A good friend took us to an elegant Buddhist vegetarian restaurant for dinner in Hong Kong last summer. It was a spectacular meal. Not only was every dish distinctive and delicious, but innovative and sophisticated as well. There was winter melon soup with mixed vegetables, vegetarian soup dumplings, stir-fried tofu skins with seaweed and multigrain steamed rice. But the most memorable dish of all was the salt and pepper crisp-fried enoki mushrooms. When Mel from Gourmet Fury once again asked me to enter the mushrooms challenge of Beet ‘n Squash YOU! I decided to recreate this dish with a twist.

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Once the yearend holidays and New Year craziness are over everyone begins to look to Valentine’s Day. Lovers are not the only ones wooing their partners. Marketers, the media and even bloggers take this opportunity to court their customers and readers. Chocolate companies package their products in red and white, and the media and blogs are full of advices and suggestions on how to charm your lovers. There are articles on how to make your lady or man happy, and how to celebrate the day as a single person. Not to be outdone I’m also going to give you advice on how to create an impressive dish for that Valentine’s Day dinner.

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Photo: U.S. Department of Defense

It is catastrophic when natural disaster hits a country, but it’s tragic when that country is already struggling to rebuild from decades of political and civic strife. The earthquake in Haiti last week devastated the citizens and physical structures of the country as well as its psychic. It is imperative that we all rally to help the survivors rebuild their lives. Marc at No Recipes had organized an effort by bloggers to help with the relief effort.

I am joining this effort along with other bloggers to donate 100% of our January ad revenue to the World Food Program’s Haiti relief effort. Marc collected a list of participating bloggers on his Help Haiti page at Blog Away Hunger. If you’re a blogger you can also help by volunteering to join Help Haiti. Otherwise visit these blogs to help increase the ad revenue, or you can make direct contribution here and select “Haiti Disaster” under Donor Designations.

At first I noticed a few blocks of broken links on some Web pages. Then I started receiving “connection timeout” and “server reset” messages. Access to my favorite places like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube was unsuccessful. Furthermore many food blogs I regularly visit were inaccessible as well. These were not symptoms of a widespread network failure, but rather the result of surfing the Internet from Shanghai. Such was the extent of the “great firewall” of China I encountered during my travel there last fall.

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We usually plan our New Year’s Eve early. We would arrange to join friends for a dinner celebration either at a restaurant or at home. This year, however, with my busy travel schedule to Asia in November and December, hosting our family Christmas celebration and organizing Warren’s 60th birthday party we found ourselves without a plan. Fortunately, a neighbor suggested we join them and their friends for a late night champagne and h’or d’oeuvres gathering.

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It has been more than five years since we lost our cat, Lily, to cancer. Warren and I were very fond of her, and until now just couldn’t bring ourselves to adopt another cat. We finally decided we’ve given ourselves sufficient “adjustment” time. Early this year our friend Grace Young, author of The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen and The Breath of a Wok, had suggested we consider the Only Hope Cats Recue, Inc. when we were ready. So last week we finally contacted Kris at Only Hope Cats and found our beautiful four-year old rescued gray tiger tabby, Brandon.

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As a newly arrived foreign student from Singapore during my university years in Boston, I had to learn the customs and traditions of American holidays. Although I was already familiar with Christmas and New Year celebrations, Thanksgiving was totally unknown to me. For my first Thanksgiving in America my roommate invited me to spend the holiday with his family in New Hampshire. Unbeknownst to me I was to experience a classic yet quaint practice of American holiday celebration: an enormous turkey dinner and a football game.

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One of my favorite activities when traveling is to visit local food markets. Last week, while wandering through the produce section of a wet market in Shanghai, I found something I’d never seen before. A large unmarked basket was full of miniature bright red fruits freckled with light brown dots that resembled crabapples. They had long green stems attached, and visible sepal crowns at the bottom. According to the friendly wrinkled-faced vendor I had stumbled upon haw fruit.

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Beets were introduced into China from Babylonia around the ninth century. However unlike other food items of New World origin such as potatoes, tomatoes, peanuts and chilies, which Portuguese traders brought to China in the seventeenth century, beets have never become a major Chinese cooking ingredient. Given this long history of existence in China why are they not more popular?

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After fleeing prewar France with her American employers, Clementine and the Beck family settle along the New England coast. As the central character in Samuel Chamberlain’s book Clementine in the Kitchen, the Burgundian cuisinier struggles to adjust to her new environment. One day as she cycles along the coast near her new home, she looks at the ocean and is amazed and “livid with excitement.” She rushes home and announces “J’ai trouve de moules! De quantites des moules!” She “has found mussels! Lots of mussels!” Clementine is overjoyed that such expensive French delicacy litters the American shoreline.

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