Field trip: Great Wall Supermarket

I'm spoiled since I have a good Asian market near where I live (Asian Food Market in Plainsboro), but there are other Asian markets in the central Jersey area. Today, on a whim, I decided to cruise up Rt. 27 to Great Wall Supermarket in Franklin Park, along one of the mall-ier stretches of the Lincoln Highway. I knew (since I was going to be there on a Saturday morning), that it was likely to be crowded, but did not let that dissuade me, since there are a number of items that the local Asian market has stopped carrying, and I was hoping to find an alternate source (short of going the internet route).

For starters, Great Wall was bigger, much bigger than my local market, the size of a great big supermarket like Superfresh or Stop and Shop (or, indeed, McCaffrey's in West Windsor). Being bigger, it was also jammed with way more people. The checkout line moved surprisingly quickly, however. It was pretty overwhelming, though, and since the layout was different than the local market's, I probably missed some things. Most notably, the local market has specialty sections for Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Filipino and Indian food items, while Great Wall does not break these items out the same way (so, rather than looking for Japanese shoyu in the Japanese aisle, you need to find the Japanese section of the general "seasonings" aisle). It was kind of like visiting a parallel universe where nothing is quite where you expect it to be, but that's more a factor of how imprinted I am on the local market than Great Wall's fault. I also didn't notice any specifically Indian ingredients at Great Wall (such as Maya spices, which I'm used to seeing at the local Asian market, which is next door to a little Indian grocery store).

Digression: it turns out that that little Indian grocery store, Desi Corner, had its moment of blogging stardom in this post from John and Lisa Are Eating in South Jersey.

I'll need to go back during a less crowded time to explore in a more leisurely fashion, but I found some Lan Chi sauces (which the local market no longer stocks) and Mizkan honteri mirin (my latest attempt at satisfying my mirin cooking needs without buying aji-mirin or sugaring up some drinking sake). On the other hand, I found no yuzu juice, nor Shirakata-Denshiro Soten tea (and, although I got Lan Chi's Soy Bean Sauce with Chilli, their Barbecue Sauce was nowhere to be found). The lunch counter looked intriguing (it even had an eat-in section with seating), but that will have to wait for another visit. I picked up a couple of pounds of pork shoulder that was absurdly cheap and threw it into the freezer when I got home. I also got a big hunk of ginger root, some fresh mushrooms and some Bull-Dog Worcestershire sauce (since I've been thinking that it's about time to check out the Bull-Dog mystique: heck, you can even be their fan on Facebook!).

Also noted for future reference were Pho 99 (NJ SPICE review), in the same mall as Great Wall, and a little roadside burrito joint on the west side of Rt. 1 south of New Rd.

Here are some Yelp reviews (none by me) of the Asian markets mentioned in this post: 

Great Wall in Franklin Park here.

Plainsboro Asian Food Market here.

Plus Great Wall (in Chinese) and Asian Food Market's own sites (both are chains).

Summer vacation?

It's a weird thing about being a grad student; you get out of school for the summer and then discover that you need to catch up on all of the things you didn't do over the school year. Like food blogging!

Our story so far...well, you can read the rest of the blog for that. I love cooking Asian food. When I started this blog, I had a lot to learn about that. Now, I still have a lot to learn (since I did not grow up with this food being cooked in my own house), but there is a range of dishes from various Asian cuisines that have become easy for me to cook. In the meantime, I've branched out and started exploring various western cuisines. Also in the meantime, the food blogging community has grown by leaps and bounds and I despair of ever being able to keep up with it the way I did (geezer alert) back in 2004.

That is, when I have time to cook. Temping a full-time job and studying for classes on the side makes a pretty grueling schedule, even without the inevitable chores or need for some sleep. It is all too easy to go for easy food, both in the office and at school. If I had my druthers, I'd prefer to take my time making some good home-cooked food, but such a busy schedule puts a premium on time, too. So the good food gets shut out more often than I would like.

A day in the life: I'm making Chinese chicken stock today, since I've accumulated a good batch of chicken bones from a master sauce chicken (along with some chicken backs from the Pennsylvania Dutch farmers market). Today is a day off, so I have the luxury of relaxing and catching up on non-work things. My garden is full of sweet basil plants from a local farm, along with a patio tomato plant, some lettuce, rosemary, and the apple mint and spearmint that have been with me from day one of this blog, almost. I've been in a salad mood lately; just romaine and tomatoes from the supermarket with some low-fat ginger dressing from a  company whose face is a recently-deceased movie star. I love this dressing, which I discovered while having dinner with The Cruise Director and The Fireman recently. It is almost as gingery and sharp as the wonderful dressing I used to get at Dosanko in Midtown NYC, though it is brown, not the day-glo orange of the Dosanko dressing.

I'll leave you with a couple of items I've noticed today: a great idea to use leftover pasta sauce to make bruschetta from Tigers and Strawberries, and a warning about a major outbreak of late blight that I found via Bug Girl on Twitter.

Cooking disaster: fresh lo mein noodles

It's a long story, a long and incoherent story. You really don't need to know all of it. Suffice it to say, last night I tried cooking a dish with fresh lo mein noodles. The dish, coincidentally enough, was pork lo mein.

My main problem, probably, was that I've never cooked with fresh pasta before (though I love pasta and cook it often). Having obtained a likely-looking package of noodles labeled lo mein from the refrigerator case of the Asian supermarket, I proceeded to treat them as I would any package of dried noodles: toss into boiling water and move on with the rest of the dish.

What went into the boiling water was a chunk of relatively firm, brownish, thin noodles. What came out was something akin to an omelette gone horribly wrong; eggy, sticky, with threads of (I guess egg) that brought mozzarella cheese to mind. Not good. Very not good. Not in flavor, so much, but in consistency.

I tried to delude myself that if I had spritzed the noodles with cold water while they were sitting in the colander, all would be well. As I worked on the leftovers today at lunch, I became more skeptical about that. The pork was good (if still a little tough, but that's another post). The shiitake mushrooms and scallions were good (though maybe I'd been a little too enthusiastic on the amount of the scallions). But the gluey disaster that had been the noodles kept giving. Not inedible, just very sticky and not what one would expect from any stripe of pasta or noodles.

Clearly, working with fresh pasta (should I attempt to do it again) will be a work in progress.

Stew weather

Winter Solstice arrived today first thing in the morning, but winter has been making itself known for several weeks in the northeast already. This weekend has featured rain, sleet and snow, plus slush, ice and standing water on roadways. Ick. It was the perfect weekend to make a pot of stew.

Stew is a forgiving dish. I don't think I've ever made it the same way twice. This time, this is how I did it.

Take some cubed beef chuck (I bought about a pound from the local high-end supermarket) and brown it in a pot in some oil (I used vegetable oil but in retrospect, olive oil wouldn't have been bad, either). Add one large sliced onion, two chopped potatoes and two chopped carrots, two cups of vegetarian broth (I used The Spice Hunter's "Clear Seasoned Stock" mix), a dash of shoyu (a packet left over from some takeout sushi), a bay leaf, about a tablespoon of tomato paste, and several dashes of Worcestershire sauce and Outerbridge's pepper sherry. Season with salt and cracked black pepper, bring to a boil, cover and let simmer until, well, whenever. I think my stew went between an hour and a half and two hours before the beef cubes I fished out for tasting purposes were suitably tender (and I probably could have let it go longer). The key is to keep checking the stew until it suits your taste.

At the end, I had tender meat and veggies, plus a lot of tasty juices; when I have some of the leftovers today, I'll probably serve it over rice (the better to soak up the juice). You could also use bread to mop up. The said juices were lighter than I expect, with a more complex flavor; I bet adding some sliced ginger would clarify and brighten the flavor even more.

Roast chicken, veggies and ginger

It's still a few days away from Thanksgiving, but this weekend I decided to roast a chicken anyway. It was a 4 1/2 pound chicken (about 1 1/2 pounds more than I normally roast); I followed Mark Bittman's recipe from How to Cook Everything. Rather than using a rack, I piled the chicken on top of a bed of chopped potato and carrot chunks, plus a few unpeeled garlic cloves and some sliced ginger (a couple of inches worth of ginger, sliced thin); also two cups of homemade chicken stock to keep everything from burning.

The ginger was a last-minute inspiration, but it worked great. It gave a certain zing and clarity to the roasted veggies (possibly abetted by the chicken stock). You don't have to eat the ginger if you try this; it's intended to add flavor to the dish only (in the vein of adding a bay leaf to soup or stew).

A bit o' business

I've been remiss here, but I suppose you folks who visit the blog can notice the Foodbuzz banners and such (and yes, I know the top one is off-center, but rectifying that will require a heart-to-heart with the template, which I haven't had time for yet). Yes, I have signed on, and I have to say so far I've been enjoying it quite a bit. I haven't begun to dig into all the features it offers, but I look forward to it. Already, I've discovered that a blog I thought was inactive and had missed quite a bit is very much alive. I've also found new blogs.

Foodbuzz takes the model of social networking you might know from sites like Facebook and applies it to food. There are slots for blogs, restaurant reviews, chit-chat, recipes and more. Given that there are lots of foodies on the internet, and they're all passionate about food in various ways, it seems like a great idea for a social networking site.

Yes, there are ads, and I have to say that I gave this some serious soul-searching when I was first contacted by Foodbuzz, but I decided to gamble and try to get some sort of income stream from the blog. Call it an experiment.

More cooking coming soon.

Coq au vin

I can't believe that I haven't blogged about coq au vin before, but searching the blog archives indicates as much. The first foreign language I studied as a kid was French, and I have fond memories of dining at Pierre au Tunnel in NYC with my dad. Coq au vin was always one of my favorite French dishes.

It's also one of those dishes with five billion variations, and I think I have a lot of them in my food library (even though it's a small library by my standards). As a result, this is the way I did it this time, but I've done it differently before and probably will again (I was out of dried porcini mushrooms this time, which is usually a must-have ingredient). My basic recipe comes from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything.

Take four bone-in skin-on chicken thighs, pat dry, roll in all-purpose flour seasoned with salt and cracked black pepper. Shake off the excess. Fry some chopped bacon (in this case, maple-honey bacon from the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market, but any bacon will do). Remove the bacon from the pan and saute the chicken thighs in the bacon fat until brown. Remove the chicken from the pan, pour the remaining oil into a pot, then saute one chopped onion, two chopped portobello mushroom caps and two chopped garlic cloves in the oil. When the onion starts sweating, add a cup each of red wine and chicken stock, a good squirt of tomato paste, a bay leaf, chicken blood if you have it, the bacon and its juices, the chicken thighs and their juices, a couple of sprigs of fresh thyme and another shot of salt and cracked black pepper. Cover, turn the heat to medium and let simmer for a while.

After at least an hour, uncover the pot and turn the heat up to reduce the sauce. Coq au vin works well with crusty bread, noodles, rice or potatoes.

About that chicken blood: it's a traditional ingredient of coq au vin, in the vein (sorry) of using everything for the dish (which was originally a peasant stew intended to use up an old played-out rooster). But just do a search online and find plenty of argument about it. I don't go looking for chicken blood, but just taking the juices out of a chicken package (particularly a whole chicken intended for roasting) will involve some blood. I've made coq au vin with and without blood, and both are good, but it does make a difference. Coq au vin with blood has a unique blackish tint and an extra something to the flavor that is difficult to describe, but you know it when you taste it.

Gyoza

It all started with empanadas, oddly enough. One of my co-workers made empanadas for another co-worker's birthday. My gut reaction was, "I've got to learn how to make those." This was quickly followed by the realization that there were all sorts of Asian dumplings, gyoza, shumai, spring rolls, summer rolls... that I had never tried making, so maybe I should start with them.

The thing that had scared me off making Asian dumplings in the past was the perception that it was a lot of work to assemble everything. "A lot of work" can jinx a lot of things, especially when you're cooking for one. In the end, all the work it took was salting some Napa cabbage and squeezing the water out afterward (which killed a kitchen towel, but that's another story), grating ginger and garlic, slicing scallions, and mixing all that with ground pork, shoyu, sugar and black pepper. Not such a big deal, in the end, and especially not so on a weekend.

The recipe I used came from Hiroko Shimbo's The Japanese Kitchen, and also included instructions for making gyoza wrappers. As a first-timer, I opted to buy some wonton wrappers from the Asian supermarket instead.

Ideally, one seals the dumplings with water and crimps the seams together, but I just threw the gyoza into the skillet and pan-fried them. Once the undersides were golden, I added enough of a combination of boiling water and sesame oil to reach "one-third the height of the dumplings." Then I covered the skillet and streamed the gyoza until the liquid was mostly gone. I only made one skilletful of gyoza, so the extras went right into the freezer for future reference.

You can make lots of fancy dipping sauces, but I just sprinkled the cooked gyoza with shoyu and tucked in. I was very impressed; they were easily the equal of any gyoza I'd had in a restaurant.

Vegetarian burritos

Last month, as is my usual wont, I headed up to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. The Dancer and I drove up on Friday night, since I couldn't take time off from work this year. Before we left, The Dancer made a quick dinner of vegetarian burritos. I was glad to see her method, particularly the assembly, since I've been getting curious about Mexican cooking lately.

First she heated up corn tortillas in the oven, then added refried beans, pre-cooked brown rice, salsa and grated cheddar cheese to the tortillas. After letting the burritos heat through in the oven, she brought them out, added fresh chopped lettuce and tomato for a garnish, and we went outside for dinner al fresco in her back yard. I was impressed with how quickly everything came together, and also with the fact that this would be a great use for leftovers.

A few days ago, I tried my own version of a burrito. The main difference was that I used a skillet on the stovetop, not the oven. I first toasted a flour tortilla on both sides in a little vegetable oil. Then I added refried beans, leftover salsa and grated cheddar cheese. Since I wasn't working from a recipe, this was cooking by guess and by gosh, but it turned out fine. The thing I liked most was the hot, crispy toasted tortilla. I'm sure to tinker with this in the future, but the initial results were quite promising. Since all my ingredients were out of jars, there's plenty of room for making my own refried beans and salsa, for example.

Housekeeping note

I've been shifting a few things around behind the scenes here. Please note that my new e-mail account is still sevensoy, but it happens to be located at gmail.com , not earthlink.net as it was previously.

Summer Pasta

Well, it's been almost a year since I last blogged here. I'm still cooking, though much of my cooking these days isn't Asian (which is not to say I'm no longer cooking Asian food, far from it!). The garden has been more aggravation than success in the past couple of seasons. I've been very busy with work and school, which cuts down on blogging time (never mind discretionary income).

Having said all that, you might see me back here a little more often in future.

Tonight I made a simple summery pasta dish for dinner. I cooked some penne pasta, adorned it with a chopped tomato from the Red Top Market in Red Lion, NJ, then garnished all with salt, grated black pepper and grated parmesan cheese. Sometimes simple is the best way to go.

Pork chop and sake-miso sauce

One of my favorite templates for a sauce is the one used in Mark Bittman's The Minimalist Cooks Dinner for "Pork Cutlet with Miso-Red Wine Sauce" (past variations on this dish can be found here, here and here). Mixing a cup of liquid and two tablespoons of miso is ridiculously easy, and the taste when one is done is excellent and downright complex in some cases (depending on the specific ingredients).

Saturday night I tried a new variation. My one "complaint" with this recipe is that it makes a lot of sauce, so this time I halved the amounts to half a cup of sake and one tablespoon of white miso. The sake I used was Momokawa's Ruby sake, a type that straddles the line between sweet and dry (leaning ever so slightly over into the "sweet" camp). As the sauce was reducing, I added about a tablespoon of unsalted butter and some shredded sweet basil leaves from the garden. This was poured over an inch-thick pork chop that had been liberally seasoned with salt and cracked black pepper, then pan-seared on both sides. I served the pork chop with some leftover homemade bread from last Friday's dinner at Lala's house; the bread had been intended to be French bread but it turned out lighter than that. I reasoned that it should still be good for sopping up the sauce (and even better than noodles or pasta for that purpose).

The results were excellent, one of the best versions of this recipe family that I've had yet. The sauce was rich but not overly heavy, the thick pork chop stood up to the sauce admirably, and the not-so-French bread made sure no drop of sauce went to waste. Well, ok, not all of the miso was totally taken into the sauce (you can see the lumps in the photo), but the infusion of butter, while doubtlessly not necessary, did a great job of smoothing the flavors out. The basil added that little extra zing.

Korean beef noodles

It's been a while since I made Korean beef noodles, mainly because I eat beef less frequently than I once did.

As always, the prep and assembly of this dish went swimmingly. Every time I cook it, I'm still amazing at how well the timing of the recipe works. The end result is a bowl of tender sliced beef over a bowl of spicy, savory noodles. The blend of garlic, scallions and chile makes the lips tingle without being excessively hot; if you wanted to raise the heat quotient higher, you could easily add more dried chiles. The dried chile is part of the recipe, but I think this is the first time I've prepared the recipe with it; it's definitely better than the Tabasco sauce I had been using since the chile infuses the oil with its spiciness.

I had hoped to illustrate this post with a photo but alas, none of them came out. Food photography can be an unforgiving pastime.

Bibimbap

Sometimes a good restaurant meal can send you off in a new culinary direction. It's one thing to sort through cookbooks in search of interesting things to try, but quite another to be confronted with the dish in question.

Saturday night I had dinner with The Deacon at one of our favorite hangouts, Soonja's in Princeton. Soonja's features cuisine from various Asian countries. The Deacon had one of the "create your own noodle dish" entrees, while I decided to visit new territory. I've been eyeing the "Bi Bim Bob" in the Korean section of the menu for a while now. The beef and rice sounded interesting, but the mixed vegetables summoned up images of a plate full of broccoli (a frequent component of "mixed vegetables," in my experience). I don't like broccoli and avoid it as much as possible, but I decided to take a gamble.

When the plate arrived (after the steamed pork dumpling appetizer and accompanying miso soup), I was pleasantly surprised: no broccoli. Mounds of different ingredients ringed the plate; in the center sat the mound of minced beef while the rice, hidden, supported everything else. The plate was a colorful assortment: yellow egg slivers, dark green spinach, variegated green lettuce, coffee-colored shiitake mushrooms, pale bean sprouts and slivered daikon, and orange threads of carrot. It was almost too pretty to eat. The veggies were fresh and just barely cooked; the sprouts and daikon were dressed with a tinge of vinegar. The bibimbap (every place I encounter the name of this dish seems to spell it differently) was served with koch'ujang (Korean hot chile paste); I added a few dollops of chile paste to the dish, mixed everything up and dug in.

All in all, it reminded me of a very substantial salad. The veggies were the real heart of the dish, in the vein of many Asian dishes which use meat as favoring rather than the core of the dish. The mix of textures and tastes had plenty of variety and was welcome on a hot day. As I ate, I knew I had to make this a part of my cooking repertoire.

When I got home, I pulled out Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall's Growing Up in a Korean Kitchen. There was indeed a recipe for "Pibimbap," but I quickly realized why I hadn't bookmarked the recipe: all those ingredients! All that chopping! Well, I didn't care now. I'd seen what bibimbap was like and that gave me more incentive. So did this recipe for bibimbap from evil jungle prince, who made the point that bibimbap is a great use for leftovers. Homemade bibimbap is sure to appear in my kitchen soon.

Back in the kitchen

One of the reasons I started this blog was to keep notes on my various culinary efforts. Despite the recent hiatus in posting here, I haven't stopped cooking, but I've also grown to realize that I miss being able to refer to those notes. So here I am again.

Another thing that's been going on lately is more non-Asian cooking. For example, a few nights ago, I wanted something quick and easy, but something more than a packaged meal. It finally dawned on me that I could toss together some "Pasta Alla Gricia" from Mark Bittman's The Minimalist Cooks Dinner. Just brown some chopped bacon in olive oil (I didn't have pancetta on hand), reserve the bacon and its juices, cook your pasta (again, capellini was what I had on hand, so that's what got used). When the pasta's done, add the bacon and juices plus grated Pecorino Romano cheese. The result is fast, tasty and gives the pleasure of cooking your own food without a lot of work.

Not that I've turned my back on cooking Asian food, by any means. I've been enjoying reading and cooking from Fuchsia Dunlop's Land of Plenty and Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. That last dish I tried was from Land of Plenty, namely "Chicken with Chiles." I made a few changes in the recipe, most notably skipping the initial velveting step and treating it as a straight stir-fry.

Aromatics are important in this dish; it calls for dried red chiles, garlic, ginger, Sichuan pepper and scallions. Of course, I only have ground Sichuan pepper, so that burned when it hit the hot oil (whole peppercorns are preferred). None of these seasonings are meant to be eaten; they're there to flavor the oil. Again, I kept the pan too hot, so there was little oil to be had by the end of the proceedings. I had a cup of chicken broth on hand, though the recipe doesn't call for it, so to keep the pan from drying out, I made sort of a pan sauce from the chicken marinade (dark and light soy sauce, Shao Xing rice wine and salt) and the broth. In the end, the chicken meat had complicated spicy flavors, very intense but still a light meal. Serving this over a lot of white rice would be a good idea.

Twice-cooked pork

The classic dish of China's Sichuan province, according to Fuchsia Dunlop, is twice-cooked pork. Like any other widely-regarded and cooked meal, there are many different variations on the recipe. The basic plan is to parboil pork belly then stir-fry it with sauce and vegetables.

I tried Dunlop's version of this dish and have been eating leftovers from it since then. The final result was a little too oily for my taste (but when you're dealing with pork belly, maybe that's par for the course). No, wait, scratch that last parenthetical comment: braising pork belly for Japanese chashu does not lead to a greasy result. Hmm.

Boiling the pork, then stir-frying it, distills the essence of porkiness. It also leads to a rather chewy result. This is not normally a problem, but when one is trying to have a quick birding meal (and one's compatriot has already finished his sandwich), chewy is not a good thing. Duly noted.

On the other hand, the sauce was divine. Dunlop recommends 1 1/2 tablespoons of hot bean paste, 1 1/2 teaspoons of regular Sichuan bean paste (made with broad beans, aka fava beans, rather than soybeans) and 2 teaspoons of fermented black beans. I'll have more to say on the bean pastes in another post, but the result for this dish was deep and savory. I liked the sauce to the point that I would happily make it for some other application, but then it might be missing the extra dimension of rendered pork belly fat. C'est la vie.

Unrelated footnote: the leftovers made lunch while The Lurker and I were birding around Cape May County, but dinner led us to Applebee's, a chain we haven't visited in some time. We both had burgers and although the server told us that our burgers were going to be better done than not (i.e., no pink), the resulting burgers were very good (even for a medium rare fan like The Lurker). The char was terrific and the flavor equally so. My burger was a "Bruschetta Burger," and it turns out that putting some diced tomato, basil, garlic and mozzarella on a good burger makes a very nice entree. The rosemary-seasoned fries were just a plus.

Another tweak to donburi

The joy of a hearty, simple dish like donburi is that once you've mastered the basic technique, it's easy to start changing some of the variables and experimenting. The other night I followed my usual recipe for chicken donburi but used chicken thighs rather than breast meat. Knowing that this would give a stronger flavor to the completed dish, I decided to use shrimp stock as the base for the broth, rather than dashi (shrimp stock recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything). I also added a few drops of pepper sherry to the broth.

As expected, the shrimp stock enhanced the darker flavor that chicken thigh meat gives to donburi. The pepper sherry was not noticeable in the broth, so I guess I need to use it less timidly next time. I'm still deciding if I like it this version of donburi or not, but playing around like this is part of what you do when you start making a dish your own. Besides, donburi is forgiving.

Hijiki somen

I haven't been cooking as much as usual lately, but last night I wanted something more than pasta and sauce from a jar. After a bit of dithering, I decided to have some hijiki. What I ended up doing was my usual recipe for braised hijiki but I used somen noodles rather than abura-age. I just put the dry somen into the pan and let it braise along with the hijiki. The noodles did a good job of soaking up the sweet shoyu broth (somen noodles are normally cooked by letting them steep in broth, rather than boiling them separately). In the end, the noodles probably gave the dish more body than it normally has; not a bad thing on an evening when a spring sleet storm was clattering on the windows. Then again, a sleety evening probably calls for mizore nabe.

The next time I try this braised hijiki variant, I might zap it with a bit of pepper sherry to add just a bit of heat to the broth's sweetness. I suspect that might be a good combination.

Serious crunch

I've finally succumbed to the Fuschia Dunlop movement. After hearing uniform praise for her books, and upon the occasion of the publication of her latest (Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, which treats Hunanese cooking), I finally bought both RCC and her first book, Land of Plenty (that takes on Sichuanese cooking).

(I apologize for the length of that last sentence. The offender will be dealt with.)

Always one to start at the beginning and work through to the end, I began reading Land of Plenty. As I read, I recognized one of the field marks of a new favorite cookbook: I found myself thinking, "That sounds good," or "That wouldn't be hard to make," as I paged through the recipes. The first one that got the nod was "Pork Slices with Black Cloud Ear Fungus." This is a stir-fry combining marinated pork, cloud ears, celery and chiles.

The marinade worried me, because the version that uses cornstarch calls for six teaspoons of cornstarch along with two tablespoons of water and a teaspoon of Shao Xing rice wine. (There's also a half teaspoon of salt involved.) This meant that the marinade was more viscous than liquid, but I dutifully lathered it over the pork slices as instructed. I didn't have Sichuan pickled chiles on hand, so I substituted some of the serrano chile pepper puree from Suzie Hot Sauce. I also substituted homemade turkey stock for the suggested chicken stock.

I needn't have worried, because the stir-fry cooked up just fine. The pork gets stir-fried first in a third of a cup of peanut oil, then the excess oil is poured off to leave about two or three tablespoons, the usual amount for a stir-fry. Then add chopped ginger, chopped garlic and the Sichuan pickled chiles (if you have them) and stir-fry briefly until they become aromatic. Now the sliced scallions, chopped cloud ears and sliced celery go in, also to be stir-fried briefly. The final step is the addition of the sauce which is based on a quarter of a cup of chicken stock, with a quarter of a teaspoon salt, an eighth of a teaspoon ground pepper and one and an eighth teaspoons of cornstarch (three-quarters of a teaspoon of potato flour, which Dunlop frequently uses in her recipes). Heat through and serve at once.

Cloud ears are essentially flavorless, but they have a very crunchy texture, and their black color can add a dramatic accent to a plate. When combined with the sliced celery, also a crunchy ingredient, it gives this stir-fry a very crunchy quality indeed. This contrasts with the moist morsels of pork. The savory sauce just ties the whole thing together. I was very impressed with the ease with which this dish cooked up, and I also enjoyed a new combination of ingredients for me. If this is any indication, I'm going to enjoy cooking from this cookbook quite a bit.

Only in Japan

Natto. Fermented soybeans. Very healthy, yet the sort of food that will make the unprepared run screaming into the hills. It's the slimy surface. Natto might be an acquired taste, but maybe it's more a food that you need to grow up with. It's the Japanese equivalent of lutefisk.

I had natto once, served with rice. The sliminess was difficult to deal with, of course, but apart from that, it wasn't bad. I keep telling myself I need to try natto again, but I haven't quite gotten around to it.

Natto has become the centerpiece of a great food scandal in Japan, because excessive health benefits were claimed for the slimy soybeans. Maki has a good post summing up the situation at i was just really very hungry.