If you've seen me in the past few weeks and expressed even vague interest in Asian food and/or cooking, I've probably bored you to tears gushing on about the best cookbook of the year (IMHO), 101 Easy Asian Recipes. The title is both accurate and a bit tongue-in-cheek, since it makes the book sound like something fusion-y and inauthentic and terrible, when in fact, it inauthentic, and unabashedly so, and wonderful. The back of the book has big speech bubbles boasting "100% inauthentic" and "very good" and "easy, really." It's fab.

The book comes from Peter Meehan, who has worked with David Chang (Momofuku) and Danny Bowein (Mission Chinese) for years, co-authored the Momofuku cookbook, and now edits Lucky Peach magazine. He's clearly a meticulous guy who gets how Asian food works -- the balance of flavors, the precision with cooking times, etc. But this book takes a step away from the "this has 500 ingredients/steps, but it's worth it"-style of recipes, opting instead for formulas that follow two important ground rules: no deep-frying, and no recipes within recipes. The rationale: Asian food isn't just for Sunday projects, it's for weeknight dinner with kids. Good bless you, Peter Meehan. 

've had this Thai glutinous rice sitting in the bottom of my cupboard for months, but never quite worked up the guts to make it into something until, a few  weeks ago, the waiter at our little Laotian spot in the neighborhood told me that sticky rice may be the easiest thing on their menu to make at home. That doesn't necessarily say much, considering the menu includes items like crispy rice salad (involving rice that's cooked, mixed with other stuff, formed into balls, deep-fried, broken into pieces, and tossed with a gazillion other ingredients, which I know only because I've made it and whoa, pain in the butt doesn't even start). Still: "easier" was motivation enough not to let that rice sit untouched.

Not a full post today, but a bunch of odds and ends that I've been meaning to share.

Marmalading: That's what kept me out of trouble and away from insanity during our two-ish weeks of hibernation under an impenetrable and, apparently, unplowable 30 inches of snow. (Attention DC officials: occasionally, it snows here. Surprise! Buy another plow or two.) Fortunately, my fridge was chock-full of citrus you've never heard us, because Cathy went to Texas for a marathon series of cooking classes, and her trip coincided with Central Market's wonderful Citrus Festival, and she is a goddess and a wonderful friend and a crazy lover of citrus like yours truly. (I paid her in Barcelonian anchovies, yes). For most of last weekend, our home smelled like a heavenly mix of chartreuse hot cocoa (thank you Pam!) and boiling citrus peel. Not shabby. Not shabby at all.

This is a happy-accident story, but it doesn't start that way. This past fall, I was determined to make hachiya persimmons into smooth, spiced butter. But each time I tried, I created something so ruined, so mouth-dryingly inedible, that I had to dump the entire thing. I did this too many times. cough three.

Fuyu persimmons are sweet and crunchy. They can be eaten as you would an apple. Hachiya persimmons are not as friendly. If you buy them hard, you must wait to eat them, or you will take a bite and your entire mouth will turn dry and chalky, like what tannins in wine do to your mouth but unpleasant, a thousand times unpleasant. To avoid this, you must tend to your hachiyas: put them in a paper bag, set them somewhere warm but not too warm, encourage them to ripen but protect them dutifully against spoilage. Hachiyas can be eaten when they are soft all over, and plump like a balloon. At that point, their astringency goes away, leaving behind soft, floral-flavored flesh that's wonderful as is, or in dozens of baked goods.

The catch, though, is that if even one bit of the persimmon hasn't reached that perfect stage of ripeness, its astringency will infiltrate and ruin whatever you're making with it. This is especially true in the case of butter, where the persimmons are cooked together and then pureed. And so it was for me, time after time, I found persimmons, coddled them to ripeness, cooked them, blended them, tasted them, cursed, and tossed the mixture into the trash. So wasteful, so frustrating. There must be a better way.