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 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.

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

The latest photographic tome by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid is anything but a traditional cookbook. Part travelogue, part recipe collection, and part ethnographic treatise, Beyond the Great Wall takes an indepth look at the foods of China's non-Han minorities.

As always, their photos are amazing, making me want to hop on the next plane to Kashgar, just to start. And the recipes, even with exotic-sounding names like Tajik nan and Kazakh pulao, seem surprisingly comfort-food-ish. There are also instructions for momos, those spectacular little dumplings from that famous and newsworthy province in the southwest. Most of the recipes are quite easy, thanks to the authors' substituting a few unorthodox ingredients for more familiar ones (a yak bone broth becomes oxtail broth, etc.)

I decided to begin with a ginger and carrot stir-fry from the Miao minority in Guizhou province. The important part to note is that the namesake ingredients are julienned. Mandolines would help, but if you want a rugged challenge and have strong hands, slicing everything with a cleaver also works. The original recipe also called for pork strips, but I decided to substitute with my local market's bean curd skin, which hooked me by being pre-shredded.

The only highlight of being left at home while your significant other goes to Europe is receiving food gifts when he returns.

Jacob went to a conference in Hungary a few weeks ago and traipsed around Eastern Europe afterwards. I stayed in Beijing, fuming about the ridiculous cost of a Beijing-Budapest ticket in August (and finally escaping to Hong Kong in frustration.) I was, however, ecstatic when he brought home not only chocolate and liquor, but also goose liver foie gras and fresh Hungarian truffles. 

What to do with these, what to do, I mused, while bouncing around in giddiness. (You must understand, dear reader, that while I am blessed with abundant Chinese food here, I have also been seriously deprived of decent Western cuisine.) The truffles had to be used, pronto, before they lost their fragrance. I was reminded of one day in culinary school, when the stewarding department accidentally sent up a softball-sized chunk of black French truffles instead of a few ounces; when the chef-instructor shrugged and turned a blind eye, my classmates and I feverishly shaved the entire chunk and made the most decadent polenta I am likely to ever eat in my life. Likewise, this time I also had to liberally use truffles in whatever I made.

Despite my pledge to eat healthier, I'm still on an Indian-Chinese food kick this week.  Following up my fried Gobi Manchurian, I decided to make fried chicken lollipops. A good excuse would be that this is a handy appetizer to know in case I ever host a last-minute party.

Since chicken is one of two meats that are popular in India (the other being lamb), it's not surprising that cooks would get creative with a little drumstick. All you need is a paring knife to cut the tendons and scrape down the meat so the meat forms a nice round ball at the end. And the end result is wings that are much less messy to eat, especially when you're dealing with the hazards of a spicy, sticky sauce. 

I first made lollipops way back in culinary school in my hors d'œuvre module. My chef-instructor hinted that this was his original idea, and that he deserved credit if we were to ever offer them on our own restaurant menus. I was impressed, until later when I began to see these not only in Indian-Chinese restaurants but also on the Food Network. So much for original ideas. At least you can rest assured that this is a better lollipop method than jamming chicken nuggets on popsicle sticks.

Note to self: Never bake cookies before breakfast, especially if you are starving.

Yesterday, faced with the prospect of no milk accompaniment for cornflakes, I decided to hold out until lunch. I wanted to try out a recipe for almond cookies and told myself I would only eat 1 or 2, then fix myself a sensible lunch. However, hunger and gluttony got the best of me, and I ended up wolfing down eight.

You live, you learn.

My father used to own a Cantonese bakery and he would make these enormous, 5-inch wide crisp almond cookies with an egg-y sheen. I wanted more manageable-sized cookies, so I tried a recipe out of Chinatown: Sweet Sour Spicy Salty, a book I borrowed from the school I teach at. A recipe from the book I tried before was a dud, but fortunately this one turned out fine, giving me crisp and buttery textured cookies.

The only alteration I made was adding a half cup of ground almonds for a more nutty flavor. Although next time methinks I should replace the all-purpose flour with almond flour from Carrefour's enormous flour selection. (Or cashew flour, or even goji flour. Ah, Carrefour. What unusual flour don't you have?)

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Other cookie recipes to try:

I was first introduced to Indian Chinese food a few years ago in Hong Kong, at a restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui whose name now escapes me. My first thought was, "This is Chinese food?" My second thought was, "How ironic." The cuisine of China, brought over to India by Chinese immigrants many generations ago and given an Indian make-over, is now in the 21st century being brought to a special administrative region of China by Indian immigrants.

Chinese food developed in India the way it does around the world: by immigrants using techniques from home to cook their new world ingredients. They begin by feeding themselves, then perhaps open a restaurant to earn a living, thus adapting the food even more to suit local palettes.

Indian-Chinese cuisine incorporates not only Chinese ingredients like soy sauce and and ginger, but also cumin, turmeric, and hot chilis. Neither beef nor pork, the de facto meat of China, are used, because of India's large Hindu and Muslim populations. That leaves chicken, lamb, and vegetables as the mainstays.