Jacob and I were invited to dinner at Cepe at the Ritz-Carlton a few days before our trip to Seoul, and it was nice to experience the hotel on the eve of that famous sporting event in August. It seemed that the Financial Street area had yet to receive its influx of tourists, so it was still pretty calm for the time being.

As regular readers may know, I have been pretty obsessed with seafood lately. I'm still doting on my photos of mussels and scallops from the Westin brunch, and obsessively searching for a recipe for seafood stew like the ones I had in Korea. This is because I have been deprived of good seafood since moving to Beijing. Chefs in Guangdong province seem to be blessed by some divine oceanic god; in the north, not so much. So every once in a while, it's nice to visit a restaurant that is able to source good marine life and cook it well.

This big beautiful scallop came on a bed of white asparagus and prosciutto. It was roasted until just done, with maximum tenderness. Rarely during a formal multi-course meal would I want another dish of the same instead of anticipating the next (mild ADD, perhaps?) but in this case I would have jumped at seconds.

It's fitting that a country so obsessed with kimchi would have a museum devoted to it. On one of our last days in Seoul Jacob and I took the subway to the COEX Mall, which housed the Kimchi Field Museum in the basement.

The place was rather small, but included a small tasting room and the standard "history of" and "how to make" displays. Over a hundred plastic models of various kinds of kimchi took up a third of the museum. I would probably have expected the shrimp, cod gills, and ginseng kimchi. But pickled pumpkin? Persimmon? Pheasant? The museum was indeed an eye-opener. 

Mall food in Asia tends to be of higher quality than its counterpart in the west, so it wasn't surprising we found Korean restaurant inside COEX that served a nice bubbling beansprout rice stew...

...along with the requisite 5 or 6 side dishes.

One of the most memorable things I ate last week was in Hongdae, the funky district around Hongik University. We found a pod-like little glass box of a restaurant amidst higher concrete buildings. You are free to draw all over the tables, and are given pens to do so.

(Bibim naengmyun)

My week-long trip to Seoul turned me from a recreational dabbler of Korean food to a full-on addict. Now that I'm home and about 10 pounds heavier, I can't stop thinking about bibimbap, dakgalbi (pan-fried chicken), bibim naengmyun (cold noodles with Korean chilli paste), among others.

The first thing I ate after landing in Seoul was dolsot bibimbap, presented in a hot stone pot so the rice on the sides become crispy and the raw egg on top cooks as you mix everything. This was at a traditional Korean restaurant in Insadong where the seats are cushions on an ondol wooden floor. A nice experience, but certainly not the most comfortable.

I instantly fell in love with the spicy seafood bean paste stew, which I apparently forgot to photograph in my state of rapture.

(Dolsot bibimbap)

(Side rant: As my luck would have it, when I started uploading photos after returning home, my card reader started acting funky and ejected in the middle of the upload. Unfortunately, the mishap caused about 100 photos, including everything from my last day at Noryangjin Fish Market, to disappear. This is what I get for buying cheap card readers in China.)

Cherries, of course, are the fruits used in the most classical French preparation of clafoutis. As recently as 2 weeks ago, black cherries were in abundance all over my local markets. I bought them for eating whole, for making black cherry iced tea, but not for baking. Now it's too late, and the only cherries left are rotten-looking and expensive. 

Yesterday at the grocery store I grabbed some lychees, which still seem to be semi-abundant.  Not best looking lychees ever, but good enough for Beijing. Lychees hold their shape very well when baked, so I just soaked them in rum and made tropics-influenced clafoutis with a coconut milk custard. They took longer to bake than I thought, because the deepness of my ramekins. But they did make my kitchen, and entire apartment for that matter, smell like lychees. Really, there is no need for scented candles or home fragrance sprays when you live with a baker.

When your significant other decides to extend your birthday by suggesting Sunday brunch at the Westin, it's hard to refuse.

Granted, I had a long-time hatred and distrust of buffets. In fact, I revulsed at the thought of them. Buffets reminded me of soul-sucking Vegas vacations and childhood meals out in suburban Massachusetts. My well-meaning but frugal parents even held my college graduation party at a Chinese-style buffet; insisting that the all-you-can-eat platters of strange-flavor beef and California rolls were a "good deal". I would have sooner organized a reception at a Chinatown dai pai dong.

But I digress. 

Beijing's Westin Sunday brunch shattered my belief that buffets were all about quantity over quality. I even went easy at first on the limitless Champagne, so my judgement wouldn't be clouded. It was an exercise in restraint.

The strongest indicator of substance over fluff was the seafood. I piled my plate with lobster, crab legs, jumbo prawns, clams, and the freshest mussels I had tasted in ages. And I doubt I could have found a better seafood bouillabaisse this side of the Caucasus. (For the record, Jacob and I had a very light dinner the night before, and didn't eat any more food for the rest of the day.)  

I like to think of this as the Punky Brewster of fried rice dishes. While seafood and pork versions would easily get upstaged by lots of vegetables, vegetarian versions are as colorful as your market's produce section allows. Today I brought home green beans, purple cabbage, and red and yellow bell peppers to go with my blackish shiitake mushrooms. To my knowledge there are no blue vegetables in existence, or I would have gotten them too.

My recipe eschews the scramble egg that is so many other fried rices. It doesn't seem needed, with so many textures already, but you can certainly throw some in for protein. As for the vegetables, the only important factor is that they are chopped small to cook quickly. This is a good way to use up not only leftover rice, but also whatever produce is close to being tossed out. 

As for the rice, I always use cold rice for stir-frying because it has the right stiffness. But if you don't have leftovers and absolutely must make this (I'm touched), try cooking your fresh rice with a little less water. 

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Vegetable Fried Rice

Serves 2

Last week, while recovering from bad restaurant overload, I cooked at home every night. The rain and gray skies were making me thoroughly depressed. Jacob was in Shanghai on business, so I was cooking just for one. I started to rely on fast fixes for food, including my all-time quickest, unhealthiest, and yet oddly delicious comfort meal: fried eggs and rice doused in hoisin sauce. No wonder my palate was deadening.

In the essay "A is for Dining Alone" from An Alphabet for Gourmets, MFK Fisher wrote,"It took me several years of such periods of being alone to learn how to care for myself, at least at table. I came to believe that since nobody else dared feed me as I wished to be fed, I must do it myself, and with as much aplomb as I could muster." After discovering that dining out alone meant a succession of bad seats and pitying stares, she settled on making well-planned meals for herself at home.

(Thank you, Chuan Ban)

Maybe it's not just me. Maybe other people also go through a cursed period of dining out, when every restaurant meal makes you want to crawl back to the safety of your own kitchen.

It started with a string of three Vietnamese restaurants. I had been avoiding Vietnamese here for lack-of-authenticity's sake, but recently got an immense craving for pho. Two weeks ago Jacob and I were in Houhai and, for lack of better choices, ate at Nuage, a trendy joint that seemed to care ten times more about décor than food. I won't go into a whole review. But I will say the spring rolls skins were lockjaw-inducing in their toughness. And the cocktails were possibly the worst I have had in China, which is saying a lot. 

The next day I met up with Sandra from Savour Asia for lunch at Le Little Saigon, a new Vietnamese/French restaurant just north of the Drum and Bell Towers. The Vietnamese coffee was what I had been craving for months. But thick well-done flank steak has no place in my ideal bowl of pho. However, I'm such a sucker for good coffee and copies of Le Monde for perusing (in China!) that I just might return.

I can't celebrate today without also paying tribute to someone else who shares the same birthday. The late M.F.K. Fisher, arguably the best American food writer of the 20th century, would have turned 100 today. If you haven't read anything by her already, do it, starting with The Gastronomical Me. Her enthusiasm for food and eloquence with words have no parallel. 

The last book of hers I finished was A Stew or a Story, a collection of short magazine pieces. In one essay about picnics, her al fresco dessert suggestion was a chilled chocolate mousse. I liked the recipe for two reasons: 1) No heavy cream, which is hard to find within walking distance, and 2) Because the recipe was written before the ubiquity of electric mixers, it assumes that you will mix and whip everything by hand.

I hadn't whipped egg whites in far too long, so my forearm got a workout getting the whites to soft peak. The old-fashioned simplicity of the recipe did seemed nice, I thought. I just melted the chocolate, stirred in the egg yolks and rum and vanilla, and folded in the egg whites. The puddings were all set to pop into the fridge to chill for 12 hours. 

Every time I am at a congee shop, I wonder if the congee business might be the most lucrative and relaxing in the restaurant industry. Your main ingredients are rice and water (and stock, but that's also mostly water), which are dirt cheap. You make one big vat of porridge beforehand. Your menu can be vast, but each of those variations (pork, egg, seafood, whatever) requires just a tiny bit of cooking or heating up at the end. And congee is such amazing and versatile comfort food that people will flock to it for breakfast, lunch, or hangover relief.

My latest congee "effort" makes use of stir-fried chicken and goji berries. The latter is because I had leftover meat from my Orange Sesame Chicken, and the former because I just bought an expensive bag of organic gojis that I should cook with instead of snacking on like raisins. I don't know how many of the antioxidant claims attributed to gojis are true, but I'll keep eating them if they are reputed to help your eyesight. (Food blogging and other frequent computer usage doesn't exactly do wonders for myopia.)