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. 

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. 

It took a trip to Japan to realize I've been making edamame wrong all these years.

Well, not necessarily wrong wrong. But not the best way possible.

When I discovered the joys of edamame about 10 or 12 years ago, I would buy bags of the frozen stuff, microwave them, and sprinkle table salt on top. Then I progressed to boiling them in a pot. When I discovered fresh edamame in Chinatown, and replaced Morton with Malden, I thought this was as good as edamame could get. After all, it tasted the same as at all the Japanese restaurants in the US. 

Then I went to Japan. In Tokyo this past summer, I noticed something slightly different about the fuzzy little legume that was as good an accompaniment with omikase-style sushi as it was with beer at 2 a.m. My meals of tempura, sashimi, fugu, and yes, even fugu sashimi were all bookended by a dish of edamame that tasted, well, better. Was it just because my subconscious dictated that the Japanese food had to taste better in Japan?

One night when returning to the guest house, a traveler from the north of Japan was snacking on some edamame in front of the TV. He was watching game show contestants clad in knee pads and mud hurling themselves around an obstacle course. He offered me some edamame. 

I have been eating water spinach for as long as I can remember chewing food. Few children love vegetables, but even as a toddler I loved these long stalks of water spinach that stayed crunchy even when wilted. Of course, it helped that my parents never called it spinach.

The Chinese for water spinach is 空心菜 (kong xin cai)，which literally means "empty-hearted vegetable." Indeed, the long hollow stalks have the advantage of holding onto all flavorings they are cooked with. Unlike gai lan (Chinese kale) or plain old lettuce, it sops up sauce very well. Often cooks stir-fry it with fermented tofu. But I prefer what Chinese restaurants mean when they say "qing chao", or "clear stir-fry." 

I have the hardest time not ordering scallion pancakes when I go out for Chinese food. They make great appetizers when the entrees happen to take longer than five minutes. They absorb the sauce of your moo shu pork like a sponge. And your vegetarian friends can eat them with abandon. That said, few scallion pancakes beat the homemade version, when they come off the skillet hot and golden brown.

This recipe is long overdue. I put off posting a recipe until I had enough photos to go along with the instructions; like folding dumplings, making scallion pancakes is much more visual than your average stir-fry. I've eaten or seen too many that are too thick, or lack the flaky layers that define Chinese scallion pancakes. Also, they aren't supposedly to be as enormous as a Frisbee.

The good news is that once you get used to rolling out the dough, these will easily become part of your reportoire. There are few ingredients, most of which are pantry staples. And once you coax the dough into little patties, they can be refrigerated or frozen for future use. The one requirement is to put your woks away; use only a nonstick flat bottom skillet for pan-frying.

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Chinese Scallion Pancake

If you're a fan of pickles straight from the jar, you'll love this recipe. If you're a fan of kimchi or other banchan, you'll also love this. 

Chinese restaurants overseas, even those in Chinatown, rarely serve appetizers. But in China, dinners at mid-range or higher end restaurants usually begin with a trail of cold appetizer dishes. You can get peanuts, tofu, turnips, carrots, radishes, mostly with a cold snappy bite to wet your appetite for the hot dishes to come. And if you're hungry and in desperate need of food NOW, it helps to have a bunch of tasty snacks to nibble on. 

The trick to making these cucumbers crisp is to drain the excess water out, by tossing them in salt and letting them sit for 20 minutes. If you don't have fresh red chilis available, you can add a couple teaspoonfuls of jarred chili sauce instead.

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More vegetarian Chinese recipes to try:

Sichuan Cucumber Salad

Shandong-Style Asparagus 

Turnip Cake (Law bok gow) 

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Spicy Pickled Cucumbers

It's hard for me to choose a favorite noodle, but in terms of cooking convenience, vermicelli rice noodles are hard to beat. You can throw them in a noodle soup, stir-fry them, or dip them in a hot pot. (And I will sooner give up lamb than rice noodles when I hot pot, which is saying ALOT.) Rice vermicelli will cook in no time, perfect if you're in a hurry or just plain lazy. 

Called mifen (米粉) in Mandarin and fensi (same characters) in Cantonese, these super-thin rice noodles are almost always sold dry. If you're making other meat and vegetable dishes, you can whip up a very basic stir-fried vermicelli with just onions, scallions, garlic, and ginger. Or if it's a one-dish meal you're after, add some shrimp, chicken, beef, or pork.  

To prep rice vermicelli for cooking, just soak them in cold water for 15 to 25 minutes, or in warmer water for under 10 minutes if you're in a hurry. (Careful not to oversoak.) Once you stir-fry your meats and vegetables, add the sauce and noodles and stir well for a few minutes until they dry up. (The crispy parts that stick to your pan are a bonus.)

Below is a very basic but flavorful recipe for stir-fried vermicelli. Feel free to elaborate!

Oh, I also love dipping stir-fried vermicelli in congee. Odd, yes, but don't knock it 'til you've tried it.

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Other noodles recipes to try:

Before my parents retired, they spent at least 15 years each in the food industry, working for hotel restaurants and Chinese bakeries. Every 12- to 14-hour shift would leave them exhausted, and understandably, my father had little desire to step foot in our own kitchen. My mother, on the other hand, sought refuge in front of our home stove. To the relaxing din of Cantonese soap operas, she would try out the "Western" tricks she learned on the job with our straight-from-Chinatown ingredients.

Most Chinese moms are ardent traditionalists with food. Mine is not. On a whim, she would make pizza with Cantonese sausage, steak with hoisin sauce, and sushi with roast pork. The strangest part is that most of the time, the food tasted very good.

So I didn't hesitate when she wanted me to help her with a new appetizer for Chinese New Year dinner. Rather than a traditional dish, she decided we should try something she "learned from Hong Kong TV." 

Most years, our New Year dinner would have some form of taro: claypot chicken and taro, or taro in a version of Buddha's Delight. This year, we used the purplish tuber in taro and pumpkin tofu puffs.

Pumpkins and squashes are so inexpensive in China, even more than in the US, that I cook with them whenever possible. (At 3 to 5 kuai per medium pumpkin, what's not to love?) Calabaza and butternut are the varieties that appear most in my meals and snacks. But if I'm craving something with even more natural sweetness, I'll pick up some kabocha instead.

Kabocha squash, also called Japanese pumpkin (日本南瓜 riben nangua), has a knobbly green outer skin and yellowish flesh. It's sweeter than even butternut squashes; simple simmering will give you a light toothsome taste, while roasting for an hour makes the sugary juices seemingly burst from their pores. 

Today for lunch, I paired roasted kabocha with a very easy lentil soup with sautéed bok choy. I left the skin on (be sure to wash the outside thoroughly), and roasted the squash in thin slices. At first I just served up the slices on the side, but on my second helping I cut the slices even smaller and threw them in the bowl. Either way, the sugary squash was a nice compliment to the savory, paprika-tinged lentil soup.

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Other heart-warming soups recipes:

Red Lentil and Okra Soup

Winter Melon Soup with Shiitakes and Speck Ham

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When in the South, eat okra.

As a Chinese-born, New England-bred chica, I first tried okra at the ripe old age of 21. I was aprehensive, having heard okra derided as a bitter, gooey freak-of-a-vegetable (mosty by non-Southerners). Then I tried the Creole okra gumbo and fried okra at Magnolia's in Cambridge, MA. What were these okra-haters thinking? These things are addictive!

(I came to the conclusion that the people who despise okra are the same who despise bitter melon. A microscopic bit of bitterness never killed anyone; just makes the flavor spectrum more interesting.) 

Granted, okra isn't just used in Southern Creole-inspired food. Indian, Middle Eastern, Caribbbean, and North African cuisines also incorporate okra in plenty of thick stews. As much as I like fried okra, gumbo and bhindi masala are hearty dishes that make the best use of okra's snappy texture and slightly bitter taste.

Last week I bought a bunch of beautiful okra pods from a Tampa farmer's market. The soup I ended up making for lunch is slightly Indian-influenced, with some crumbled blue tortilla chips thrown in for garnish.

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