Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

so many choices....pho is good. or chinese style beef noodle soup, with star anise and spinach and pickled mustard greens. or chinese style hot pot, or in my house, also known as, let's clean out our refrigerator and put everything into this hot pot on a portable butane burner. dipping sauce- raw egg yolk (don't worry- it gets cooked with when things are dipped into it...at least I think it does), soy sauce, sesame oil, and sacha (bull's head bbq sauce brand). so good for wintertime!

slightly off topic, but the webcomic octopuspie gave this wine some love last week: http://www.octopuspie.com/2009-06-01/296-working-for-someone/

also includes love for tteok! what a serious eats themed comic :)

avgolemono with a bit of chicken, no egg. lotsa lemon!

portabella mushrooms with balsamic vinegar sauce, over bed of spinach and tomato

chocolate bread pudding from dessert truck! and i don't even like bread pudding :P

Peru, for ceviche, alfajores, potatoes and chicken
Thailand, for noodles, curries, and easy access to other southeast Asian countries
France, for escargotm creme brulee and easy access to other European countries

I was in elementary school and leading the life of your average latch-key kid. Bored and hungry one afternoon, I had the brilliant idea of making chocolate bread in our little toaster oven. Having no idea what constituted a bread recipe, I assembled what I thought were the appropriate ingredients: flour, baking soda as a substitute for yeast, sugar, salt, water, oil, and of course, lots of chocolate syrup to give it the right flavor. I mixed it up, let it sit for a couple minutes because I KNEW that bread dough had to rise, mixed it up some more, and poured it (yes- the batter was so thin that I poured it) onto a small sheet of foil. I set the toaster oven to "Bake" and let it cook. When it looked solid enough, I took it out. It hadn't risen, but I saw little bubbles in the flat soft cookie/cake-like result. I tried to peel it off, but only succeeded in picking some crumbs off the foil. It pretty much tasted like bland cake...sort of. Needless to say, my family never saw that culinary masterpiece.

I have to say though, I was an inventive kid who came up with some genius recipes, though others might think of them as culinary disasters. My favorites: Hershey's chocolate syrup over shaved ice and melted American cheese in a bowl, which could be eaten by scooping it out with your finger. That bowl was always a tough one to clean before my parents came home to discover my kitchen experiments...