Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I'll be sharing Dorie Greenspan's Korova cookies, my knockout weapon of choice when it comes to spoiling the people I love.

Don't scoff, but I make a mean salad. Always improvised, never wimpy, and fierce enough to convert the formerly salad-averse.

Food prepared with passion and dedication - towards the dish itself, for the people who will eat it, or both.

Torrisi for spirit and value.

Rum bum bum bruummm.

Dorie Greenspan, who inspired my first forays into baking and sweetly but firmly encouraged experimentation.

I only have one to choose from, alas: curried braised vegetables. I've been meaning to tinker with chai recipes, though, and to experiment with full-on meals. This year!

I haven't ever tasted truffle proper, but my nose has been less than an inch away from a chunk the size of my fist.

Sorry, but I'm going to be cheap and go the "wish for a million wishes" route: my dream culinary journey would involve a) the Ulterior Epicure acting as guide through every sense-melting experience he's written about, and b) intimate culinary training sessions with the person responsible for each dish. And then we'd all drown ourselves in flavor while making out with, like, everybody.

Planned out my Thanksgiving menu today and Perfect Mashed Potatoes are goin' on it.

Pumpkin Brioche Bread Pudding - sorely jonesing for it now.

@Eating The Road: I did end up trying a MOS shogayaki rice burger; China Airlines served them for breakfast during my flight back to the U.S. (see photo above) I decided against commenting on the burger itself, though, since after having been refrigerated and reheated as airplane food it was clearly not up to normal MOS standards. Like you, I've also heard many great things about MOS burgers - the next time I find myself in Asia, I'd be happy to write off my two experiences as unusual and give MOS another try.

@haappyhed: Thanks! My relationship with Taiwan is similar to yours - my mother was born in Taiwan and I spent many a childhood summer, as well as part of elementary school, in Taipei. As a rule, whenever I return for a visit, every square micrometer of stomach space is reserved for my grandparents' home cooking, tropical fruit, and Taiwanese street food... so this tour was a marked departure from my norm, instigated primarily by my encounter with those absurd mini-burgers.

I wish I'd known better than to try MOS' regular hamburger - from the sound of it, almost anything else on the menu would have been more satisfying - but at the time I intentionally ordered what an uninformed, displaced American might when searching for a hamburger that tastes like home. Given my preference for traditional Taiwanese food, my recent two-week visit was far too brief to accommodate a truly exhaustive burger roundup (I'm not a food writer and this trip was personal in nature), but in the future it might be interesting to seek out distinctively Asian re-conceptions of the burger.

@kkyoung: You're right, it's often foolish to expect familiar food to be prepared authentically in a foreign country. I was raised on homestyle Chinese cooking and if I went into a Panda Express here in the U.S. expecting similar, my soul would probably die a little.

Reasonable or no, for the purposes of this review I deliberately assumed the mindset of a homesick American looking for a regular burger. People who order Asian-style burgers expect to taste something interesting and unfamiliar, but a customer who orders a hamburger probably just wants a hamburger. Whereas the 3-inch mini-burgers don't pretend to be traditional and MOS rice burgers are a deliberate and successful departure from the norm, I'm pretty sure Mary's does attempt to make an "American" style burger, and when MOS offers an apparently standard "Hamburger" alongside its more imaginative entrées, I think it's fair to examine it according to Western standards.

I'll know better next time, though. ;)