though!

Luck was on my side, and Marks & Spencer had jar after jar of "luxury" mincemeat lined up in their seasonal display. I won't ask what makes it "luxury"; I don't want to contemplate the sorts of culinary sins that might be covered up with a brown sauce full of booze and spice that might make up non-"luxury" versions. 45 RMB a jar; I hope it's got bloody macadamia nuts and single-source heirloom cherries or some such in it. I'm going to tart it up with lemon and mandarin orange zest, spiced rum, and some Xinkiang raisins. As for pastry, I think I'll try Nigel Slater's version, since it calls for a minimum of ingredients, although I'll probably stretch it to larger-size pie tins. I'm working without a food processor, so I need the pastry to be fairly unfussy. Puff pastry is completely out of the question with my feeble skill set and lack of access to quality frozen product. Do you think I ought to add some chopped apple to my jarred filling?

I have an entire SAT course to prepare a scheme of work for, and instead find myself looking into my fridge at three solid pounds of unsalted butter - a king's ransom of milk fat in China. I'm procrastiplanning right now by drawing up complicated preparation lists -starting first with all-butter pastry for mince pies and lemon tarts. What could be more time-consuming than cutting butter into flour by hand? Fortunately, my flat is about 15 degrees Celsius.

Oh, I'd just read that and was coming to post that very link. I liked the discussion of the various types of fats used, and the trick of heating the oil up first, before throwing the potatoes in. What I thought was curious was that Heston Blumenthal wanted us to boil our skins in with our potatoes, to give them more "potato" flavour. I never noticed that my potatoes were lacking potato flavour. That and all of the recipes discussed called for par-boiling potatoes, where it's clear that hardly anyone discussing roast potatoes here does. Does par-boiling create a different roast potato experience? The potatoes I have access to in China make for generally poor roast and mashed potatoes - they're incrediblly sweet, not the least floury, and they're extremely wet. I despair.

I love dong dong ju! There are several great tea rooms in Seoul in the Insadong area that specialize in selling different kinds, like pine-flavoured, and so on. I love the little bits of millet that float around when you reach the bottom of the bowl. It goes especially well with Korean drinking food like salt-grilled mackerel, kamjajeon (potato pancake) or haemul pajeon (seafood pancake). Even just a bit of radish kimchi is a delicious counterbalance. It's a smoother alternative to the chemically-bland taste of soju, and who doesn't love drinking out of bowls? I'm told that the right kind of housewife still makes her own blend at home, and quite frankly, I wish I knew how.

Sounds like you got a Vietnamese version with mung beans. I always feel bad, because I quite like mooncakes, so I think I must have too sweet a tooth. I like the ones with an egg yolk inside. And the lotus seed ones. Those are good, too. Actually, I've never met a mooncake I didn't like, although it helps to eat only a quarter, and to eat that bit with tea so strong it feels like you're stripping the enamel from your teeth. When I lived in Vietnam, Highland coffee used to run a special set of them in the mid-autumn festival with trendy flavours like green tea and dark chocolate.

Ketchup on meat pie is a perfect combination. I don't have any ketchup for my tourtiere, but I did find some fruit chutney at Marks and Spencer which will have to do. My main problem now is that I can't find any allspice. Would cloves do instead?

I do the same, tucking the bag over so it's closed. If I don't, the paste exposed to air tends to darken - I don't think it does any harm, but it does dry it out a bit.

I actually haven't decided where I'm staying yet - we'll be visiting friends, but we'll be staying at a hotel - any recommendations for a good, food-centric area? We also don't know how long we'll be in town. I'm a pretty flexible traveller, obviously. We'll be there for less than a week, that's about all I can say with certainty. We won't be going to either Penang or Melaka, we're actually heading to the beaches at Tioman.

If the vanilla spice nuts are a little sweet, then a spicy nut would provide an excellent contrast. How about lime and chili? Thai flavours always balance salty-sour-sweet-bitter, so how about a mix of lime juice, chili powder, fish sauce/salt, and maybe the coconut and a little more sugar to add sweetness. Either peanuts or cashews would be an excellent choice. Lemongrass would be a nice flavour, also, but it'd be hard to get onto the nuts - maybe by infusing a sugar syrup...

I keep mine in the fridge, and it seems to work out fine. I go through a tub about every three months, and it doesn't seem to be a problem. When I did a cooking class in Thailand, the teacher recommended that if we purchased things like galangal, chilis, kaffir lime leaves, etc. in large quantities from an Asian market, we could freeze them whole divvied up in packets, then make curry paste fresh-from-frozen as needed. I've never tried this, since I have never lived anywhere where I could get fresh galangal or kaffir lime leaves - however I have seen them being sold frozen at import markets, so they can't degrade too much that way.

One problem holding parsnips back, I think, is their colour. They're a pale cream/gold colour doesn't offer enough of a colour contrast if you're considering them for a roast dinner, like my mother would have. Next to the roast potatoes, they would present a plate of bland white/yellow. Are there any more interesting ways to serve them? Pureed as a soup? With spinach as a contrast?

A Japanese cookbook I have calls for searing the eggplant skin-side down quickly on a hot pan to preserve the colour. I also find that beautiful colour stays bright when I deep-fry my eggplants, so I suspect high heat must be what does it.