nakji

'Tis the season...last year I made a sickly-but-delicious trifle with pound cake soaked in Malibu rum, set with strawberry Jello, and covered with home-made vanilla custard, fresh strawberries and whipped cream. Anyone trying something slightly more sophisticated this year?

I have gotten myself into the Christmas spirit by re-reading Maggiethecat's excellent ruminationon that Quebecois Christmas specialty, the tourtiere. This ground pork pie is just the answer to my Christmas dilemma - I'm having a large crowd over, and want something meaty to serve - there aren't a lot of turkeys or roasts of beef to be had, but ground pork is but a street market away. But since I have all sorts of other interesting meats to hand as well - roast rabbits and duck come to mind immediately - I was wondering if anyone had any variations they'd like to share? And what about doing mini tourtieres - too much work?

How about barley tea? It tastes like toast - can you use a bag of that and infuse it in the cream? Korean grocers usually sell boxes of it quite cheap.

Well, they don't have stems, so they just look like regular juice tumblers...which is what they are, I suppose, but I have tasked them to wine. I'll post a picture the next time I have some wine open. For prep bowl, I have these great heavy frosted plastic square ramekins from Muji. They stack nicely and don't take a lot of room. Muji is great for designing things with exactly the right size and shape for what you need it to do. I bought out their kitchenwares section when I lived in Japan.

Check out this topic on favourite Chinese cookbooks....the best one for you really depends on how you like to cook. A lot of people recommend Barbara Tropp's Modern Chinese cooking, but my eyes glaze over halfway through the recipes, they're so detailed. I haven't cooked anything from it yet. It does have excellent methodology for cutting and wok preparation and maintenance, though. I cook regularly from The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, since the recipes reflect the sort of ingredients I have regular access to. The more you become familiar with Asian ingredients, the more you'll be able to discern between Chinese/Korean/Japanese/Thai/Vietnamese and so on. Check out some books from your local library to see what you might like to cook, and check out our regional forums too - there's tons of great information here. So true! Do you find the prices cheaper there by much?

Where to start? How about: Sauces: Basics: a decent soy sauce - light/dark sesame oil rice vinegar Expansion Set: mirin oyster sauce cooking wine - sake and shaoxing peanut oil for frying fish sauce Specifics: doubanjiang (chili bean paste) Thai curry paste (red or green) gochujang (Korean chili paste) miso/doejang Black bean Taiwanese brands are generally good for Chinese products, Mae Ploy seems consistent for Thai paste, and Squid brand Thai fish sauce seems ubiquitous and non-offensive to most. There are lots of specific brand listed in those topics Chris has linked to. Play around and find what you like.

Yes! And to further procrastibake, ideally you'll choose a recipe that you're three ingredients short of, ingredients that can only be purchased by visits to three different locations. I usually poke the butter with a crap Nora Roberts novel in hand. Three torrid scenes later, the butter's mush - and so's my brain.

I used to eat it in Korea when they were the only alternative - after our Sbarro closed. I wouldn't say it was great pizza, but since it came with pepperoni and without sweet potato or mayonnaise, it was an improvement over the alternatives. But why a sweeter sauce? Is that to appeal to kids? Why not put ketchup on it and be done with it?

Oh, that's like - enabling- behaviour. Genius. Plus you get the heels of the bread as a reward if you actually complete the other task.

Urban dictionary defines procrastibaking as, With a stack of student essays, summaries, application forms and reference letters on my desk, along with a completely un-bought Christmas list from my husband, I started procrastibaking up a storm this weekend. The perfect candidate? Something incredibly time-consuming or labour-intensive, ideally that needs to be checked every five minutes once started as a way of staying away from the task that really needs doing. I chose to make shortbread -without a mixer. And with butter from fridge temperature. Although to fully procrastibake, it would have been okay to stand over and watch the butter come up to room-temperature, prodding it with a finger every thirty seconds. "Is it there yet? Nope. Not yet. Better wait." Nothing like hand-creaming hard butter to work off guilt (and the inevitable resultant calories). What do you make when you procrastibake? Confessions here, please.

Thanks! The salt was mixed in with sugar for a crunchy topping. Sharing was strictly a defensive mechanism for my waistline. I find I can make it through the holidays without any weight gain as long as I give away anything I have the urge to bake. I brought in a whole batch of World Peace cookies to work today, and they all disappeared too. Next up: mince pies and tourtiere. I just hope I can make decent pastry without a food processor.

D'oh! Just another reason to travel home, I guess. But freshness is an issue, and I wouldn't want to compromise that. Why isn't more good sake made internationally, I wonder?

I simply parboil because I want to save time and money. It's hard to explain to my landlady that I don't mind the power bills that come from leaving my oven on for an hour or so. Par-boiling happens to yield an interestingly-crusted potato, but I'd be just as happy doing it the other way as well.

In Asia, chicken thighs usually command a higher price than chicken breast meat. Every time I go home to Canada, I worry that people will have discovered thigh. Fortunately for me, breast still seems to be favoured there.

Oh, those cauliflower pickles are nothing short of beautiful. Are they a traditional sausage side dish? They're pickled in spirits?

My shortbread did manage to make it into the office today, where it was so well-received there's not a crumb left. Many thanks to Mr. Oliver - it was the best shortbread I've ever made; not the least bit dry, nor was it too floppy with butter. The lemon and salt pushed it over the edge into divine territory. Gilding the lily would have been to dip it into some Valrhona dark - maybe next time. My next bring-the-spirit-of-the-season project will be to make some world peace cookies.

Ooh, sparkling sake is always a treat. One of my husband's most frequent complaints is how hard it is to find nice sake outside of Japan, so it's nice to see some makers are making a push towards international sales. Any idea where in Hong Kong they're going to make their product available?

Cookies and home-made eggnog. The kind with two or three kinds of booze in it. I favour rum myself, but I've heard others like bourbon. The kids can pour.

I've moved so often in the last ten years I have the same sort of goals for my kitchenware as you. One thing I've done to minimize glassware - and this might be too extreme for you, if you drink a lot of wine - is use regular, small tumblers for wine service. I got mine at Muji, and they double as juice glasses and yogurt pots as needed. I saw this sort of thing at a restaurant once - lost in the mists of my memory now, and thought, "Why not?" None of the wine I have access to merits special treatment. And my husband doesn't break these at the rate he does regular wine glasses. Since I mainly cook Asian food, I have a small assortment of mini bowls that serve as pickle plates, dumpling-dip bowls, shabu-shabu bowls - I collect one or two of these wherever I go. They're remarkably flexible.

My husband grew up hating parsnips. His mum used to boil them and serve them with butter - Bunnicula carrots. I found some in their crisper once, cut them into matchsticks and roasted them in olive oil and butter. Not only did they eat them all, I caught him and his brother in the kitchen after, trying to peel the crispy ones stuck to the pan off. I nominate: lard.

I did this method for the first time the other day to save some time in my small oven. I had three or four things I wanted to roast, and I didn't have time to roast the potatoes as long as I'd like from scratch, so I cut and parboiled. Then I cooled them, tossed them in enough olive oil to burn a lamp off of, plus salt and pepper. They sat in that for a while while I was waiting for the chicken to finish, then when I pulled it out to sit, the potatoes went in. The nice thing is that I had slightly over-boiled the potatoes, so the edges were quite mealy - that soaked up the olive oil and made for a brittle, toast-like coating on the potatoes, different from the typical golden crust. Yeah, there were no leftovers.

I've just made a batch of shortbread to bring into work. I used a recipe that looked intriguing from Jamie Oliver. When I tasted the dough, I thought it needed something, so I added a lemon's worth of zest as per his recipe note. It still was tasting a bit flat, so I took a page out of Prince of Pastry's book and added a dusting of Hakata sea salt to the top.......nice. I doubt strongly this will make it into my office tomorrow.

I love mussels, but despite the abundance of every other sort of life, marine or otherwise, available in markets in Asia, I've never seen one here. Maybe I'm too far South? I always try to eat my fill when I'm back in Nova Scotia. In Vietnam, there's a great street dish called "Bun Oc" - in Hanoi they use "lake snails", whatever they might be, make a rich broth with them, and serve them in a bowl with rice vermicelli, broth, and all the soup fixings - cilantro, lime, etc. In my Chinese class the other night, we were going over flavours. She said that things like shrimp, abalone, and scallops have a flavour called "xiang". We went back and forth for a while on what it might be an English alternative until we settled somewhere near umami, although she was quite clear it was sea-based, and things like tomatoes or cheese were not xiang flavours. Can anyone shed more light on this? Do mollusks have an elusive sixth flavour of their own?

I'll be in Hong Kong in February, and I'm thinking I want to go on a bit of a char siu bao crawl. What are some likely candidates for stops on a pork bun crawl of this nature?

What a great article - I've been looking forward to a trip to Hangzhou sometime in January. This place will definitely be on my list to visit. I'm not sure about other restaurants, but organic produce is not unknown here. Suzhou even has an organic farm, the May Farm, that delivers vegetable boxes.