nakji

I've been trying to work this out this week, but since we shop at multiple places, I don't keep a running tally. I'd say we spend about $40 a week for staples, meat and some vegetables at Wal-mart. Then another $1-$2 a week at the wet market for vegetables. Another $5 for bread from the bakery, plus $20 for cheese and the like from the foreign foods store. Coffee is another $10, but I can't go without it. I'll call it $75 for two people for a week, not counting eating out once or twice.

That's a pretty genius method. Do you think it's possible to freeze pre-assembled individual apple crisps and bake them as needed? Would the apples suffer much, I wonder?

That's an excellent excuse. If PJ likes olives, they make excellent fillers to plug up any gaps in the lunch box. This? made me laugh out loud. Nevertheless, having systems like this are key bento strategy. But doesn't the maki get rubbery overnight?

I never used to own any cookbooks, because I move around so frequently, and books are expensive to ship. But then the odd booklet here and there started to slip in, and I heard about some great books I wanted to try via the forums here, such as Dorie Greenspan's Baking..., before I knew it I had a bit of a bookshelf of cookbooks started. I can still count them all, so that's keeping my freight costs down. The books I like the best are ones where the author has a clear voice that speaks to me and convinces me to try their recipes. Great pictures are nice, but I'm sold by a story.

Don't onions get stronger as they age? Where are you getting your onions from? It could be that they're older or being stored improperly. If you get stuck with a sharp one, soak thin slices in ice water for ten minutes or so, it'll leach out the bite.

I've known a lot of people, especially single people or people with small families, that do this. The theory is that cooking a too-small batch of rice in the cooker doesn't work as well as cooking a regular-sized batch. I've heard some people say they do it to save power, although I'm not sure how accurate that is - I guess the microwave for five minutes would draw less power than 20 minutes of the rice cooker.

I've often thought curries and soups taste better when you "cook" them, then cool them to room temperature, then bring them back up to a simmer again. It could just be my perception, but my Nanny always said a soup tasted too "fresh" if you had to serve it right away.

The only chili sauce I have on hand right now is a bottle of Vietnamese sri racha, and a tub of gochujang, but I don't either are appropriate mixes for cheese (or are they?), so I'll have to chase down a bottle of tabasco. In the meantime, I might add some dijon to help balance the cheese flavours. As for reheating - I'm staring down the rest of the pan for lunch, and yeah, it's not going to be as good as right out of the oven.

You too? I thought it was just the recipe I was using. My granola tastes great, but I'm not getting any big chunks, and I figured it had to be a binding or liquid problem. Is raw butter just what it sounds like...butter?

My Korean friends also swore by their pressure cookers for cooking rice - mixed or not. I tried it a couple of times before the seal on my old pressure cooker broke, and it worked a charm. 15 minutes, and the rice was on the table. I imagine it would help with the speed of brown rice, too.

Thanks for that, Kent! I'll add my findings: The xiao long bao I had at Crystal Jade were the first (of many, I hope) that I had, so it's hard for me to objectively rate how good they are other than to say the skins were sufficiently thin enough to make lifting them gently on to the spoon, before poking a hole and sucking out the broth, delicate business at best. My husband lost his broth to an overzealous pinch, and I laughed at him while guzzling mine. Obligatory pic: Special mention goes to their noodles, which had irregular edges that spoke to being handmade. Toothsome and tossed with pork, dark soy, and greens in perfect balance. My husband, who finds noodles "boring" unless they're pho, ate them, so. Hot, oily deliciousness. Turnip cakes had the most amazing skins - how do they do that? We had some other, less memorable meals in alleys and such, but we went to Lost Heaven for Yunanese food for our anniversary dinner, hoping for a bit of change in atmosphere. I's pretty scene-y, but the menu was filled with dishes I'd go back to try, and there was a wine list, which I appreciate. I expected it to be filled with ex-pats, what with the English name and all, but it wasn't. Heavy on the decor, with ladies in national dress at the front door as greeters, I nevertheless enjoyed to food. Lamb samosas with cumin, cilantro and a fruit sauce that I'm pretty sure wasn't mango, as I liked it. Scrumptious chicken I'll be making and claiming as my own invention. Crispy pan-seared chicken breast with a sauce of chopped cilantro, green chilis, ginger, garlic, spring onions in equal measure, with rich chicken broth poured over: A beef rendang-style dish. Bland and dry, sadly. Not one of their recommended beef dishes, but I wanted a stewed dish to complement the fried chicken one. I should have asked. Prolonged menu consultation seems the norm here, and I'll have to get more confident about that. Tamarind-broth vegetables with pork ribs. I ordered this as a vegetable dish, as the pork wasn't listed on the menu. In China, pork is a condiment like salt, I guess. Fabulous, anyway, and the broth was just the thing with steamed rice. All with a Clare Valley Reisling. I can't wait to get back to Shanghai and do some more eating.

Rice dope! That's what I call it. When I first moved to Korea, I was so ignorant, I thought people really liked to feed birds, and that's why they were all buying tub after tub of mixed grains. I know now that the "birdseed" is an excellent way to improve the taste and healthiness of white rice. The rice additives "bar" at my supermarket is now one of my favourite places. I like to mix red rice or millet in a 80:20 ratio, and have never worried about cooking times. I like beans in rice, but can never get the cooking times sorted out, although I understand modern rice cookers can deal with this. Occasionally I'll buy a pack of pre-mixed rice dope that can be dropped into the rice before cooking. The rice "bar", just to tantalize you, has: green soybeans millet some sort of corn flakes rolled oats barley mochi rice red rice dried corn adzuki beans big white beans kidney beans dried green peas And so on. Barley mixed with rice is great, but I've never enjoyed brown rice.

The flavours here sound intriguing, but when I think of an asian pear, I think of more of a textural element, and less of a flavour. In Korea, julienned nashi pear is used as a crispy garnish for cold noodle soup "mul naengmyeon". Have you thought of using the pear more texturally? Like in a cubed salsa-like garnish, maybe mixed with grated ginger, to drop on the top before serving?

This was on the menu tonight, and I made my standard pan, which uses a bechamel with a mix of old cheddar and parmesan, buttered breadcrumbs and macaroni. I didn't have any one hand, so I subbed in ditalini, which worked even better, I thought, at maintaining cube integrity after I cut it out of the pan than regular mac. I don't know why, but in my head, mac and cheese has to come out of the pan in a square, and hold like that, or it's just not a success. My husband asked me where I'd gotten the recipe, which made me stop and think - I don't use one, and haven't since I started making it as a kid. I don't know when the idea of mac and cheese made with bechamel came into my head, or why it stayed there, but that's all I've ever made.I'll have to use the trick of hot sauce next time - are we talking tabasco here? I served mine with sauteed green beans and a nice chardonnay.

What kind of picky eater are we talking about? Because rogan josh converted me to lamb, and I think that might technically fall under the "lamb stew" heading. But if said picky eater doesn't like "spicy" things, it might not help.

Italians eat sweets for breakfast, too, don't they? Biscuits and the like? That seems like an excellent thing to get away with if you can. I like sweet and salty equally, but savoury tends to set me up better for the day. A breakfast of blueberry muffins leaves me starving by ten. Sweet breakfasts like bread-type things - muffins, pastry, boxed cereal - seem to all win in the prep-time arena, though, they're faster compared to items like a fry-up, pho or congee. You need real infrastructure in the morning to get a bowl of congee or pho first thing. I wish I had some more fast savoury options - the only thing that comes to mind is an omelette or a fried egg. Or buttered toast. There are some dumpling places on my street, but I'm never organized to get in the queue early enough. I've been making my own granola, which I pack with nuts- that helps on the protein front. It's also fast, and portable if I'm running late.

Wait...is there a difference between an apple crumble and an apple crisp? I thought it was just a tomato/tomato thing. What distinguishes the two, to your minds? Is it only the oats that are different? I like a bit of cheddar cheese with my apple baked goods, but I've never thought of actually grating it into the baked goods themselves.

Pancakes. But they must have a crispy ring around the edges to best maintain the butter/maple syrup topping. This should always flow lightly over the top, and never sink into the pancake, rendering it soggy. My husband is a French toast man all the way, so it's really a wonder how we've managed to keep our marriage going this long.

Yesterday I wanted to make an apple crisp to celebrate the start of the fall weather in my neighbourhood. It's not something I've made since living with my parents, where the Purity cookbook ruled for basics like this. I dug out my "basics" cookbook, which is Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" and he was suggesting heretical ingredients (to me) like nuts and coconut. Over in this topic, some Canadians were talking about putting cheese in their apple crisp. That really blew my mind. Cheese. I can only conclude that, true to its name, the Purity cookbook is pretty minimalist with its oat-flour-butter-brown sugar topping, and that I have been limiting myself in apple crisp opportunities. What do you put in your topping, and what kind of apples do you favour underneath?

I find I can communicate reasonably well, and am understood using standard pinyin pronunciation of Mandarin. My point is, I guess, that if you don't need the proper tones, having tones won't interfere with your pronunciation any less than not having them. And if you are trying to speak Mandarin correctly, they make it possible to communicate accurately. Surely I'm not the only person in China using English-language Chinese cook books to try and cook local dishes, while studying the language? There are many flaws with pinyin, I'm sure, but it's the romanisation system we've got - why not use it, rather than some random version of the publisher's choosing? I could argue that the accents on French aren't useful to anyone who hasn't studied French, or may interfere with their pronunciation, but a serious French cookbook would still include them. For those who can speak it, and do know what they mean. An excellent suggestion; however, the publisher has chosen to use traditional characters to "illustrate" the recipes, rather than the simplified versions common to mainland China. In a book about mainland China. Many people would recognize both, I suppose, but my argument is that if there's a system to make a language available to non-native speakers, why don't we expect it to be used in a cookbook about that cuisine? All of that being said, I do quite enjoy the recipes. Last week I tried the farmhouse stir-fried pork with green peppers, p. 85. The green peppers at my local market are quite thin-skinned and have mild heat, and fried up to a nostril-twitching crackle. I didn't have pork belly on hand for the two kinds of pork, so I subbed in smoked pork instead. The smoke and heat made for a great dish, and it wasn't more than twenty minutes from cleaver to table. This will go into my rotation of pork fried with ______ dishes, which I usually hit once a week or so.

I made some granola this week, using Alton Brown's recipe as a base. I left out the coconut, because I couldn't find any, and replaced it instead with ground walnuts and crushed banana chips, for a banana-bread style flavour. Now once I start making my own yogurt, I'll have some decent breakfast food stocked up. But I've noticed a lot of other recipes on-line require wheat germ or milk powder - what do these ingredients add to the end product? Are they binding agents, or do they add flavour?

Red-handled kitchen scissors are standard equipment in most Korean kitchens, and they're used for cutting bulgogi or galbi as it cooks, cutting naengmyeon or japchae noodles into edible portions, divvying up heads of standard kimchi into chopstickable pieces or nori into similar. They're now standard equipment in my kitchen, and any kitchen I work in, as I always bring a set to family members. I also use them for cutting quesadillas, but almost never use them for chicken (I use my cleaver) or herbs (a knife).

What about active cooking time? For example, if you're making an omelette, or pasta, you're right there at the stove the whole time. So it's a full thirty minutes of work. But let's say you're making stew - well, it might be about 15 minutes of actual prep time, but another two or three hours of cooking time where the cook is not actively engaged. Does that count?

Me, too! I cannot have an opened jar of Nutella in the house and not wake up to eat a spoonful, or two... It's a shame really. They have made their product so good that I do not buy it because I can't afford the calories. Rhonda I have only ever bought one bottle of this, but had to give it up immediately after. I left the bottle in the fridge, and then practically ate the whole bottle in one sitting by carving hunks of it off while sitting in front of the TV, slouching towards diabetes.

I have some young, thin bamboo shoots that I'd like to incorporate into a Thai curry. It seems the consensus here is that they don't need to be blanched, just peeled to prep them. How much peel should I think about taking off? The ones I have are about an inch in diameter, no more.