Habeas Brulee

I collect them in my freezer until I am in the mood to make shrimp stock. (Which I usually use as a base for shrimp chowder. Yum!)

Phaelon - where? I want them, too!

I have a bunch of curry leaves left over from making butter prawns last night. I don't want to do one of the same dishes I always use curry leaves for - I want to try something new! So, what are your favorite recipes that call for curry leaves?

My wok was originally non-stick, back when my partner first bought it (long before we started dating or moved in together). The non-stick coating peeled off over time, and was basically gone by the time it entered my kitchen. I scrubbed off the rust and nastiness that was left, and set about re-seasoning the no-longer-non-stick wok myself. It's my project to keep this thing alive and make a good, useful tool out of it. Sure, a new wok would be cheap enough to buy, but I feel so much better putting in the work to reclaim the old one. It's developing a good layer of seasoning, and it works beautifully. So, point being, doesn't matter what sort of wok you get, really. If I could reclaim this old wreck and work well with it, you can work well with just about anything. I swear, I coddle this wok like a baby, feeding it fats and wiping it clean and taking extra care with it. It's such a weirdly pleasurable project.

Dejah, thanks for posting photos of the arrowroot. I've seen those in markets, but I never knew what they were.

I really love seeing your interpretations of recipes I've posted. And all the inspiration! Dejah, what a great find! I've never cooked pork belly, but looking at the photos here, now I want to. The latest Chinese food we've made at home was Sweet and Sour Lotus Root. As usual, more information, including the recipe, is available at my blog, here.

I made the Fall-Apart Lamb Shanks with Almond-Chocolate Picada. We were way too hungry for me to take photos before eating them, though. I thought they were great! We tweaked the recipe just a bit: extra leaks, extra cocoa, and, given the contents of our pantry, we substituted almond meal and extract instead of grinding blanched almonds. The sauce was rich and flavorful, the meat tender, and the last step of baking the meat in the finished sauce really did the trick. Served with some stir-fried chard for a quick 'n easy green, it made for a wonderful dinner.

Slow-roasted eggs made following a recipe from this book. They were beautiful, and they did have a mild smoky flavor after all that slow cooking. It wasn't really worth it to me (just a matter of personal taste), but it was there as advertised in the recipe.

Some of my favorites are: Smitten Kitchen Homesick Texan A Muffin Story Bon Appegeek Bron Marshall Cook & Eat Hungry in Hogtown Hooked on Heat Jumbo Empanadas Kuidaore La Tartine Gourmande Nordljus Rasa Malaysia Roots and Grubs Still Life With... Tigers & Strawberries And of course I also like my own food blog: Habeas Brûlée

Hey, I know this is off-topic for this thread, but I really want to get the opinion of the 'regulars' here - I'm a lawyer and a foodie living in NYC. I was thinking of taking a class to learn Chinese, both to help with my shopping and restaurant ordering in Chinatown, and to communicate with Chinese immigrants who don't speak much English when doing pro bono legal work. My very vague understanding is that Mandarin is the most common dialect in China, but Cantonese is more common in Chinatowns in the U.S. Which should I study, and why? (I'm sorry, I'm sorry for going off-topic! Never again, I promise! But there was some discussion about language upthread...)

I had a calendar made with some of my food photography and recipes, and it's hanging on my wall now.

That is interesting. I'm a New Yorker. My father was born here, too - his family came over from the Ukraine in 1902. My mother was born in Israel, and her parents were born in Hungary. As a New Yorker, I've been eating food from all sorts of cuisines all my life. I care about texture a lot. In fact, I'd say that most of my food issues relate to texture rather than taste, though there are definitely a few flavors that I dislike, too. I've actually read that people with autism spectrum disorders are more sensitive to texture in foods and more likely to dislike foods because of their texture. Maybe Westerners are more likely to be slightly autism spectrum? (Wildly theorizing with absolutely no real evidence or scientific basis. Please do not take too seriously.)

This is an adaptation of Grace Young's recipe for Sichuan Dry-Fried String Beans. Since my partner and I made it with tons more ground pork, and also bacon grease for added flavor, on my blog I'm calling it Stir-Fried String Beans with Pork and Pork. The recipe and description are available here.

I am dying for a bowl of that soup right now! Tepee, I am so impressed by both your cooking and your photography.

Oh, fantastic! I'm glad you enjoyed them. Even blurry, they look like they came out great.

Thanks, Ben. That's a hell of a compliment. aznsailorboi, sheetz: Thanks for the welcome! Tepee: Glad you like! I just went over to look at your cake gallery, and wow, those are beautiful. Ham sui gok are dumplings with a thick glutinous rice dough outside, and a savory pork (and often mushroom, sigh) filling inside. They are deep-fried. They are also utterly delicious, and if I ever manage to make them properly at home, I will be just about the happiest person on the planet.

Their mole definitely was smooth, and certainly flavorful. So if that burned taste is intentional, could be that they're doing things well after all.

It's not? I first discovered how much I like ham sui gok when I had it at Ping's Seafood on Mott St! I've only ever had it sweet, I think of it as pork mocchi, almost. I just wish it didn't have mushrooms in it. My partner and I tried making it at home once from some internet recipe, but it totally failed. Does anyone here have a good recipe for ham sui gok?

This thread is making me drool. You guys are amazing! I'm not Chinese, but I'm Jewish and from New York, so that's close enough, right? And I do like to cook Chinese food pretty often. A few nights ago, I made these stewed garlicky black bean spare ribs from Barbara Tropp's The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking. The full description of what they were like and the recipe are up on my blog, here.

All right, here's the first review. They've only been open for a few days, and they're obviously still trying to get on their feet. The guy (waiter? manager? everything?) was explaining to everyone who called or came in that new menus will be printed shortly. There were a lot of things on the menu they just didn't have in yet. Like grasshoppers. This made me very sad. I wanted to try grasshoppers! But he did reassure me that the grasshoppers are on their way, and once they arrive he will be happy to serve me some without the guac (which I never like), and said, "we'll have fun watching you munch on them." Fantastic! Yesterday was sort of the first day of winter, so they seemed to be getting a lot of delivery orders, but the restaurant itself was almost empty. The delivery guy isn't on top of things yet, either; I had to give him directions to one place on his way out. Onto the actual food. We tried one appetizer, two mains, and three desserts. The shrimp ceviche was actually very nice. Just hot enough for me, sweet, heavy on the lime juice, and flavorful. The stewed pork with mole negro was less nice. For some reason I expected the pork to be more tender than it actually was (well, that's what 'stewed' usually means to me). I really enjoyed the way the plaintains came through as a primary flavor note in the mole, but overall, the mole tasted sort of burned to me. To be fair, I'm no expert on Oaxacan food, and it is entirely possible that this was a matter of my palate and the cuisine rather than this particular restaurant's execution of the dish. I hope someone who is more familiar with the cuisine goes to check it out and then reports back here, so I can find out if it was me or them that was the problem. The chiles y chocolate shrimp were better. They, too, tasted a bit too charred to me, but I liked the flavor and the heat of them. Still, nothing special from either of the mains. Then came the desserts. The tres leches cake was, well, cake. It looked like a plain white cake with buttercream frosting like you'd see at a kid's birthday party, and it tasted like one, too. It did absolutely nothing for me. The chocolate raisin tamales were more interesting. I enjoyed the bitterness of the chocolate, though I wish the masa had been sweeter to contrast with it. The traditional flan was fantastic. Really, the best flan I've had in a very long time. I usually find flan a bit too jello-ish, but this time, it was so utterly creamy and lovely that I would drop in just to order it again.

I passed by and noticed it a few nights ago. The menu looks really good. I have plans to go there for dinner tonight, so I'll update you all here later this evening.

I was there for lunch on January 2nd and thought the ribs were actually very good. Flavor was nice, meat was properly melting off the bones, and service was excellent - of course, it was lunchtime and shortly after NYE, so we were the only ones there.

I just got my first digital SLR, the Canon 30D. I've never used an SLR before - I'm graduating from the Canon S400, which is an old point and shoot. This is my favorite of the few food photos I took with it the night it arrived, taken with the Canon 100mm/f2.8 Macro lens: (You can see the larger version on Flickr and read about the pear liquor at my blog.) Point being, for anyone considering going for the Canon 30D, this is an example of what it can do. I'm thrilled with it.

Thank you for that recommendation! Looks like Dhaka is just a few blocks from where I work, so I'll certainly check it out during lunch sometime. It'd be nice to find another good lunch spot around here.

Grapefruit! In honor of almond grapefruit curd.