Saturday on the mountain.

I am rudely awoken at what seems like an unbearable hour - actually only 8:30, which is late for me - and dragged off to Mt. Rainier. One flat tire (fortunately not too far from home) and a two-hour drive later, we are at Paradise. This time, sadly, we do not stop for McDonald's on the way. It is too late for an Egg McMuffin by the time we make it that far, having lost a crucial half-hour by having to examine the (rapidly deflating) tire and returning home to exchange cars (if not tires). It is almost summer, but on the mountain the snow is still ten feet hight on the trail, although the roads are clear, save for a few that remain closed. We have lunch in the dining room of the newly-remodeled Paradise Inn (currently mostly staffed by Singaporean exchange students here to make enough money to travel around the States for the rest of the summer), decent but uninteresting, and then head over to the visitor's center to look at the view, still somewhat obscured by the clouds. I have never been up to Mt. Rainier so early in the season, and it is discombobulating to see the trails and meadows covered in several feet of snow.

Back in the car, the talk turns to food. Our guests have been traveling in the United States for nearly two weeks now, and they are tired of American food, however much they enjoyed the dinner at Lark the night before. My mother proposes a stop at Ranch 99, with dinner at the restaurant next door, on the way home. I promise to make congee for breakfast tomorrow night, and to cook dinner another night next week, both suggestions which are met with a considerable amount of enthusiasm. We find ourselves at the Great Wall Shopping Center in Renton, just south of Seattle, and head into Imperial Garden for dinner. (Most excursions to Mt. Rainier begin with breakfast at the McDonalds in Spanaway and end with dinner at Imperial Garden in Renton. I don't know why).

The restaurant is a big room filled with round tables and elaborately carved chairs, easily divided by rolling partitions for large parties (weddings, banquets, and so forth); it is mostly empty save for a few families scattered around, with one birthday party holding forth at a corner table. There are tanks of live seafood and a small bar and a tv screen displaying various special dishes that are not on the menu. We order soup and live shrimp and live crab and simply cooked vegetables and some tofu dishes and talk about our day. I am not really expecting much from our meal, what with my lifelong fear of Chinese restaurants in America and their tendency to let me down. The best part of our dinner is the quickly boiled (or steamed) live spot shrimp, huge and sweet and just cooked through, with a slightly spicy-sweet soy dipping sauce. The crab is cooked with ginger and scallions, the celery stir-fried with dried tofu and shreds of pork, the Chinese broccoli cooked with garlic, all of them unnecessarily weighed down with a heavy, cornstarch-thickened sauce.

There is a beef soup with drops of egg white and the sharp sting of cilantro, bowls of rice, the long-grained white rice so different from the medium-grained Japanese rice I am used to, fluffy and sweet, instead of firm and clean-tasting. Y., who is half-Japanese, used to speak disdainfully of this Chinese rice as "popcorn rice. It is a good enough dinner, but it makes me long for simpler things made without cornstarch or MSG, a more refined kind of cooking. I remember a few days ago, D. accused me of not liking Chinese food. Which is not true; what I don't like is American Chinese restaurants, with their gluey sauces obscuring perfectly fine ingredients. There is good Chinese food to be found, but it is hard, and it is rarely better than home cooking. I live for my trips to Taiwan or China, or even up to Vancouver (although I find myself in Taiwan or China more frequently than I find myself in Vancouver), and dinners at home when my parents are here, and at the homes of friends.

After dinner we go to Ranch 99, a different world from the American supermarket, with aisles crammed with brightly colored boxes of candies and cookies and crackers, instant noodles of all flavors, shelf after shelf of soy sauces and hot sauces and vinegars and oils of all kinds. The floor seems to always look a little grimy; the fluorescent lights feel a bit more glaring. The meat aisle smells like meat; tanks of seafood burble away. We scan the aisle filled with cans and jars of a countryside's worth of pickled vegetables, looking for just the right one to eat with tomorrow morning's congee, stock up on rice wine for cooking and vinegar for dipping boiled dumplings and live crab or shrimp and soy sauce for, well, everything, and some tight-skinned fresh ginger for whatever I can think of in the days to come.

Friday Lark. dinner for four.

It is quiet in the restaurant when I run in for dinner on a Friday night instead of my usual Saturday, asking for a table for four instead of just myself. I slide into one of the booths that line the south wall of the restaurant, and settle in to study the menu. My mother and her friends are late, which leaves me plenty of time to think about what we should order. I look up and see my mother go past the window - she has forgotten where the restaurant is - and then come back as I call her (thank goodness for cell phones, saving me a mad dash out the door). Usually when I am here I just order whatever special is on that night, and perhaps a soup or some sort of vegetable, but since there are four of us tonight I can try all sorts of things from the menu.

There is just one special tonight, the softshell crab, and the choice of dishes is left to me, a tricky task. I have to weigh the tastes and desires of our guests, Dr. and Mrs. Q, against my own choices. No chicken, no foie gras, no pork belly. (I am shattered when Dr. Q tells me I should only eat foie gras twice a year, and never pork belly, and I refrain from mentioning all the pork belly baguettes I have been eating at the Baguette Box lately). Eating with other people, like eating alone, has its pleasures and drawbacks together. You can order all sorts of things, but then, you have to order all sorts of things. We choose vegetable dishes and seafood dishes and the confit duck leg (deciding against steak and sweetbreads and the beef tartare) and ignore the charcuterie and save the cheese list for later.

The softshell crab comes with a smear of saffron aïoli and a watercress salad, the shell crisp and melting like the sugar crust on a crême brulée. We order the yellowtail carpaccio, drizzled with a little olive oil and lemon juice and scattered with a salad of fennel and olives; it reminds me of the sea bass carpaccio I once ate on the outdoor patio of a seaside restaurant somewhere in the Cinque Terre, under giant canvas umbrellas and twinkling lights, and the dark evening sky far above. There are sautéed wild mushrooms, morels and perhaps fresh porcini or oyster mushrooms, mushrooms I can't identify mingling with the tiny morels. The asparagus comes with a poached duck egg on the side, the asparagus fat and tender, the stem carefully peeled to reveal the pale green stalk within.

The broccoli rabe is tossed with crunchy little bits of coppa and dusted with some finely grated cheese that melts like newly fallen snow. We have a crisp-skinned confit duck leg served with fresh peas, and it is, well, confit duck leg. The dourade is more interesting, a piece of white fish, sweet and melting into the puree of leeks that serves as its resting place. We take a breath, look around at the empty plates scattered around the table, and order two bowls of white asparagus and almond soup, which is strangely light and creamy without being too rich or too thick. It is smooth, but with a slightly grainy texture, warm in the black Staub soup plates in which they serve chilled soups in the summer and hot soups in the winter.

Dr. Q likes cheese, so we order three cheeses, one blue, one softer and slight creamy, and one firm cheese that tastes slightly sheepish (pun very much intended). Our server says their names very quickly, and so I have no idea what they are, but they are all good, served with bread and a dish of pale honey. It has the same graininess as the Italian honey I tried a few dinners ago, but has a lighter taste, cool morning sunlight rather than warm afternoon light. We share two desserts, the lemon parfait, a round of frozen lemon mousse floating in a creamy lemon sauce and topped with whipped cream and the lightest, thinnest tuile I have ever eaten, and the apricot tarte tatin, dried apricots nestled in caramel sauce, on a bed of buttery golden pastry.

Eating here with other people, ordering all sorts of things and sharing them together, is very different from coming alone and just having one or two things. It is more fun, but at the same time it is a little overwhelming. I like seeing how different elements from past meals have appeared on the table tonight, like the saffron aïoli that I once had served with simply boiled shrimp, or the duck with peas that had been tossed with a creamy pasta instead of served on its own. Walking home I turned the tastes of the evening over and over in my mind, comparing them to other meals past, and imagining what might be in store the next time.

The 20-minute-meal. dinner for one.

We leave work early, and C. drops me off across the street from the grocery store near my apartment (saving me a ten minute walk). There are now four hours before I have to leave for the airport to pick up my mother, and there are drains to be unclogged, magazines to be shelved, and clothes to be put away. I run into J., who offers to let me hide any books I need to at his place, which makes me laugh and calms me down a little before I sprint through the supermarket, collecting asparagus and tomatoes and jugs of juice and triple-chocolate Dove bars in my headlong rush. Fifteen minutes later, I am home and running between bedrooms with piles of clothing and stacks of magazines. I shove things onto shelves and under the bed and into closets, haul things out of storage and down to the recycling bin and move more things into storage and sit down to collect myself. Two hours to go.

There is dinner to be considered. My mom will be jetlagged, and presumably they will feed her on the plane. But just in case, I should probably cook something she would eat if she got hungry, which means I need a little more something than just a piece of steak. Rice, I think, and some vegetables, and perhaps some scrambled eggs with tomatoes. It only takes a moment to wash a few cups of rice and get the rice cooker going in between sorting out the recyclables and putting away last week's mail. And then I realize there is only a little more than an hour before I have to leave; time to cook something and wolf it down. I have to plan the cooking out in my mind, to figure out what to cook first, how to organize things so everything is ready at the same time. The steak first, so it can rest while I scramble the eggs. The asparagus next, because it can sit at room temperature, and I can do other things while the water comes to a boil, and finally the eggs-and-tomatoes.

I put a pot of water on to boil before trimming a bundle of asparagus stalks and heating the grill pan for my steak. I think of Edouard de Pomiane, who tells you to put a pot of water on the stove as soon as you come home, because you will probably need it for something during the course of your dinner preparation, whether it be for blanching vegetables or cooking potatoes or what have you, and it is nice to have it ready when you are (I believe this comes from French Cooking in Ten Minutes). The steak goes in the pan, and I let it sizzle quietly as I slice the scallions finely, on the bias, and chop the tomato. Halfway through I find that there are only two eggs left. Whoops. It will be scrambled tomatoes with egg, but that will be fine; I'll just eat a little bit and save the rest for my mother. The asparagus is done as soon as the water comes back to a boil, and after I set that pot aside I use the same burner for the sauté pan, heating a little oil and cooking the scallions, then the tomatoes, sprinkling them with salt and a few grinds of pepper before adding the eggs.

The rice is done, waiting quietly in its space-age-looking white plastic cooker. The steak is just medium-rare, a nicely browned exterior striped from the grill, a ribbon of pink running throughout the interior. I slice off a piece, plate it with some rice and a spoonful of the tomato-and-eggs and a bundle of the slender bright asparagus. Exactly twenty minutes have passed since I turned on the stove, pulled the chopping board from its cupboard hiding place. (Although I did have to start the rice well ahead, but it only took a minute to prepare). And I have a perfect little dinner in front of me, rice, steak, scrambled eggs, and asparagus. I even have a little more time to finish tidying up before heading off to the airport.

The first barbecue of the year.

Yesterday brought sunshine, clear skies, and the first barbecue of the year. It would be at A.'s house, as most family gatherings are, a grand house on the lakefront designed with large parties in mind. At least forty people can be accommodated at the tables in the formal dining room and various eating areas in the huge kitchen. And then there is the terrace, on which Y. is busying himself with piles of coal and heaps of food. D. has prepared a vat of chicken wings, marinating in ginger and wine, piles of pork chops seasoned with soy sauce and more wine, and huge bone-in steaks heady with cracked black pepper and 18-year-old Chivas Regal. (I am not making that up).

Before dinner K. and I set off in the kayak, paddling against the current and occasionally finding ourself being turned around in circles, and the entire time I worry about tipping the boat over (which does not happen). When we come back (helped along by the current), people are in the kitchen threading bright chunks of peppers and onions with shrimps and scallops onto skewers, and Y. is grilling away madly outside. The first platters of grilled steak and pork chops head into the kitchen, amongst bowls of green salad and potato salad and loaves of garlic bread. I grab a little of everything, take my laden plate out to the terrace, with the view across the water before me. The pork chops are perfect - Y. is a master - and the steak is terrific, peppery and intense.

After the first few waves of steaks and chops and wings and kebabs comes off the grill, the grill comes off and the younger generation - by younger I mean under 30, including myself - descends on the barbecue (one of those Weber kettle grills) with hot dogs speared on long skewers, held over the hot coals. This is what they refer to as Hong-Kong-style barbecue, where the skewered food is held directly over the coals instead of placed on the grill, and it is terrific fun. Even though I am nearly full, I succumb to a hot dog, perfectly browned by the coals, the skin just crisp in the soft bun. Later there are spicy hot links and more ginger chicken wings, drizzled with honey, but I am full, and there is still dessert to come.

Finally, it is time for s'mores. I've been waiting all winter for these, for the chance to spear two marshmallows on the prongs of my barbecue fork, turning them over the coals until browned on all sides, squishing them between two graham cracker squares along with a piece of (dark) chocolate, crunchy and soft and sweet. The first marshmallow catches on fire, as it always does, but I manage to blow it out before it blackens beyond recognition. I eat one, and then another, and then another. At last, I am unable to eat another bite, and it's time to go home. D. sends me off with an extra (uncooked) steak, which I will save for another night. I regret that I did not eat any chicken wings or hot links slathered in honey. But it is only May, and there is a whole summer of barbecues left ahead. I can't wait.

Baking bread. part two.

I have been baking bread pretty much nonstop for the past few weeks, much to the amusement (and, hopefully, delight) of everyone around me. My narrow galley kitchen is permanently dusted with a fine layer of flour and wheat bran; my favorite Le Creuset pot is probably never going to be the same again. Having removed the knob (replacing it with a twist of aluminum foil) for the lid so it wouldn't melt in the blisteringly hot oven, I will probably never be able to find it again. Bags of flour litter the countertops, crumbs are scattered far and wide across the marble floor. Sachets of yeast pile up in the cutlery drawer; half-empty bottles of beer (the recipe calls for beer) litter the refrigerator. My pants feel a bit tight, unaccustomed as I am to eating large quantities of bread. (The one drawback to this bread is that it does not keep well, and as I cannot stop baking it, I always have some on hand, which I then have to eat).

I baked another loaf of bread tonight, mixing together the dough the night before, letting rise for some twenty hours before kneading it again, dividing it into two loaves, and letting them rise again. One loaf went, wrapped in parchment paper, into the fridge so I could bake it another day; the second one went into the oven. I love the soft whoomp of the dough as I drop it into the hot cast-iron pot, quietly settling in as I slash a big X across the top; I can see it begin to rise from the heat, and it will rise even more once in the oven. The recipe I have been using deviates somewhat from the original New York Times recipe; this one is from Cook's Illustrated (by way of The Seattle Times and Nancy Leson's blog). It calls for less liquid (which makes the dough a little easier to control) and replaces some of the water with beer and a little vinegar. Some people feel that this recipe is easier to handle and produces a more flavorful loaf, yet no one who has tasted my versions of both recipes seems to be able to tell the difference. I am not sure if that was because of how I made them, or if we just all lack taste buds.

As soon as the baked loaf was cool enough to handle I sliced some to eat with a little butter and strawberry jam, although it was so good it didn't really need anything at all. As I bit into the thick, warm crust, I thought of Barbara Kingsolver's description of a loaf of bread in Animal Dreams, "nearly spherical, with a deep brown crust and a steaming interior, it tasted like love." Like her heroine, Codi, I ate half a loaf by myself; like everyone at the dinner table who saw Codi and her half-loaf of bread, my friends have taken to calling me the Bread Girl. And nearly fifteen years after I first read those words, I realize that nothing on earth tastes more like love than fresh bread, still warm from the oven.

Taste, memory. ¡Ay carambola!. (on exotic fruits).

I saw a photograph of a New Zealand red tamarillo the other day, and it brought back sudden memories of the trip I took to Taiwan last year. We had seen them at a fruit stand and bought some because they were so beautiful. The fruits were plum-shaped, a deep tomato red, with a thin skin (like the skin of a plum) stretched tight over a jelly-like flesh surrounding tiny seeds (much like a tomato). It was a little sweet, with a clear taste that I have no idea how to describe. I came home to Seattle, home to glossy clementines and baggy-skinned satsuma oranges with their dusty leaves, and those strange red fruits were consigned to the far reaches of my memory.

Most of my encounters with exotic fruits happened during childhood vacations in the Far East. Perhaps the earliest memory I have is of eating lychees in the shade of weeping willows, on the shore of a little lake that held the tomb of a long-dead imperial concubine. Or something like that. I have forgotten the rest of the story, or even where we had been (probably somewhere outside of Xi'an), but I remember the red-brown pebbly skin of the lychees that peeled away to reveal translucent white flesh and the smooth, shiny dark seeds within. For years afterwards, fresh lychees were unavailable in the United States, and I only ate them during those hot summers in Taiwan. Even now they are inextricably tied to my childhood, like the carambola, more commonly known as starfruit.

The starfruit is my second favorite exotic fruit, with its green-tinged yellow skin and flesh, and sweet-tart juiciness. It is most likely that, as a small child, I loved how the fruit fell into perfect star-shaped slices more than I loved the taste; I would eat each piece point by point until my plate of stars was gone. Years later I would sometimes find them at the supermarket and buy one or two, but somehow they weren't the same. I had the sense that they were not nearly as sweet or as juicy as I remembered them being, more green than yellow, and it was then I began to understand that with food, there is a sense of place. The starfruit belonged to childhood summers, to the heat and humidity of a Taiwanese summer, as did everything else I ate in those days, the lychees, the bell-shaped lian wu (known in English as "wax apple" or "bell fruit") that had a pinkish-red skin and a crisp white flesh.

So now I save my longings for lychees and starfruit and lian wu for when I am in Taiwan again. I would not try to find them here; they belong to that faraway place. But that is fine with me. Here I have red-tinged Fuji apples in the fall and clementines and Satsuma oranges in the winter and pink-flushed golden Rainier cherries in the summer. The best of both worlds.

Dinner for two.

G. messages me to say that she was coming for a visit and would I be available for dinner one night, and could we have Japanese food. I am always available for dinner, particularly if it gives me an excuse to go to Nishino, where I never venture alone. I head over to the university district to pick her up, and realize that it has been over a year since we last saw one another. Our friendship has been always been an intermittent one, linked mainly by our parents, who were friends at university, and now she lives in Austin. But as always conversation comes easily as we talk about when we last saw each other, and everything that has happened since.

Nishino is nearly empty when we walk in, only a few tables and seats at the sushi bar are occupied. But it appears that all the tables are booked for later, and instead we take two seats at the sushi counter. Usually I come here with my family, and my father does all the ordering. With the choices left up to me, I am lost. We start with ikura sushi, made with bright orange salmon eggs, each about the size of a pomegranate seed. I eat mine in one bite, and feel the eggs pop in my mouth, clean and fresh and a little salty. We order at random, hamachi (yellowtail tuna), kampachi (another kind of tuna), and unagi (grilled eel). We order amaebi, the big sweet shrimp whose bodies are served raw, the heads deep-fried and served on the side.

We turn our attention to the main menu and order "dynamite," a dish of sautéed scallops, geoduck, and mushrooms, covered with mayonnaise and broiled until browned. I order the grilled hamachi kama, tuna collars, lengths of bone filled with rich, fatty meat. G. has become the kind of person who takes pictures of her food, and I turn the plate to get the best angle of the crisply broiled fished arranged artfully atop the cabbage salad. The restaurant is now busy, with hopeful diners waiting patiently just inside the door, every table occupied, every seat at the counter taken. It is a Tuesday night, even, and Nishino has been around for a long time, over ten years now. I am amazed at their longevity, but at the same time, not surprised. Their food is consistently excellent, occasional new additions breathing life to a menu of favorites. For nearly fifteen years this has been one of my favorite restaurants, and its place in my heart has never wavered.

We are nearly full, but there is still dessert to consider. I had meant to head back over to Trophy and buy some cupcakes, but there wasn't time. I suggest crêpes, and G. agrees. We drive home and walk down to 611 Supreme, about ten minutes from my apartment. Inside it is quiet and dimly lit. I waver between the chocolate-mousse-filled crêpe that I usually order, or the Nutella-filled one that beckons. G. can't decide either, and at last I choose the Nutella-filled one, while she goes for la Pomme Nord, filled with fresh apples. We share our respective desserts, mine filled with the chocolate-hazelnut warmth of Nutella and the coolness of vanilla ice cream, hers bursting with crisp, cinnamon-dusted apple slices and caramel sauce and more vanilla ice cream. It is so good I want more, but I have to stop.

Somehow we wind up at QFC so G. can buy breakfast things for the rest of her visit. It occurs to me later that dinner with her always ends with us standing in the cereal aisle of QFC at 9:30 pm while she debates over Cocoa Pebbles versus Rice Krispies and pajama-clad students shuffle by with baskets of Pop-Tarts and potato chips.