Ruth

Two that come imm ediately to my mind are the Hong Kong Flower Lounge, near the San Francisco airport and Pings Seafood in New York

My absolute favorite bean curd dish is Ma po dofu (bean curd with pork, black beans, chilis and Sichuan peppercorns). I also love home style bean curd where it is cubed and sautéed crisp before being combined with the pork and chiles. As for buying it, there is a great store on the corner of Grand and Bowery in Manhattan's Chinatown. Until recently they used to sell it (either soft or firm) straight out of the tub and it was always very fresh. I suppose the food police caught up with them and now it's packaged and sold inside - which is fine, but as it has no preservatives, I would like to see them date their packages. Ruth Friedman

I always have a bunch of flowering chives in the fridge. To be honest I use them not only in Chinese stir fries but raw and finely chopped as a garnish in innumerable dishes. They have a so much more character than the wimpy chives of Western cuisines.

When I was taking classes at the China Institute years ago our teacher, Florence Lin, used to insist on a pinch of msg in every dish. We were all horrified! Now I am tempted to try it again. As for citric acid, I too have a couple of little packages in the closet whiich I use to preserve the color of puréed parsley, basil etc. I have also combined it with sugar to coat candied citrus zest. Thank you Jaz for suggesting other uses. Great article.

Lard not shortening. It makes all the difference

I think it is definitely the star anise that gives it that unique "pho" flavor

I bought bamboo shoots this morning, also on eighth avenue in Brooklyn, corner of 58th Street. I always test them after five minutes of blanching and they usually take about 15 minutes. This morning I trimmed and cut them in 1/4 inch slices and they were perfect after 5 minutes. I plan to make a simple stir fry with snow peas and mushrooms and season with garlic and ginger, perhaps just a touch of soy. It would be a crime to smother the fresh bamboo with too much soy sauce as we see this quality so rarely. The same market now has beautiful Dungeness crabs at $3.99 per lb. Mine were close to 2 1/2 lbs each. They keep the large ones in a separate tub under the fish counter and you have to stress that you want the big ones. They are very much alive and kicking.

I am with Mogsob. It is beyond me why anyone would go to a restaurant, especially one with a chef who is creative and talented, to order a salad. That said, I signed up for a class with Wylie Dufresne several weeks ago. The class will be in June and I shall wait till then before trying WD50. His cooking at 71 Clinton Fresh was a delight but the NYT article has made me a little wary. Apparently the current chef at 71 Clinton is doing a superb job and I plan to try it soon.

The Bangkok market on Mosco Street and the market on Bayard have been a wonderful source for Thai ingredients for years but I did not know that the Bangkok market is selling fresh curry pastes. That's wonderful. I agree with Mamster.Mae Ploy red and green curry pastes are great products. I use them to add zip to sauces that have nothing to do with Thai cuisine as well as for tradional curries.

On the question of dried shiitake do you buy the pale or the dark. Traditionally the large pale shiitake are the most valued and by far the most expensive but ,after long trial and error, I have decided that the darker the mushroom the more intense the flavor. Eddie have you come to a similar conclusion?

The problem is the "high heat". You wok must really get very very hot for it to get properly seasoned. If you do not have hight BTU take it to a friend's stove try leaving it for 15-20 minutes on maximum heat setting' No point in trying to season a stainless steel wok. It cannot be done. If it is very hot and well greased your food should not stick.

True shrimp with lobster sauce is nothing more nor less than shrimp with black bean sauce. Lobster , in Cantonese cuisine, is traditionally served with black bean sauce which is often renamed "lobster sauce".

On the question of dried shiitake do you buy the pale or the dark. Traditionally the large pale shiitake are the most valued and by far the most expensive but ,after long trial and error, I have decided that the darker the mushroom the more intense the flavor. Eddie have you come to a similar conclusion?

Just a few dried scallops soaked and chopped add real oomph to the fresh

Be extravagant. Use top quality lump crabmeat and no bread or mayonnaise Purée four large scallops. Season with the chopped zest of 1-2 lemons, chopped scallions, curry powder and s&p to taste. Fold in the crabmeat (1 container = 14oz). Shape and chill. Coat with flour, eggwash and panko just before sautéeing, preferably in curry oil. I served these as an appetiser for so many dinners that I finally grew bored. I plated them with citrus gastrique and dotted the edge of the plate with either wasabi oil or wasabi tobiko. This looked beautiful and offset the richness of the crab. Ruth Friedman

Ariane Daguin's "D'Artagnan's Glorious Game Cookbook" is quite helpful. There is a section on most game meats currently available in the US with notes on best cooking methods etc and recipes from well-known chefs. Of course, most of what we get here is not true game but farm-raised, a pale substitute. To be able to cook wild game you will have to shoot it yourself or make friends with a hunter. The cooking methods would be basically the same but with longer marination. I believe venison and hare, imported from Scotland ,is available in season but have not tried it.

You've lost me with the cider. Why not a glass of zinfandel or syrah?

My husband, a surgeon, is fascinated by knives, so we have a pretty large collection, some from Turkey, Spain (far too heavy a handle), a new cleaver we just bought in Beijing, plus Wusthof, Global, Mac and Kyocera ceramic. I love the Kyocera for slicing and light weight chopping and the Global and Mac for tougher work. Not being able to suffer blunt knives I use a diamond steel every day for the Global and Mac knives and confess to resorting to the electric sharpener from time to time. This will probably shorten the life of my knives but I think they will nonetheless outlive me!

I do something very similar to Jimmyo's recipe and add a spoonful of Thaik red curry paste to the mix

This is a tough one. I have several hundred cook books and tend to go through phases, using one batch for a few weeks and then relinquishing them for another batch. I use cook books to get ideas and learn techniques more than to follow entire recipes and love chefs' books. My current favorites include: Keller's "The French Laundry Cookbook"; Charlie Palmer's "Great American Food" (a permanent favorite); Judy Rodgers' "Zuni Café"; Hira Sone's "Terra";"Testsuya"; Jean-Georges' "Cooking at Home with a Four Star chef" and "Simple to Spectacular"; Ken Hom's "Fragrant Harbour Taste" and Ming Tsai's "Blue Ginger", a favorite since publication. I also love to use recipes from Art Culinaire, Saveur and, yes, Cook's Illustrated, because everything they publish is so well tested. If anyone were to ask me to name my most disappointing cookbook it would be Gray Kunz's "The Elements of Taste". I don't know what happened to him. Ruth Friedman

This is becoming a dizzying debate. Eddie is right on the mark when he lauds the quality of the ingredients used in the better Chinese restaurants. Anyone who knows me also knows that I am ready to go uptown, downtown, east side and west side, plus Queens and Brooklyn, sometimes on a single day, to find the best quality ingredients. I haunt the Union Square greenmarket in the summer and fall but I still do more than half my shopping at Chinese markets. In my view there is no better poultry or foie gras than at Bo Bo's (Williamsburg). I am always able to find fresh fruit and vegetables (including young garlic when in season) in Chinatown. Many Chinese markets sell live fish and the fish served, for example, at Ping's on Mott Street is always of superb quality. Jean-Georges may be using Niman ranch pork but the meat was dried out so perhaps the technique is the most important factor! I think what I would have liked to see at 66 was something more along the lines of what Ming Tsai does in Wellesley, Ma. Ming Tsai approaches western food from a Chinese angle. If Jean-Georges were to do the same in reverse I think his food would be far more interesting.

We did not know what to expect last night when we took advantage of a last minute cancellation to have dinner at 66.Obviously we were not going to see traditional Chinese dishes. Would Jean-Georges be giving these traditional dishes just a little tweek or trying to revolutionize a 5000 year-old cuisine? We sampled six dishes and found them a mixed bag. We started with a "hot and sour soup". This was an excelllent soup in its own right - a powerful clear, slightly sour broth, redolent with star anise and thick with mushrooms and fresh hearts of palm. Yet it was in no way evocative of the true viscous hot and sour. Nor did it have any heat. A quick glance at the other diners told us why! The Shanghai pork soup dumplings which followed were an attempt at the traditional. They were, however, very dry and we had had far more delicate wrappers, and more flavorful soup and filling not only in Shanghai but at New York Chinatown Shanghai style restaurants. Crispy bean curd was actually a tempura and would have been good had it not been served with an overly sweet dipping sauce. Excessive sweetness was a pervasive problem with sauces served with the meats too. Crisp chicken had a beautifully lacquered skin and the meat was moist - although we wished the cinnamon could have been omitted from the salt and pepper seasoning. The crisp pig did indeed have a nicely crunchy skin but the meat was dried out. The star of the evening was the dish of Tan Tan (read Dan Dan) noodles although I would attribute this to our insistence that our waiter ask the chef to spice it up for us. There was far more broth than in the traditional Sichuan version, but it was less oily and had a deliciously strong peanut flavor. If only Jean-Georges had chosen the same approach for everything on his menu we would have given it an A+. Ruth Friedman

I love to use chefs' recipes even though I often substitute ingredients and modify the recipes in other ways. I rarely make the same dish twice - unless I am rehearsing for a dinner party. For the past fifteen years I have been building a recipe index on my computer. 90% of the 11,000 recipes are from chef's books or the Great Chefs TV series and other internet sources. I just key in two or three of the ingredients I have on hand and generally come up with several options. It's a lot of fun and often a challenge.

Sweet and sour pork can be great when well prepared but I would never order it in a restaurant outside HK or China. Please no pineapple and no canned bamboo shoots.

Yuk Ruth Friedman