KennethT

Last night I cooked chicken thighs in a master stock, recently refreshed with garlic, ginger and green onion... These thighs will be featured in a Hainanese chicken rice later this week. The stock that the chicken was cooked in will be boiled briefly and then have the impurities strained, and will go back into the master stock container and refrozen for future use... but some of the original stock was watered down a bit and will be turned into the chicken rice.

Jeez @FeChef - no need to be snippy.... OP was asking if the water would prevent the bones from developing a grilled flavor. The OP did not say that it was not wanted, just if the water would prevent it.

What do the sweet potato shoots taste like? I've seen them in my local Korean/Asian store and have been curious, but not curious enough to take the plunge without hearing what someone else thinks!

So I'm prepping to make mapo tofu, and one of the ingredients is fermented black beans. I haven't opened the package yet, but they look like they're preserved in salt. Do they need rinsing or soaking before chopping them up?

Right - gai lan is called "Chinese Broccoli" sometimes in the USA... also, keep in mind that gailan is the Cantonese for Brassica oleracea var. alboglabra (from Wikipedia). The stems are much thicker and hardier than what has been pictured above so far.

@liuzhou Very true... but I was also comparing the price of the cai hua to the spinach... it's almost half the price.

wow that cai hua is cheap! It's like $0.60 per pound!

Just make sure you wash anything you pick in the park - who knows how many dogs could have peed on that chrysanthemum!

@shain Sorry to hear about not feeling well.... I've been there. Do you know what those berries were? The first ones look almost like hops (not a berry)...

Nuts will absorb water, regardless of how well roasted, I would think. I think they should be coated with some kind of moisture barrier (cocoa butter?) before putting in anything other than chocolate, which is basically fat with solid particles suspended.

It's labeled that way here too, depending on the store. Some call it baby bok choi, others Shanghai bok choi...

@liuzhou This variability of nomenclature reminds me of something that drove me crazy in Singapore - there was a vegetable that I loved that was served everywhere, called "baby gai lan" - but it didn't look anything like any type of gai lan I've ever seen. And doing any kind of search for it brings up nothing even close - yet every place we went to, from hole in the wall dive to hawker center to restaurant all called it the same name, and when it was served, it was always the same thing! Maddening! ETA: this is a photo of the elusive "baby kailan"... ETA (again).. another photo of the baby kailan, in a different place:

Then again, a search with Mr. Google shows many different images for xiao bai cai - some look like what I posted above, and some look like this, which looks just like yours:

This is what I typically see labeled as baby bok choi:

@liuzhou Looks great, as usual. That baby bok choi doesn't look like how I'm used to seeing it - the stems seem too narrow. It looks sort of like a baby yu choi. I'd love to know more about this.

Lan Zhou Hand Pulled Noodles and Dumpling. They're on Bowery about a block south of Canal. They used to be on East Broadway in a much smaller space, but have moved maybe a year ago to the current location. There's a window in the back of the dining room where you can watch the guy pulling a huge skein of noodles... didn't get a photo of it though. The dumplings are amazing, and the noodles had great texture, but I thought the broth was under seasoned - but that's easily rectified by the jar of homemade chili oil, and bottles of black vinegar and soy sauce on each table...

Finally made it down to Chinatown to get some specialty ingredients and stopped off for lunch. This place is known for their hand pulled noodles and their dumplings. The dumplings were so good that I got a bag of them to take home.

@CantCookStillTry Thai curries can be very runny - it depends on how much (if any) coconut cream you use.

Sometimes people want a dark stock. Beef stocks typically have the bones/veg roasted prior to simmering. You can also do it for a dark chicken stock.

Whoops - I misread the OP - I thought the OPer was trying to roast bones and use water in the pan (I assumed the bones were on a rack above the water) to keep the drippings from sticking to the pan...

@liuzhou Sorry for the question - I didn't realize that shepherd's purse was an ingredient! I had never heard of it before...

I agree - I think you can get good browning when roasting above a pan of water. The water won't be boiling in the oven - hot air in an oven does not have nearly good enough heat transfer capability to have a pan of water boil... it will increase the humidity in the oven though. I recently saw a video online where someone was making Char Siu in a home oven - and the pieces were being roasted on a rack over some water in the pan. The char siu got nicely browned - it looked perfect.

Your photos are fantastic - they are so good that Georgia may go on the travel list! Thanks for all this!

What's the filling in the wontons? Do you make them, or are they available for purchase (uncooked)?

It is sometimes recommended to roast things on a rack above a little water so that the drippings (mostly fat) don't burn on the sheet pan below it. I don't know how useful it would be for bones since there isn't much meat or fat on them, unless you're roasting a duck or goose carcass, or a really fatty cut of pork.