It is almost perverse how much I crave a good xiaolongbao. There are few moments more highly anticipated than seeing my order slowing coming from the kitchen to my table, in a stack of steaming baskets. The dumplings are all beautifully pleated at first, enticing but prim. But when picked up by chopsticks, they become so bulging with savory broth, held back by so thin of a wrapper, that they are begging for you to unleash their juicy insides.

That said, there are few things more frustrating than xiaolongbao that don't satisfy.

If I were in Taipei there is no question that I would make a beeline to is the flagship Din Tai Fung, hailed by many afficionados as the xiaolongbao mecca. But since I'm in Shanghai, I decided to try out the Din Tai Fung at Xintiandi, expecting it to be at least as good as Beijing's Shin Kong Place branch. This is, after all, the city that claims xiaolongbao as a native dish.

(Food for thought...)

I have recently made a few updates to Appetite for China so it can be more user-friendly. Inspired by Wandering Chopsticks' simple but useful indices for her recipes and reviews, I have created similar Recipes by Category and Restaurants by City archives, both prominent in the top menu bar. 

In case you would rather bypass the browsing and go straight to a certain recipe or blog post, I have added the ever-more-popular Google search bar to find anything on this site within seconds. Hurray for (me catching up with) technology! Now I (and you) don't have to scroll through the archives to pinpoint something specific.

But I would still like to know your thoughts on improving the site. What would you like to see more of?

-Recipes from a particular region?

-Desserts?

-Dining out?

-What to mix with baijiu to make it palatable?

Let me know in the comments below!

There's more to wonton wrappers than just encasing pork and shrimp, however delicious the result is. If you're in need of a quick dessert, these chocolate and banana wontons take almost no time to make.

I have seen some recipes for dessert wontons that call for deep frying. With these wontons, I was able to use a bare minimum of oil (about 3/4 cup) and still achieve crispness. The trick is to refrain from getting fancy with with folding, and stick to the simple triangle. The flatness of the resulting wonton makes it easier to fry up all around the melt the chocolate inside. 

As for the filling, I just finely chopped some bananas and a milk chocolate Ritter Bar. No need to pre-melt the chocolate. Just make sure you don't overdo the filling; a heaping tablespoon of mixed banana and chocolate is more than adequate. And afterward, just spinkle some powdered sugar for presentation, or even granulated sugar if you happen to be out of the former like I was.

Either way, you get a simple dessert in about 15 minutes.

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Related recipes:

Homemade Almond Milk with Bananas and Honey
MFK Fisher's Chocolate Pudding
Coconut Hot Chocolate

I have eaten Hong Kong-style French toast many times before, but not this variation.

In Hong Kong, French toast can range in thickness from regular sliced bread to John Grisham paperback. Usually it's topped with butter, peanut butter or sweetened condensed milk, or all three. And sometimes pork floss. And every once in a while, you come across bread on steroids, like the one I ordered yesterday at Lisboa, a Macanese restaurant in Shanghai.

It was a block about half the size of your average loaf, overloaded with black sesame and with specks of bacon. The top was buttered, slit in Tic-Tac-Toe fashion, and browned to the crispness that I liked. And it came with a trio of dipping sauces: honey, sweetened condensed milk, and melty vanilla ice cream. 

Two months later and I'm still fantasizing about this maeun-tang, or spicy fish soup. 

Cod and a few clams in a Korean chili paste-laced broth and topped with shiso leaves: this is a poor woman's seafood heaven. I ate a version of this soup practically every day in Seoul, the best one from a restaurant on the second floor of Seoul's Noryangjin Fish Market. For spice fiends, it's hard to resist a bubbling hot, fiery red soup that comes with its own burner.

While Noryangjin is lesser known than Tokyo's famed Tsukiji fish market, it rivals Tsukiji in sheer size. You can bet most of Seoul's restaurants source their fish from this wholesale arena. My photos can't do justice to the sprawling market, the rows and rows of exotica in my landlubber's eyes.

(So although these photos are a couple months old, now that I finally retrieved them from the USB card reader screw-up I couldn't resist sharing them. Due to painfully slow internet, I only uploaded a few here; the rest can be viewed in my Flickr set.)

We went in the mid-afternoon and were spared the crowds. These crabs were mere minutes of steaming away from being supper. 

I had plans. Big plans that involved a ton of peanut and sesame oils, chilis, mala peppercorns, and high wattage wok usage. During Golden Week, one of the 2 times a year  all of China is off from work and I'm completely free of teaching, I was going to cook up a storm.

But I'm currently down in Shanghai, in a wok-less apartment with nary a soy sauce bottle in sight. Don't get me wrong. I love being here, in this nice, renovated lane house that belongs to a friend. But he's in Canada so much that the kitchen is as empty as that of a college dorm. Upon arrival I did a quick cabinet assessment. I found a handful of spices, Bisquick, expired peanut butter, and a Sherpa guide offering delivery from 73 restaurants around town. There are, happily, chopsticks in the drawers.

I quickly jettisoned my cooking plans for the week; it made little sense to stock a pantry full of Chinese cooking oils, sauces, and dried goods just to make a few dinners. Instead, I got grain-happy at the grocery store and stocked up on chickpeas, barley, and inexpensive fresh produce. The fewer ingredients needed for a dish, the better. This teaches me to not take my pantry staples in my own apartment for granted. At least I'm forced to be more creative when planning meals.

Xiaolongbao, those glorious steamed dumplings with a meat and soup filling, have migrated far beyond Shanghai and gained a cult following. Meanwhile, another obsession-worthy Shanghainese specialty has remained a local secret.

Shengjian bao, they call it here. Think of it as a fried version of xiaolongbao. Well, a bun, really. A soup bun that is pan-fried until the bottoms are just crisp and the sesame seeds and chives on top meld into the crunchy casing.

When I come to Shanghai I get my shengjian bao from two places. One is in the French Concession, a 3-minute walk from where i usually stay. The baozi aren't spectacular, but they're great for a cheap lunch or hunger fix. The other is the venerable and endearingly misspelled Yang's Fry-Dumpling, just north of People's Square and right across the street from another cheap-eats institution. If you eat shengjian bao only once in Shanghai (or twice, or thrice), do so at Yang's.

Chowing down on shengjian bao is trickier than on xiaolongbao. First,the thick crunchy casing is such a good insulator that the soup is still piping hot 10 minutes after you sit down. Burnt tongues are common, but worth dealing with.

Chickpeas don't appear often enough in my dishes. Call it laziness, or impatience. Whenever I want to whip up something simple and meatless, I usually head straight for lentils, quinoa, barley, any dry grain that doesn't take over an hour to prepare.

Yesterday, for once, I planned my dinner early. I set my dried chickpeas on the stove and went back to work for an hour. For once I had no hunger pangs to distract me or tell me to screw the long cooking times and just get dumplings next door instead.

The sauce part takes little time. Just soften the onions and carrots, stir in the curry paste and coconut milk, and add spinach towards the end. Finishing with Thai basil and a squeeze of lime juice, I had a basic, hearty, and portable bowl of curry to eat laptop-side.

I remember a time when pork belly was shunned in the U.S. as a fatty, undesirable cut of meat. But thanks to a few big-name chefs, this unctuous piece of hog is gracing some of the country's most popular dining spots. David Chang's Berkshire pork belly in a bun may have been the most lusted-after dish in New York in the past 5 years. 

Which is why I'm surprised red-braised pork is still not very popular outside of China. It's one of the least fiery dishes in the entirety of Hunan cuisine, and very easy to make at home. What omnivore can resist a dish of braised pork cooked with sugar, cinnamon, chilis, and star anise? The smells alone are intoxicating, and make me jittery with anticipation as I could down the minutes until braising is done.

I am a huge fan of cooking with whole spices. Ground cinnamon can never substitute cinnamon sticks in a braise. Ground Sichuan pepper doesn't have the same punch as whole or crushed peppercorn. And I'm prone to ignoring a recipe's call for ground cumin, when whole cumin has been the friend that never disappoints.

The fragrance of freshly toasted whole cumin can make me delirious with hunger. I know that whatever's touched with cumin will be smoky, substantial, and evocative of a far-off land blessed with pungent spices. If the food on this site seems cumin-heavy, that's because I use heaping spoonfuls and, when working off other recipes, double or triple the amounts. Is there a support group for this kind of spice addiction?

This eggplant and black bean salad is a great backdrop for another cumin invasion. The spice adds a nutty dimension to the eggplant, and highlights the saltiness of the black beans. (Salted black beans, also called fermented black beans, is usually found in the preserved goods section of a Chinese market. Rinse before use.) Try this appetizer not only with Chinese main courses but also Middle Eastern dishes.

What's your spice fetish?

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Eggplant, Cumin, and Black Bean Salad
Adapted from Chinatown by Ross Dobson

Serves 4 as an appetizer