I've been thinking a lot recently about how the names of Chinese foods vary so much between China and the US.

One example is lemon chicken. In Southern China, lemon chicken usually means a whole bone-in chicken, steamed, chopped up, and served with a light lemon sauce. In the US, you'd get perfect cubes or slices of breast meat that has been fried and coated with a thick lemon sauce. (In other words, more like this.) A few places, like this takeout spot in Park Slope, may serve you something that looks like a lemon chicken kit that you put together: breaded and fried chicken with little seasoning, on top of some iceberg lettuce, and a container of something that's more or less lemon simple syrup.

Another example is Mongolian beef. In Beijing, Mongolian-style lamb or beef is stir-fried with toasted cumin seeds and whole red chilis. In the US, what has become Mongolian beef lacks any whole spices, but is pretty tasty in its own right. The only thing similar to its mainland Chinese cousin is the thinly sliced steak and abundance of leeks. The sauce, when done well, is pretty terrific. The beauty of Mongolian beef sauce is that none of the flavors stand out on their own, but rather, come together (as the Chinese would say) "harmoniously".

My electricity bill these past two months has been frightening. Living in a building with only two units that is considered a "house" by ConEdison's standards, my roommate and I have had to pay double the monthly amount of typical apartment tenants. And it doesn't help that we have three air conditioners. We try to use them a little as possible, but with July's record high temps and oppressive humidity, a little AC meant the difference between good night's rest and no sleep.

And of course, I can't not cook at home. As somewhat of a carb addict, 75% of my homecooked dinners, let's just be honest, involve noodles or pasta. But the noodle soups will have to wait until fall.

Cold noodles, on the other hand, are essential for the summer. They make great picnic food. They make great sides for cookouts. They are the same savory-sweet kind you get from the Chinese takeout, with less grease and no MSG. And they require very little prep time and don't even have to be reheated out of the fridge (within a reasonable number of days, of course.)

Most sane people keep a drawer full of delivery menus for the sole purpose of...ordering delivery. I too have a menu drawer, but can count on two hands the number of times I have actually ordered delivery in the past few years.

Call me a bad New Yorker.  I'm pretty good with picking up takeout while out somewhere, but dialing from home is another story. Being so dangerously close to the kitchen, I usually wind up studying the menu for half an hour, choosing an entree, then deciding, screw this, I can make the same dish, except way better.

This hubris usually leads me to spend another couple of hours ransacking my cabinets, schlepping to the grocery store, figuring out a strategy, then executing it. Even if it is already past 9pm and I'm starving. Sure, it would have been easier and about 1 hour and 50 minutes faster to just call the damn Golden Panda Dynasty, but definitely not as satisfying. Or so I tell myself.

I wonder if delivery menu one-upmanship can be classified as a psychological disorder. 

Although I write a blog on Chinese cooking, every once in a while I get a craving for concoctions that are a far cry from what anyone in China would actually eat.

Take Mandarin Chicken Salad, for example, also called "Asian Chicken Salad", "Chinese Chicken Salad", or the very archaic "Oriental Chicken Salad". (Note to Applebee's: hire a menu consultant from the 21st century.) For one thing, the Chinese think of eating raw lettuce as barbaric. But whoever thought of this hodgepodge of ingredients also had a brilliant marketing mind.

The idea of such a salad was probably born out of Californian Pan-Asian cuisine in the 1980s (some say from Wolfgang Puck's kitchen), when it was cool to be fit and just a little bit worldly. You take a bunch of romaine, mix it with cold chicken breast, some type of orange, add a soy-ginger-peanut-buttery dressing, and top it off with crunchy La Choy chow mein noodles or something similar. Just healthy enough, just exotic enough. The soy sauce, sesame oil, and ginger are the only things Asian about such a salad, but the names seemed to have stuck. 

This past weekend, I saw the effects of the chicken wing shortage that was reported earlier this year.

I was all set to grill wings for a last-minute July 4th/Birthday gathering, but one look at the Trader Joe's meat department derailed my plans. Brooklyn Fare didn't have wings either. Or Associated Supermarket. Forget shrimp. Chicken wings may be this season's most sought-after commodity. 

What every store had, however, was plenty of chicken thighs. At ridiculously low prices. It'll set you back $1.99/lb for "natural, hormone-free" chicken, and just a bit more for the organic, free-range variety. Legs and thighs may be awkward to pass around while sipping a beer outdoors or pretending to care about the World Cup, but are perfect for a braising dish I like to make even in the summer. 

I posted a recipe last year for pork adobo. But it is the chicken version that I make again and again (and again and again.) I first learned to make this Filipino dish from an ex-roommate. Certain friends have gotten sick of it after the 20th time, so now I learn to space out my cooking of it. Instead of twice a week, I'll indulge in my craving twice a season.

Every year around this time, I start to become giddy at the prospect of a long summer of cook-outs. And the excitement usually lasts about an hour, until I remember I don't actually have an apartment with outdoor space.

I have spent the bulk of my post-collegiate years in enormous cities with no breathing room (New York, Beijing, Shanghai). Outside space meant a fire escape, at best. With each passing year, outdoor cook-outs become less of a reality and more of a quaint abstract idea, like white picket fences and rent control. Aside from cozying up to friends and family in other states, I have become used to barbecue-less summers.

Until this year. This year I am the proud resident of an apartment with a guestimated 120 square feet of terrace space. With a grill. In New York. (Okay, Brooklyn, but still.) This may not seem like much, but I'm excited. This summer I'll be able to cook while communing with nature, even if "nature" just means a few trees that muffle the traffic noise from Atlantic Ave. 

When I moved into my new apartment a few months ago, the first thing I did was take inventory of the cupboards. (The previous tenants had left a decent supply of spices, oils, and condiments.) The second thing I did, even though it was almost 10pm by the time I was done unpacking, was march over the Trader Joe's and buy ground cumin. I had not planned on cooking that night. It just made me sleep better, knowing my kitchen was no longer eggregiously understocked.

Other than sea salt, cumin is the spice that I cannot with without. If I were only allowed two spices on a deserted island (with an otherwise fully-stocked kitchen), and had to choose between cumin and a pepper grinder, the former might win out. Just a whiff of toasted cumin seeds brings back a flood of memories of the best foods I have ever eaten: melty lamb shoulder from a Yemeni restaurant in Brooklyn, late night beef kebabs from a street vendor in Beijing, pilau from an Afghani restaurant near Boston.

On this blog already I have already made a good number of salads and other vegetarian dishes with cumin, but here's one for red meat eaters. Cumin is normally used in a lot of western Chinese cooking, such as that from Xi'an or the Xinjiang province, but periodically shows up in Hunan and Sichuan cooking as well.

There are two types of people in this world: those who go through bubble tea withdrawal every few days, and those who vehemently hate the drink. The latter will shudder at the chewiness of the tapioca pearls, and complain about how drinks should not be "lumpy".  I have a hard time understanding this textural phobia, but to each his own.

As for me, when in need of a cold drink and an afternoon snack, I like to kill two birds with one stone.

Or maybe three birds with one stone, if you need a cold drink, an afternoon snack, and a jolt of caffeine at the same time. Few caffeine sources taste better than cafe sua da, or iced Vietnamese coffee. While New York's early summer is not quite as oppresive as Hanoi's, it feels pretty close. So lately, I have been making Vietnamese coffee bubble "tea" to help with the humidity and afternoon slump.

Try this out you're also a bubble tea fan and caffeine addict. Here's what you need:

One of the things I missed the most while traveling was having a standard stock of kitchenware. When you're bopping around from city to city, and readjusting to a new kitchen every few months, you're not going to have all necessary tools at your disposal. Expecially the super heavy items, like a mortar and pestle. I went almost three years without one. If you cook for a living, that should be a crime.

I used a mortar and pestle whenever I could, like while working at The Hutong in Beijing, but for most of the last peripapetic 3 years I mostly made do with ground spices. I just couldn't justify moving around 10-pound stone objects to every kitchen I used. (Nevermind that I had at least 5 times the weight in cookbooks.) But now, ever since moving home, I've been crushing spices like a fanatic.

For anyone who craves the numbingness of Sichuan peppercorn, the whole spice will always be more satisfying than the pre-ground variety. If you have to use "crack" to describe any food item, use it for Sichuan peppercorn, instead of Momofuku desserts. So, when faced with a mountain of shimeji, king trumpet, and large shiitake mushrooms (went a little overboard at Whole Foods), I decided to sort of recreate a wild mushroom stir-fry from a trip last year to Chengdu. 

At a dinner party earlier this week, a nutritionist from China told me point-blank the main problem with American diets is the overwhelming meat consumption. Meat was a bigger culprit that carbs or complex sugars, he said. Americans think nothing of eating a 22 oz. steak or a bucket of fried chicken in a single meal, with potato as a "vegetable" side. There's not moderation in this country, and that's why obesity is such a huge problem. I nodded and agreed, mentioning, among other things, the now notorious Double Down. 

The next night, without thinking, I made a pound of pork belly for dinner. 

To be fair, it was one of those cold and windy April days, and braised pork just seemed like a good idea. Frequent readers of this blog may remember that I have numerous other pork recipes. I mean, it's kind of a sin for someone of Asian descent to not be obsessed with fatty pork.