East Asian

These hors d'oeuvres should be served warm, so fry a couple of batches at a time as platters need replenishing.

The recipe below is excerpted from restaurateur Jenny Kwak's book, Dok Suni: Recipes from My Mother's Korean Kitchen.

Spicy Szechuan dishes were quite the thing in the seventies; around that time, pasta was also coming into its own. This recipe features ingredients that are widely available in the Asian foods section of most markets. If you like, add snow peas and sliced red bell pepper for some crunch.

Hey-mul Pajun Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from restaurateur Jenny Kwak's book, Dok Suni: Recipes from My Mother's Korean Kitchen. Kwak also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page. To read more about Kwak and Korean cuisine, click here. It is said that because Korea was almost all surrounded by water, Koreans looked seaward for culinary inspiration. Hey-mul pajun, a simple and reliable treat, is a good example of this. My parents both spoke of this dish when I was growing up. My father ate it when his family had little to eat, and still to this day he enjoys it with a bottle of soju (sweet potato vodka). My mother told me that the aroma of the dish was so good that it would entice her neighborhood girlfriends to peek over the walls that divided the homes and ask, "Hey, can I come eat that with you?" And because the girls enjoyed the company as much as the food, they sat by the fire cooking up one pancake at a time, talking and eating until their mothers called them back home.

This sauce, allegedly from Hong Kong, is called XO to equate its extravagance with that of "extra old" fine brandy (though there is none in the recipe). Many versions of this sauce exist, but they all include dried scallops (sometimes called conpoy), an ingredient highly prized in Chinese cooking for its flavor and texture, and costly Chinese Yunnan ham, which is unavailable in the U.S.

When we were children, we adored zeen doy(sesame balls). The dough is fried until golden brown so it is both crisp and chewy from the glutinous rice flour. It is eaten year-round, but especially for New Year's and for birthday celebrations. As the dough fries, it expands, so the Chinese believe if you eat Sesame Balls your fortunes will expand similarly. The Sweetened Red Bean Paste for the filling can be purchased in a can or homemade. Sesame Balls must be eaten the day they are made. The following day, they can be heated in a 300-degree oven but, like so many foods, they are not nearly as good as when they are fresh. Remember to use glutinous rice flour and not rice flour! My Auntie Lil, who taught me this recipe, says the secret is to never knead the dough and to use cold sugar water.

This dish is equally delicious prepared with turkey, seafood, beef, or pork.

Neen Gow, New Year's Cake, is the most important cake eaten on New Year's — the main ingredient, glutinous rice flour, is a symbol of cohesiveness. The egg-dipped, pan-fried slices have a mellow sweetness and are slightly chewy from glutinous rice flour. Mama remembers watching her grandmother's servants scraping the slab brown candy, peen tong, for this cake, which is the traditional technique. Brown candy is a kind of sugar that is sold by the slab in 1-pound packages and is also available loose in bins in some Chinese markets. The slabs are about 5 inches long, 1 1/4 inches wide, and a scant 1/2 inch thick. The scraping of the sugar is extremely labor-intensive, so some cooks dissolve the slabs of sugar in water, which is less authentic but much easier to prepare. Be sure to use glutinous rice flour here, not regular rice flour! See the introduction to Turnip Cake for how to serve and store this New Year's Cake.

Nixon's re-establishment of relations with China led Americans to discover, among other things, that there was more to Chinese cooking than the Cantonese dishes we had all grown up with.

Miso soup — a fermented-soybean broth — is not difficult to make at home. Freeze the ginger and thaw it before squeezing; that way, extracting the juice will be easy. Chilled sake goes well with the meal.

Pae Thee Thoke Chinese long beans, also known as yard-long beans, really are long — about 18 inches.

This is a big-deal dish. But the numerous steps, all easy, transform the duck into a wonder of subtle spiciness. We had this dish in Xi'an, where five-spice powder in the rub and the dipping salt were lovely touches.

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less. Makes use of the microwave oven.

To form the noodle cakes, measure them out by taking a few strands of noodles and loosely squiggling them into a tablespoon. Once you get the hang of the amount needed, you can pretty much eyeball it.

Red-cooking is a Chinese method of braising in a soy sauce-based liquid. Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.