During my absence, I found a new hobby--one that's not entirely unrelated to my love of good food. Since mid September, I've been taking a weekly class of pottery making, at a local studio. It was as much a result of boredom as that of frustration. I'd wanted more Japanese-style bowls and plates for my food (and for my food porn), but not too surprisingly, good ones are exceedingly rare in Chicago. Especially after the much-lamented closure of the Japanese ceramic shop in Mitsuwa, finding up-to-date ceramics at a reasonable price have been pretty much impossible. So, I thought, why don't I try making them myself? To begin with, we could use some ramen bowls.

Of course, it didn't go as planned. What I discovered during my first few days at the pottery studio was that it wasn't me who determined the shape of the finished product; it seemed that the clay itself decided to take one shape, and once it knew what it wanted to be, there was no way I could force it to become anything else. I cranked out a lot of lopsided, thick-walled bowls of varying sizes, in addition to quite a few outright dead ones (which, thankfully, could be recycled). Ramen bowls were at least a few months away, I decided, with a bit of amusement. And I meekly obeyed the commands of the wild, assertive lumps of clay on my throwing wheel.

The first trick I learned, therefore, was to "let live." Since most of my bowls came out uneven, I soon realized that I need to take their lopsidedness and turn it into something interesting, if I didn't want to start all over again. When one part of the wall had significantly more clay than the rest, I pinched the thick part to make a pour spout; when my finger got caught on the rim of a small dish, I squished the rim even more to give it an artsy flair. That sort of thing.

After a month and a half, I'm surprised to see how much progress I've made. Not that I'm a great potter by any stretch of imagination, but my bowls turn out much more even and they do listen to my commands more. It's not just the clay becoming whatever it wants to be, but now I can, at least sometimes, guide it to take more or less the shape I have in my head. And most of all, it's been such a fun.

Oh, and I've managed to make a few bowls that I can actually use on the dinner table, too. This shallow bowl with Tenmoku glaze is one of them:

Daikon Sprouts, Jamaican Pepper and Chicken Salad for two

• 1/2 pack daikon sprouts (available at Korean and Japanese markets)
• 1 Jamaican chocolate pepper, cut into thin strips
• a handful of grilled or steamed chicken breast, shredded
• 1/2 tablespoon soy sauce
• 1/2 tablespoon vingar
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1/2 tablespoon toasted sesame seeds
• a drizzle of sesame oil

Instruction would be just a line: toss all the ingredients together and serve. Daikon sprouts ("kaiware" in Japanese) have a very refreshing flavor akin to that of the shredded daikon you find next to your sashimi. Don't forget to rinse them thoroughly, though--there was a huge outbreak of E-Coli in Japan, blamed on daikon sprouts about a decade ago. This incident, much like the recent contaminated spinach incident here, drove all the daikon sprouts off the supermarket shelves. It took years for the supermarkets to muster the courage to carry them again, and those were sad years--I love the wasabi-like, refreshing flavor of the daikon sprouts. The slight bitterness of the pepper is quite nice, though not absolutely necessary, in this salad.

As it turned out, it was a lucky turn. Just after a few minutes since we'd started our northward march on Clark, a group of about six or seven women stopped us at an intersection south of Andersonville. One of them showed us a square-shaped brochure and explained that they're giving us the ticket for an Andersonville Dessert Crawl, while the rest of the group milled around us, all of them looking cheerfully back and forth between their spokesperson and us. Apparently, a lot of the restaurants and businesses in Andersonville were offering little samples of sweets as a fund raiser for the "good cause."

Though we were a bit surprised, of course we jumped at the opportunity. Free desserts are always welcome in our book. "You have to promise that you'll do this, though," said the spokeswoman, and we graciously promised that we would. Patrick and I thanked her profusely and we parted ways. From a short study of the brochure, it appeared that we missed a few businesses south of us, so we decided to walk all the way to the south end of the area and start from there. The first destination was the Wooden Spoon, a very cute shop selling baking and cooking tools. Inside, the folks from the yet-to-open Cocina de Frida were serving strawberry and pineapple dessert tamales, neatly wrapped up in little corn husks.

After that, we tried dessert after dessert, sweets after sweets in various restaurants and venues.

• Baklava @ Middle Eastern Bakery
• Pecan-speckled crispy cookies @ Swedish Bakery (served in Landmark)
• Hazelnuts mousse @ Andies
• Fried dough dipped in honey @ Reza's
• Pumpkin spice latte @ Starbucks
• Chocolate cheesecake @ Renali's
• Pumpkin ice cream w/ ginger snap pieces @ Sweet Occasions
• Bread pudding w/ whiskey sauce @ Charlie's Ale House
• Raisin ruggulah @ Kopi
• Pumpkin crumble bar @ A Taste of Heaven
• Deep-fried twinkies @ Humburger Mary's
• Lemon-iced cookies @ Pasticceria Natalina (photographed above)
• Terry's toffees and port @ In Fine Spirits
• Espresso-chocolate mousse & much-appreciated coffee @ Coffee Studio
• Chocolate cake w/ raspberry cream @ M. Henry (served in Equinox)
• Banana in coconut milk @ en Thai ce

Okay... this is a trifle horrifying. Did we eat all this? In an hour or so? Well, to be sure, we took home the lemon-iced cookies and pumpkin crumble bar, which were wrapped up in a transportable form, but that's still a lot of sugar and fat. No wonder I was merely an inch from getting a heartburn as we walked back home under the bright moon--out of the sheer sense of caloric duty, for our legs were pretty tired by this point. The scarier thing, though, is that the list is not in any way comprehensive.

We missed the chocolate kahlua mousse from Fireside, raspberry chambord brownies a la mode from Ravenswood Pub and baklava from Taste of Lebanon, which are all served along the Ravenswood Ave., which we decided to be a bit too out of the way for our exhausted legs. We also didn't have the tiramisu from Calo (they ran out), and didn't try the doggie treat at Scrub-a-dub-dub (for obvious reasons). Erickson's Delicatessen had Swedish candies in baskets, but we didn't get that, either. We somehow missed Anne Sather's brownies, too. So, if we'd had time, energy and stomach space for everything on offer, we'd have had 26--that's twenty-six, my dear--different desserts from the same number of Andersonville businesses in a matter of a few hours.

And even scarier than that is the fact that we shared the portions. we had only one ticket, so in most places, we got only one piece of the dessert and shared it. I can't imagine how stuffed (and eventually sick) I would have been, had we had one ticket for each of us. So, if you're thinking of joining the event next year, I'd suggest either sharing a ticket with someone or bringing a bunch of Ziploc containers so you can save for later what won't spoil too quickly. I've got more to say about the Dessert Crawl, but it's running long, so I'll save that for tomorrow.

On the way back to Chicago from the tip of the peninsula, we stopped at a farm market, operated by the Seaquist Orchards, and picked up half a peck of honey crisp apples. They were so sweet and crisp--as their name implies--that they had the same power to tempt us to eat them impulsively as chocolates and cookies do. Though I'm not a big fruit eater in my normal life, those apples made me one, if temporarily. I've had them piled up on the dining table, and they're already down to two-. (Apparently it's the case with other people, too, for we saw quite a few farm markets and pick-your-own orchards on the peninsula emphasizing honey crisps on their signs.)

The apples are so good we've been eating them fresh, but I did play with them once. Using some leftover wonton wrappers, I made appetizer/dessert wontons.

I'd come across an interesting idea of using shichimi, Japanese seven-spice mix, in sweet desserts, and I'd wanted to try it. (Unfortunately I don't remember where I read about that idea.) The spicy kick and the citrusy aroma of the shichimi I had at hand seemed perfect for pairing with apples, so I jumped at the opportunity. For the filling base, I mixed softened cream cheese, some sugar and a pinch of shichimi. To bridge the spice mix and the apple, I decided to fold in a thin slice of ginger in each wonton. After wrapping the shichimi cream cheese mixture, diced apples and ginger slices, I shaped the wontons into small parcels, and deep-fried them till crispy.

The result: I could have used a lot more shichimi. When I taste-tested the shichimi-sprinkled cream cheese before frying, it had an unmistakable aroma and heat of the shichimi. But apparently the frying process made much of that heat and aroma evaporate into thin air, and the finished wontons had only the slightest hint of shichimi left. This was a disappointment, but there was a nice surprise as well: the ginger slices lightened (jazzed up, might I say?) the whole thing fantastically. I thought the ginger would be a nice, refreshing touch in this fat-heavy combination of cream cheese and deep-frying, but the ginger worked even better than I expected. Cooking also brought out the tartness in the apple that wasn't very pronounced when eaten fresh.

We had the wontons as an appetizer, but this would be a nice dessert, maybe paired with vanilla ice cream (drool...). Next time I make this, I'll use a lot more shichimi and see how that works.

Pear tomatoes from my mom's backyard and a handful of Thai-flavored cashews...

Chop up the cashews, toss with halved tomatoes, and let them rest for fifteen minutes in the fridge, and you have Thai cashew tomato salad. Work time? Two minutes. Juice from the tomatoes work as the liquid base for the dressing, for which the seasoning comes from the lime- and chili-flavored nuts. Brought to you by Trader Joe's spicy concoction, Thai Lime Chili Cashews. (Hey, I'm not getting commission from Joe or anything...)

"Her" recipes and meal ideas were fascinating in so many ways. Guacamole didn't call for cilantro (although it did ask that you get avocados--phew). She pretty much boils every imaginable vegetable, from the predictable potatoes and peas to the shocking eggplants to the almost criminal celery. To me, who didn't spend her childhood in Betty's country, the recipes and directions aren't nostalgic. Some of them are outright horrifying, but in that horror, I realized, lies the huge distance that the American food culture has covered over the past 40-plus years. The tuna chow mein bake, which combines cream of mushroom soup (out of a can), tuna (out of a can) and cooked chow mein to be baked in the oven, wouldn't make its weekly appearance on the dinner table very often these days (or so I hope), but there was a time when such an oddly "oriental" dish was an exotica that only a knowledgeable homemaker could put on the table.

I was talking to Patrick the other day, showing him the ghastly colored photographs in the cookbook, when he confessed a particular fondness for the "red cinnamon apple rings." He used to have them occasionally, when he was growing up. Amused and on a whim, I decided to try recreating the hyper-red, plasticky circles that didn't seem at all like apples on the yellowing pages.

The recipe called for red cinnamon candies, which, not too surprisingly, I didn't have at hand. So I made a quick trip to Target and picked up a bag of them for 99 cents. This is good, I thought. I didn't want to spend too much to obtain ingredients that I don't usually have at hand--which, in this case, quite a few--like canned soup and salted beef. I melted the candies in a little bit of hot water and threw in circles of a pared-and-cored apple. (I had an apple I grabbed from a motel's breakfast buffet on the day before, so there was no guilty feeling of ruining a perfectly good apple in this artificial concoction.) The bubbling red syrup was kind of pretty, I have to admit, and the apple pieces soon took on the same unearthly red hue. I couldn't imagine how intense the color would have been if I'd used the food dye as called for.

The red circles set the tone of the entire dinner. I fought off the temptation to use herbs and spices that I've become used to in the 21st century kitchen, and pretty much stuck to salt and pepper (except for the orange peel and sage I used for the mashed sweet potatoes). I sautéed pork chops (with salt and pepper, lightly dusted with flour) in butter, and mounted the apple pieces on top. For the sides, I made green beans and corn in (again) butter, and the heretic mashed potatoes. I was satisfied to see, on large blue plates, that the resulting dinner had the undeniable sense of '60s retro. The reddish pink syrup soon started to dribble down the side of the pork chops.

The apple rings tasted just as I expected--extremely sweet, with only a faint apple aroma, and similarly subtle cinnamon tang. With the cinnamon stronger, it could actually be pretty decent with the pork, I suspected (though I would be perfectly happy without all that color). Patrick, who thought the same thing, said that the cinnamon apple rings he used to have might have been store-bought, perhaps in a can. Most importantly, though, it was edible.

I'm tempted now to try other recipes in Betty's book. Many of them would be just a joke (like "sea dream salad" made with grated cucumbers and lime-flavored gelatin), but it's kind of fun. The obvious downside, though, would be the number of empty cans--soups, green beans, corn, fruit cocktails, etc.--that'll heap up in our trash bin. Or... would that be too dangerous for our health?

Which posed a small challenge: when our food came out on a tray, I noticed that seafood congee wasn't there. I tried to communicate this to the young guy behind the counter, who looked at the order slip and understood my concern. He nodded, pointed at the slip and said something in rapid-fire Chinese, smiling at me. (He was very nice.) Not understanding any of what he said, I made a face--a universal sign of "what?" He looked at me with his eyebrows twisted, his eyes clouded with genuine concern. He repeated what he said again, which of course I didn't get. Then, one of the customers in line, a woman with a long hair swaying down to her waist, stepped in.

"He'll call you when it's ready," she translated. Ahh, I said, and thanked her. The guy seemed relieved, as I turned to carry the tray to our table. Wondering how we would recognize that we were being called when we were, I walked back to Patrick through the maze of tables and other customers with their own trays of food.

Soon, the same, gentle-looking guy behind the counter called out our number (in Chinese), and realizing that we don't even understand simple numbers, started to wave his hands at us. My seafood congee was ready.

With a chive bun, fried dough (which they called "twisted crullers"), dessert tofu (tofu fa, 豆腐花), and a house special of fried tofu and pork in black bean sauce--on top of that delayed congee, we definitely went overboard. But that was an overdose worth every bit of calories.

I don't even know where to begin--it was all very tasty, perhaps with the exception of the congee, which I'd had better ones. So, I guess I can start with the stuff in the first photo. Though (relatively speaking) not so rare in Chicago's Chinese food scene, the fried tofu in black bean sauce was fantastic. Something in the dish--maybe the tender, pouchy tofu--made it seem more down-to-earth Chinese food that might be served at someone's home. It may have been the sauce, too, that seemed a little homier than your usual restaurant kind.

But the real fun was in the items that appeared in the "weekend breakfast menu." I was apprehensive that the fried dough might be too oily and heavy, but that proved a worry over nothing. The oil only gave the dough a satisfying flavor and was never overpowering. I have no idea how they make it so un-oily, but it was. The flour dough was slightly salty and slightly sweet, with the reassuringly comforting flavor of the wheat flour. It was sort of like a toughened-up version of a really good "cruller" type doughnut. Quite a few people were dipping them in bowls of soy milk, but the fried dough was excellent by itself. It was huge--more than a foot long and three inches across--but I could have eaten the whole thing without any problem (other than my rapidly expanding waist line, that is).

The chive bun was a steamed-then-fried bun with chives and glass noodles. Compared to the sublime simplicity of the fried dough, the chive bun may not have been as good (a bit too heavy on the artificial MSG flavorings, and the bun itself could have been better), but it was still very, very good. Again, I could have eaten the whole thing, although it, too, was on the humongous side. Yu Ton Dumpling House must go through a scary number of chive buns and fried doughs; as I waited for our food by the counter with other customers milling around and constantly fetching their food, I probably saw 50 fried doughs and 30 chive buns come out of the kitchen, only to quickly disappear somewhere in the hands of happy customers. No wonder they tasted so fresh.

Now, all these were very good, but what really made my day was the tofu fa. Just around the time I left Japan in 2003, a boom of Hong Kong sweets was starting to happen. I never had a chance to try any of the interesting-sounding sweets, but I did have enough time to pick up bits of information on them. Made of familiar ingredients like sesame seeds, read beans and coconut milk, the Hongkonese desserts still sounded fascinatingly different. Tofu fa was among them. I'd been meaning to try one, but somehow never got around to it. Imagine my excitement, then, when I found two variations of tofu fa listed in the breakfast menu.

One option was the deluxe version with everything on it, but I opted for the other one with simply one ingredient: peanuts. It was (again) on the gigantic side. Bathing in a brown, chilled syrup was a few large pieces of very delicate and silky tofu, topped with peanuts boiled in the said syrup. (I photographed it, but it doesn't look as good as it tastes.) The ivory-colored tofu in tofu fa is much softer and smoother than normal tofu, but it has the same distinctive flavor of the soy beans. I was surprised by how well that tofu flavor works with sweetness: the tofu flavor gave depth to the potentially flat sweetness of the syrup. But this is not to say that the syrup was merely sweet, flavorless liquid; it was quite peanutty, which then complimented the tofu. All in all, my first tofu fa was a refreshing dessert. It would be an awesome replacement for morning yogurts, I thought, if I could get it around where I live.

We felt compelled to take a nice, long walk through the forest of the Morton Arboretum after this extravagant meal of $16. Stuffed to the brim and nothing less than euphoric, we scrambled into the car and drove to the Arboretum, where we did take a little walk in a quiet prairie at the Western end of the park. (A huge flock of yellow flycatchers!) I liked the Arboretum a lot, and we're thinking about going back with our bikes--the meandering, shaded, slightly hilly trails seemed perfect for a leisurely bike ride. And when we go back there, we're definitely getting those fried doughs again. One for each of us, next time.

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Yu Ton Dumpling House
International Mall
665 Pasquinelli Dr., Westmont, IL
630.323.2329
As a side note, the Dumpling House occupies two stalls in the food court. Next door to the ordering counter, they had half a dozen extremely fresh-looking Chinese vegetables for sale, which seems to assure the freshness of the ingredients they use.

The problem is that it's so out of the way, if not far away. By the intersection of Routes 83 (Kingrey) and 34 (Ogden), the Mall is at least 45 minutes drive from where I live. Driving out there just to get breakfast seemed, as appealing as an authentic Taiwanese breakfast was, a bit much. So, when we decided to spend what was possibly the last day of summer exploring the nearby Morton Arboretum, I grabbed the occasion. Drawing the plan couldn't have been easier: we'd catch the fried dough breakfast at the Mall, drive fifteen minutes to the Arboretum and spend a quiet day communing with the artificial nature.

Once at the Mall, we checked out the Whole Grain Fresh Market on the eastern end. Though much smaller if compared to Jewel and other chain supermakets, the place was overwhelming: an entire aisle was dedicated to noodles of different ingredients, shapes and sizes while another was occupied by more Chinese dried goods than you can imagine. Cookies and sweets spilled out of the two rows of shelves dedicated to them, and were pressing onto a few shelves in the front. At least 20 different kinds of rice--red rice, black sweet rice, black wild rice, Jasmine rice, short grain rice, long grain sweet rice...--were prominently featured by the entrance. But the most overwhelming was the collection of mostly Chinese sauces that occupied a whole aisle. Many of the sauces were familiar to us (sa cha djan, to ban djan, chi ma djan, etc.), but so many others were utterly mysterious and esoteric.

Abalone cookies/

We picked up a few confectionery ingredients (black sesame powder, almond powder and black sugar) and a few Chinese cookies. One of them, the abalone-shaped cookies, had quite an interesting ingredients list that included shallots and Chinese spices. The unique, sweet-and-salty flavor of the cookies went surprisingly well with jasmine tea. (I had them with and without the tea, and discovered that enjoying them with tea is the way to go.) I'm not sure if I would know that it was the shallots if it weren't on the ingredients list, but the cookies do carry a faint, fleeting aroma of the shallots, making it quite unusual in the U.S., I'm sure.

The cookies were interesting and quite tasty, but there were reasons for not picking up other things at the market. For one, it was too hot in the car for anything requiring refrigeration to survive for too long, but for another, the market's fresh produce and meats could have been fresher. "H Mart definitely elevated our expectations from ethnic markets," Patrick said, and I agree.

In the light of the freshness, variety and quantity of the produce, meat and fish at H Mart, the Whole Grain Fresh Market was sub-par. (Ethnic markets do face the indomitable challenge of a smaller clientele and a slower turnover rate as a result, which favors the behemoths like the H Mart--I know. But still, selling moldy mushrooms and gray beef didn't appeal to me too much.) Even with the occasional organic produce (as to be expected from their name evoking such organic-centered places as Whxxe Foods and Wxxd Oats, I suppose), I wasn't impressed by the Whole Grain market on this regard. But it's okay--the true joy of the International Mall was its food court.

To be continued (because I'm mean).

• roasted spare rib in yuzu marmalade sauce
• tofu chigae
• rice

Bitter melons have knobby, grooved skin that's kind of fun to look at.

I myself am not too big on bitter melons--or so I thought. The bitterness was a bit too much for me. But the other day, I saw a large heap of pretty good-looking bitter melons at H Mart, and decided to get one for my beloved husband (haha). Since I had some pork belly and fried tofu at hand, I decided to cook gôya champloo, an Okinawa-style stir-fried bitter melon, for dinner. (Gôya refers to bitter melon in Okinawan language/dialect.)

Soaking the bitter melon in salt water can reduce the bitterness a bit.

It turned out surprisingly well: I actually liked the dish. And it wasn't "despite" the bitterness, but "because of." It was easy to make with relatively cheap ingredients, too, and I suspect that I might start buying more bitter melon that I would have imagined just a few days ago.

Gôya Champloo (Okinawa-style stir-fried bitter melon; for two generous servings)

• 1 bitter melon
• 1/3 inch carrot, julienned
• 3 ounces pork belly meat, thinly sliced
• 4 ounces thick, deep-fried tofu ("atsu-age"), cut into thin, bite-sized pieces
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon dashi powder
• 1 small handful of bonito flakes ("katsuo-bushi")

Cut the bitter melon lengthwise in half and remove the pulp, using a spoon. slice them into about 1/5 inch thickness. Soak the cut bitter melon in salt water, if you prefer mild bitterness. (I soaked my bitter melon pieces for about 30 minutes, and it nicely cut down on the bitterness.) Cut all the ingredients as shown above.

Heat the oil in a frying pan, and start with the pork belly. Once the pork is mostly cooked, set it aside. Add carrots to the pan, followed by bitter melon. When the vegetables are mostly cooked through, add the fried tofu. Stir-fry carefully, so the tofu won't break into tiny bits. Then put the meat back into the pan.

Season with soy sauce, dashi powder and salt. Quickly follow the seasoning with beaten egg. (Give the egg a bit of time to cook before stirring here.) Sprinkle with bonito flakes, give it one last mix and serve.

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NHK, the Japanese national TV network, broadcast a drama series set in Okinawa, and within that drama, they introduced a silly little character called "gôya man." It's an anthropomorphized bitter melon with an yellow helmet--and, well, it's pretty cute. If you feel like it, go to Japanese google and copy and paste this: ゴーヤーマン.

Quick Indian buffet for a late din-din on Sep. 7.

But somehow, not knowing how to make dashi from scratch and having never even tried it have become a skeleton in the cupboard for me. I've grown apprehensive that some day, somewhere, someone will pop out of the bush and accuse me: "You keep a food blog as if you knew something, when you don't even know how to make dashi? And pretend that you're interested in Slow Food? Noooonesense!" Well, not really, but you know what I mean. It's like being a French cook who always uses bouillon cubes and canned chicken soup stock. It's like building an elaborate castle before laying a solid base structure. I just don't have the basics done.

So, yesterday, I finally looked up some dashi-making methods and tried it myself. Luckily, Japanese-style dashi doesn't require the same intensive labor as the Western-style chicken stock. All you need is a pot, water, bonito flakes, a bit of kombu, a strainer, a stove and maybe ten minutes--all of which I had at hand.

From what little I read about dashi-making, the following seems to be the consensus.

1) Wipe away any dust from the surface of the kombu (kelp).
2) Soak kombu in cold water for a while.
3) Bring the kombu-water to a boil, and retrieve the kombu just before it reaches the boiling point.
4) Add a handful of bonito flakes (katsuo-bushi), give it ten seconds and turn the heat off.
5) Wait till all the bonito flakes have settled on the bottom, then strain.

I more or less followed the direction, except for the last bits about giving only ten seconds to the bonito flakes and waiting for them to settle. Somehow, I didn't notice these two points, so I probably boiled the pot for a minute or two after throwing in the bonito flakes. Then I didn't give time for them to settle before straining the dashi. It smelled good, though--the intense, aged aroma of the bonito flakes had a subtle lining of the sweet and earthy aroma of the kombu. Excited, I used half of the dashi for the miso soup (with daikon, oyster mushrooms, wakame and green onions), while putting away the other half for later use.

The result was a little bit disappointing. The dashi didn't stand up to the relatively powerful flavor of the miso. The soup wasn't as flat as it would have been without the dashi, but it wasn't as satisfyingly complex as my usual one made with the powdered dashi. Five possible reasons came to my mind:

a) The two points where I didn't follow the direction somehow ruined, or didn't extract enough of, the bonito flavor.
b) The ingredients I used for the dashi were sub-par (this is quite likely, since they were one of the los cheapos I picked up from Mitsuwa long time ago).
c) The dashi I made wasn't suitable for miso soup.
d) I didn't use enough dashi.
e) I cooked the miso soup for too long, letting the flavor evaporate into thin air.

While I suspect the less-than-expected result was a combination of all the factors, but I also think that c) might be a larger part of it. The dashi taken from bonito flakes and kombu this way is called "ichiban dashi," meaning "the first stock." Subtle but elegant in flavor, Ichiban dashi is usually used for dishes where you enjoy the flavor of the stock itself, with minimum additional flavoring agents. For something like miso soup, which requires a potent dashi to stand up against the powerful flavor of the miso, other kinds of dashi is recommended.

Niban dashi, or "the second stock," is made from the bonito flakes and kombu recycled from the process of making the ichiban dashi, combined with some fresh bonito flakes and kombu. Niban dashi has more robust and less subtle flavor than ichiban dashi, and is used for nimono and sometimes for miso soup. For miso soup, however, the best dashi seems to be one taken from niboshi (boiled-then-dried baby fish), which imparts a stronger flavor than bonito flakes. (It really depends on the family and the palate; my grandma, for one, always used freshly shaved bonito flakes for her miso soup.)

Though my first attempt at real dashi-making was less than satisfactory (I didn't even mention that to Patrick at dinner table!), I'm determined to try more. Before I run to the store for better-grade bonito flakes and maybe some niboshi, I'll fix the problems a), d) and e). But the scary fact of all is--sort of reminiscent of the MacDonald's and company--that it's probably much cheaper to use the powdered dashi and liquid soup mix than to make good dashi from scratch with decent ingredients. Is this economy crooked, or what?

Din-din for Sep. 6, a la slow food

• gôya champloo (Okinawa-style stir-fried bitter melon)
• miso soup with real dashi (oyster mushrooms, daikon, wakame, green onions)
• pickled nozawana
• Korean sweet 'n salty black beans
• rice

As you can see in the photograph, fresh pickled nozawana has this beautiful, deep but vibrant green hue. When it turns sour, the green becomes dull and an unconcealable tinge of brown sets in. Not that there aren't people who prefer aged nozawana that's turned sour (quite a few Japanese people do, in fact), but I'm just not big on that sour taste in aged pickles in general.

Nozawana is a crunchy, leaf vegetable that belongs to the turnip family. For something in the turnip family, it grows rather big: a fully grown nozawana can reach three feet. Preferring chilly and misty climate of the highland, nozawana is a specialty of the village of Nozawa, and grown in the surrounding Shin-etsu region. Although I did come across a few American seed companies (such as the Kitazawa Seed Co. in California) that distributes nozawana seeds, I've never seen one being sold fresh anywhere around Chicago.

Nozawana has a distinctive flavor that's difficult to describe. (Well, well, this shows my limitation...) The closest vegetable I've had in the U.S. is the generically called "potherb" stir-fried with shredded pork, served at the Lao Szechuan (a surprisingly stylish website they have!). Whatever they're calling "potherb" has a different texture from nozawana--the one at Lao Szechuan seems denser and less crunchy, but the flavors are very close. Strange for a vegetable, both nozawana and the "potherb" have a hint of meaty umami. My amateur's guess is that they have some amino acids that produce this complex, meat-like flavor.

Guessing aside, nozawana is just really tasty. If you find one on a restaurant's menu or in a Japanese grocer's fridge, grab and try it. I'd planned an American-style dinner for yesterday, but the nozawana changed it all: I had to have rice, with the nozawana, so I did. Ah, I could have eaten the whole bag in one sitting, with maybe three bowls of rice! I didn't need anything else (although I did behave myself and had a balanced meal). I hope Patrick wasn't too taken aback by my uncharacteristically ferocious defense when he tried to snatch the last piece of nozawana--I just had to have that one, too. It's mine. It's all mine...

My happiest day would be when one of the area farmers start growing nozawana and sell them in farmers' markets...

Hurray for nozawana! Din-din for Sep. 5

• Laotian pork chop
• broccoli with homemade sesame dressing
• curry pumpkin salad
• four heirloom tomatoes from my mom's back yard
• rice
• nozawana

According to this article, Morocco is now the leading supplier of sardines in the European market, beating the competition from Spain and Portugal. (So, maybe, the tin I picked up, although it bore an exotic image of turbaned man, was mainly intended for the American/European market, not for the domestic Moroccan market.) To consolidate their position as the leading exporter of sardines, Reuters reported in 2004, Morocco apparently had discontinued the fishing accord with the EU in the late '90s, banning foreign fishing boats in its waters. To the same end, Morocco heavily subsidizes the Moroccan fishing industry.

What complicates the political ethics of eating a tin of Sultan's sardines, though, is the fact that the sardine fishery takes place along the coast of the Western Sahara, which both the Moroccan government and the separatist Polisario movement claim as their own. According to the same Reuters article on Planet Ark (which is an Australian environmental non-profit), the Polisario Front, with its base inside the Algerian border, has been battling the Moroccan government over the control of the Western Sahara. Since 1991, the UN has been trying to set up an autonomous political entity in the region for the Saharawi peoples, but it hasn't seen success. So, the very existence of the Moroccan fishing industry in the area is in itself a sort of political statement on the part of the Moroccan government, as well as an important economic stabilizer that the government can point to as a proof of its success in guiding the region.

Why this area has come under the Moroccan control and why the Moroccan control has been in dispute have a much longer history: the area was not under any "nation state" as was imagined by the European colonizers back when France and Spain were busy setting up marionette colonial governments all over Africa. Since the colonizers didn't have the sensitivity to perceive or acknowledge the often blurry "zones of tribal influences" in the area, the arbitrary boundaries they drew on the Saharan sand cut through these zones. (Sounds awfully familiar, right?)

There's a much longer history that seems really interesting (to me) before that, of course, of the Islamic influences and the native Berber peoples, but that's way beyond I can sum up here. (Plus I feel I should know more before writing it up.) Meanwhile, two Wikipedia article--one on the Polisario Front and the other on Saharawi peoples--were intriguing and helpful. I'm all for just enjoying the sensations of what's in the plate in front of me and not think about it, but at the same time I can't deny my fascination with the sudden, explosive connection to history and politics that a mere tin of sardines can produce--with just a little bit of curiosity on my part.

• Chinese boiled dumplings
• cabbage, celery and cucumber salad with black bean dressing
• pumpkin salad
• rice, of course

It was evidently not so for the ten-year-old me, for quite a few of the entries have marks--ranging from simple circles to stars and flowers--that I penciled in as I leafed through these cookbooks. My hope was that my mom would look at the marks, realize that I wanted to try those particular dishes, and cook them for me. That rarely happened, for my mom was not an eager cook (though she was and is a good one), but a few of the recipes she did try stuck around, in one form or the other.

One such is the Toban Djan Pumpkin, a dish that blurs the boundary between the Japanese home cooking and the Chinese cooking. It takes one of the staple veggies in Japanese cooking--pumpkin--and combine it with a Chinese chili bean paste. Back when the recipe was included in the cookbook, toban djan (Lee Kum Kee makes one) was probably not an everyday condiment in a normal Japanese housewife's kitchen. (Accordingly, the editor of the cookbook accompanied the recipe with a little expose of what it is.) Toban djan was beyond my ten-year-old culinary imagination, so I didn't mark it as "I want." Then, years later, when I was flipping through the cookbook (again), I found the recipe. Being a lazy ass, I asked my mom to try it (even though I was more than old enough to cook it myself), and this time she did.

It was so good that it's been in our repertoire ever since. We've both tinkered with the recipe over time, and our version features celery, which was not in the original recipe but gives an indispensable flavor twist to the dish in my opinion.

Toban Djan Pumpkin (for two)

• 1/4 pumpkin (Japanese kuri is my favorite)
• 2-3 celery stalks
• 1/3 inch ginger, minced
• 1 green onion, chopped
• 1 teaspoon toban djan (more, if you like it spicy)
• 1/3 tablespoon Chinese chicken bouillon powder
• 1/2 tablespoon sugar
• 1/5 cup water

Remove the pulp from the pumpkin and cut it into thin, bite-sized chunks (see the photo). Slice the celery diagonally.

In a pan, heat some oil and fry minced ginger and toban djan. (Be careful not to inhale the über-spicy toban djan fume--I accidentally did once, and it was pretty agonizing.) When the ginger and toban djan start to emit that appetizing aroma, add celery, then pumpkin and stir-fry, till the vegetables have turned a little translucent and have a nice coat of aromatic oil.

Add water, bouillon powder, sugar and green onions and simmer till most of the water is gone. I usually keep the lid on during this process, but when I want the water to evaporate faster (say, before the pumpkin lose all its shape), I take it off.

The heat of the toban djan compliments the earthy sweetness of the pumpkin, while (I thin) the celery and ginger somehow bridge the two very different flavors. It's good right off the stove, but it's also wonderful chilled on hot summer evenings--a good reason to make more than one serving and refrigerate! My mom used to be a bit taken aback by how her gluttonous daughter (thats me, yeah) kept looking through the same four or five cookbooks all the time, but thanks to my gluttonous obsession, we now have a pretty good pumpkin recipe to spice up our autumn table.

Below is the "before" photo of the beautiful Japanese kuri pumpkin.

I picked up the one on the left, with the beautiful green pattern (from the Green Acres farm in Green City Market). It probably could have used a few more days on the patch (a bit of greenness right under the skin), but it was delicious.

It's been such a rainy August a mushroom sprouted up in my Greek oregano planter on the back porch! It would be nice if this were a Chanterelle (which I've never had--yet)...

Meanwhile, I've been worried about the declining service, especially on weekends, at Julius Meinl recently. Here's a review on Gapers Block's Drivethru, which I hope would help them get their acts together. I really don't want to see them close their doors--since that's where I first met Patrick!

So, it's a mystery that I started buying tinned seafood lately. The first was the smoked oyster in a tin that I picked up at a Vietnamese market along Broadway. Perhaps because the smoked oyster pasta came out well, I became bold and bought a tin of sardines next. And it was no ordinary tin of sardines--it was "Sultan's" sardines in chili oil, imported from Morocco.

There's a good chance that I was knocked out by the awesomely nostalgic package. It conjured up an image of a small village store with dust-covered merchandise slumbering in the darkness, sheltered from the sweltering heat outside. The Arabic writing on the other side of the box only added to my exoticism. The problem is--exoticism wasn't quite enough to make me open the tin. Once I opened it, I'd have only so many hours to use the fish before it goes bad. So, the tin sat in the cupboard for a few weeks before I finally made up my mind to use it.

When I opened the tin, I was surprised by the generous size of the fish inside. Somehow, I was expecting anchovy-sized fish cluttering the space, but instead, what I found was two plump pieces of sardines almost bursting out of the tiny container. Despite the annoyance of scales left on the fish, the small nibble I had of the sardine was fantastic. I had expected it to be fishy, oily, salty and maybe somewhat stale, but it was none of these. Thinking that I could eat this right out of the can, maybe on crispy toasts, or with grated daikon and ginger, I started cutting the cabbage--the other main ingredient of the evening's meal.

Sultan's Peperoncino (Spaghetti Peperoncino with Cabbage and Moroccan Sardines) (for two)

• 1 tin Moroccan sardines in chili oil
• 3-4 large cabbage leaves, chopped
• 6 oz spaghetti (I used whole wheat, just because)
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 teaspoon crushed dried chili pepper (fresh ones would be nicer)
• 1 1/2 tablespoon olive oil
• salt to taste

In a large pot, boil plenty of water. When the water is boiling, add a generous pinch of salt and add spaghetti. Cook to al dente.

Meanwhile, heat olive oil in a pan and fry the garlic and chili pepper. When it starts to smell nice, add the sardines. After a minute or two, add the cabbage and stir-fry them, crushing the sardines into bite-sized pieces. Salt to taste.

Transfer the pasta into the pan, mix, and serve when the pasta has a nice coat of olive oil.

Since the sardines weren't super-salty anchovies, the pasta came out to be a little milder than I'd expected. It could have used some more salty kick, perhaps, but it was a pretty nice comfort meal. I'm still not sure if I would gladly join my father in his occasional fish-in-a-tin drinking spree, but I'd be definitely buying these Sultan's Moroccan sardines again and again. Next time, I want to try cooking something Japanese with them--perhaps my father can enjoy it with me.

The burdock salad, purchased from a then-sprouting convenience store for a quick picnic lunch some fifteen years ago, blurred the boundary between Japanese nimono-style dishes and Western salads in my head for ever. And evidently the same thing happened on a much larger scale. Today, when you visit delis in "depa-chika" (large-scale food courts in the basements of department stores--a fantasy land for any foodie indeed), you'll see lots of crossover dishes like the mayonnaise-based burdock salad. Some use traditional vegetables in a new way (eating daikon raw, as a salad, for example, used to be unthinkable, but now it's a mundane dish) while others combine Japanese and Western flavors and methods. I'm not sure which of the two countries--U.S. or Japan--is more intent in creating new food trends, but surely Japanese vegetable dishes have undergone a tremendous expansion in the last decade. What used to be unthinkable merely ten years ago are now commonplace, and quite a few home cooks are still experimenting with the inspiration they get from commercially produced noubeau Japanese. (Note to self: I should look through some Japanese cookbooks here and see if any of these new ideas show up in them.)

Using a lotus root in a "salad" would be unthinkable for my heptagonalian grandmother (although she might enjoy it once she tried; she's quite adventurous when it comes to food). For her (and for me for a long time), lotus roots are something that we'd find either in kimpira or in nimono (mainly root veggies and sometimes chicken simmered together in soy sauce, sugar and fish stock). But now, I make lotus root salad, as a part of my mundane dinner table, and often to present leftover nimono with a more enjoyable flair.

Lotus Root and Hijiki Salad (for two)

This recipe calls for some leftover "hijiki no nimono," but if you don't have it at hand, you can substitute it with the same amount of rehydrated hijiki and vegetables of your choice (like carrots and beans). If you do this, you might want to increase the amount of noodle soup mix a bit.

• 3-4 inches lotus root*
• 4 tablespoon hijiki no nimono
• 1 green onion, chopped
• 1/2 tablespoon Japanese noodle soup mix ("dashi")
• 1 tablespoon mayonnaise
• 1/2 tablespoon sesame seeds

First, peel the lotus root. I always use a peeler because the lotus root has a uniquely brittle texture that makes it difficult to peel it with a knife (plus the holes inside mean that if I peel too thick, I'll make holes on the surface). Cut it lengthwise and slice into 1/10 inch thickness (see the photo above for an idea). As you cut the lotus root, throw the pieces into a bowl of water to prevent discoloration.

In a saucepan, boil some water. When the water is bubbling, add lotus root pieces and boil for five minutes. Drain.

In a bowl, mix lotus root, hijiki no nimono, green onion, noodle soup mix and mayonnaise. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and serve.

Lotus roots have a delightful crunch when lightly cooked. In fact, I think the best way to eat lotus roots is to enjoy that crunch, which is so often lost when the lotus roots show up in traditional nimono dishes that involve long and slow simmering. Although this salad-style preparation is very new in the scope of the Japanese cooking, I suspect this might be one of the best--or at least one of the fittest for the contemporary Japanese taste.

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* When buying lotus roots, look for ones without dark, soggy patches on the skin. Fresh ones are mostly uniform in color (sometimes with tiny speckles scattered evenly). Looking at the cut surface often helps: if the cut surface is dried up and/or soggy and brown, the lotus root probably isn't very fresh. If the store has them in sizes too large for you, try breaking them at the joints. (I'm a little fond of the "pop" they make when they snap...) To make your peeling job easier, choose one that's more or less straight, without too many dents and bumps, too!]]>