The Burmese sure love to mix things up. Seriously, at a Chowhound lunch at Mingalaba, almost every dish we ordered involved tableside mixing. It’s nice for once to have some idea of what ingredients are in an exotic and unfamiliar dish, but what’s with the national passion for blending?

Chowhound poster Moomin once wrote:

“Thoke” is an important syllable to toss about freely when composing a Burmese menu. The word means “mix.” Anything in which a variety of ingredients are mixed can be a “thoke.”

Salad is a thoke. An ice-cream sundae is a thoke. Fried rice, given enough ingredients, could be a thoke. You get the idea.

In Burma there is no specific cultural tradition of a mixed green salad. But, in Burmese American restaurants there is ALWAYS a salad section on the menu. In these cases what is generally being served is a wide selection of thoke.

Fermented tea leaf salad is just this kind of thoke, closer to Indian chaat than anything from an American salad bar. Mingalaba’s version surprised me at first, using ground tea leaves instead of the whole ones I’d had at Golden Triangle in southern California. Pungently sour and funky, it’s not for the faint of heart, but in moderate doses it’s quite tasty.

Young ginger salad, shown at top, is more clean-flavored and refreshing.

I first heard about this place from my friend Daveena, who raved about the palatha (aka, in other parts of the world, paratha or roti). I adore these rich, flaky pancakes and sometimes buy frozen packages of them from the Thai supermarket to pan-cook at home, even though they’re inevitably as thick as a dinner plate.

Mingalaba’s palatha is really wonderful, flaky and tissue-delicate. The bottom sauce is a lovely coconut milk curry, the top is like Indian dal but not very flavorful.

The big surprise was how a shrimp, garlic and chile condiment I’d never heard of could transform ordinary green beans into a thing of deliciousness. Balachaung! The word is like music to my tongue. Long after the green beans were eaten, I was picking crispy bits of fried spice paste off the plate and eating them.

I also really liked the surprisingly soothing mo hing nga, a fish chowder with rice vermicelli …

… and the house noodles with chicken in coconut-curry sauce, enlivened by wisps of kaffir lime leaf.

Mingalaba
1213 Burlingame Avenue
Burlingame
650-343-3228

I totally forgot to post about this, but a while back I bought some sea beans from Far West Fungi’s little storefront at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. I’ve been fascinated by these things ever since I discovered them at Fairway in Manhattan (go Harlem!). These weird little sprigs of vegetables are crisp like green beans, but instead of releasing sweet vegetable juice, they’re decidedly salty.

I couldn’t find any recipes that sounded appealing, so I had to use my imagination. My imagination, it turns out, is rather dull and logical, and it works like this: Since the beans are from the sea, I assumed they’d pair well with fish. Since they’re salty, they require something to balance the salt, maybe something that ordinarily would require salt itself, like potatoes. And there it was. I did a mini test of cooking methods, pan-frying a few sprigs and steaming a few (hey, a small paper bag cost me $8!), and sauteeing turned out to be the better choice. I used just a little butter/olive oil (I forget which) and kept the cooking time short, tasting now and then till the beans were still crisp but a teensy bit caramelized. Meanwhile, I was steaming some French fingerling potatoes.

Piled together, this was a winning combination. My instinct was right: The beans’ saltiness went perfectly with the starchy potatoes. Be sure to use a type of potato that would taste good plain, not the generic white potatoes. Yukon Gold is good, or any farmers’ market potato.

We ate the beans and potatoes with fish in beurre blanc, but I realized that they would go really well with steak — an unexpected twist on the classic manly meal.
I also theorized that sea beans would go well with tofu braised in a mirin-sweet sauce, but I haven’t quite figured that out yet. Perhaps next year… the season for these is supposed to be pretty short.

We arrived at my friend Carol’s eco-conscious store a bit early for her summer solstice, but very hungry. Happily, the shop is right across the street from Mustard Seed Cafe, purveyor of my favorite turkey burger of all time. I’m not even a turkey burger fanatic, but in the years that I lived in this neighborhood, I never tried anything else at MSC because I just couldn’t stand not ordering it.

The burger is laced with tons of rosemary and usually very juicy. I prefer to pretend I’m eating healthy by getting it on an enormous bed of salad that includes some cooked broccoli, zucchini and pickles, but really I like how the juices trickle down and blend with the vegetables. Note that the red-onion garnish is grilled slightly, so that it’s mild and sweet.

Since I’m not likely to be dropping in for lunch very often now that I live in northern California, I tried to pry some cooking secrets out of our waiter, but I didn’t get very far. I was able to rule out additives: no breadcrumbs or crazy infusions, just turkey and chopped rosemary. Well, at least I know where to start.

Mustard Seed Cafe
1948 Hillhurst Ave.
Los Angeles
(323) 660-0670

Wes and I recently went back to L.A. for the weekend, where we stayed with a friend in Hollywood, putting us strategically close to my favorite Thai restaurant of the moment, Spicy BBQ by Nong & Family.

An article in the L.A. Times about regional Thai restaurants alerted me to this tiny, family-run place in (of course) a strip mall on a stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard where Little Armenia meets Thai Town. In fact, Spicy BBQ is right next to the reliable Falafel Arax, so if your dining companion isn’t in the mood for Thai, you can fall back on falafel or tongue sandwiches.

I gather that the friendly woman who always seems to be running the front of house is the chef and owner, Nong. She actually remembered me, even though I’ve only been in twice and my last visit was several months ago. I probably made an impression by ordering a ton of dishes for takeout and taking a double handful of the salted plum candies by the cash register on my way out.

Northern Thai food is the specialty here, and unlike some places where you have to sleuth to find out the house specialties, they’re proudly laid out in a northern-cuisine section at the end of the photo-illustrated menu.

The mild noodle dish of khao soi (above) seduces everyone who travels to the trekking capital of Chiang Mai. Nong’s version, declares Jonathan Gold, is probably the definitive one for L.A. The curry-and-coconut broth is smooth and savory, the housemade flat noodles as delicate as the fettuccine at Bella Roma S.P.Q.R. Nong showed us how a bit of red onion and housemade pickle, along with a squirt of lime, adds texture and piquancy to each soothing mouthful.

The zingy northern sausage here is my favorite Thai sausage so far. Check out the texture! They don’t skimp on flavorings- it’s practically bristling with kaffir lime peel, lemongrass and chiles.

The savory fried pork salad patties get their character from an unusual, earthy-tasting herb whose name I read somewhere, but forgot. Sorry. Despite the name, I believe they’re a bit different from the minced pork salad (laap or larb). I’ve had it before and it’s excellent, but it doesn’t have that herb.

Stuff that has underwhelmed: Pad see ew is Wes’ “safety” dish at unknown Thai restaurants. I’ve come to like it also, for the savory gravy blended with the flat rice noodles and the crisp-tender Chinese broccoli. But the pad see ew at Spicy BBQ, with tough beef and American broccoli, was the worst I’ve ever had.

The green papaya salad is unusual in that it includes grilled shrimp. Unfortunately, they’re kinda mealy, and the salad as a whole doesn’t have much depth of flavor. I asked for “spicy” and it definitely was not, leaving me to wonder whether I’d been gringo’d.

Green chile dip is okay, but not irresistible in the way that Lotus of Siam’s version is. That stuff was impossible to keep your fingers out of. It turns out, though, that mediocre green chile dip can be converted into a quite good chile verde soup. Just add broth, chicken and vegetables.

Spicy BBQ by Nong & Family
5101 Santa Monica Blvd.
(323) 663-4211

In Korean-heavy L.A., grill-it-yourself bulgogi or kalbi is as much a hometown food as tacos from a truck. So it might seem strange that when my mother, who is Korean and lives in Chicago, would visit me in L.A., she’d say, “Let’s get Korean food! But not barbecue.” Soups and stews are the things she misses, not smoke from the grill in every fiber of her clothes.

So I was surprised that she wanted to take me to a Korean barbecue house in Chicago. But her favorite thing at this place, she told me, was not the beef but the fried rice they make in the same stone griddle used to cook the meat, after you polish it off. It sounded like something I’d had, with pork, at L.A.’s fantastic Honey Pig.

Cho Sun Ok is a small corner establishment doing modest lunch business with businessmen, young couples and lunching ladies, all Korean.

They gave us a nice spread of panchan. These are side dishes, but it’s impossible not to pick at them when they arrive if you’re hungry, so they end up as de facto appetizers.

Unfortunately, the kimchi, the most important panchan of all, was utterly bland. “Too young,” pronounced my mom, but I disagree. I have a fondness for crisp, young kimchi, and in L.A. kimchi rarely comes fully fermented. No, this was flat-out flavorless.

Instead of a grill, the beef is cooked on a stone griddle slicked with toasty sesame oil. I can’t remember what cut we ordered — it’s just thinly sliced unmarinated beef.

But the beef was so lean, it overcooked really quickly. Most of what made it to my plate was dry, dry, dry. But it’s not about the beef, right? I waited.

Ah, the pièce de résistance. The waitress came by and dumped what was left of our vegetable panchan in there, stirred it around and left it to toast. It comes off more like a Korean paella than fried rice, with the crunchy toasted grains at the bottom. A real pleasure, and I only wish we could’ve fast-forwarded to it.

Cho Sun Ok
4200 N. Lincoln Ave.
Lincoln Square/Ravenswood neighborhood
Chicago
(773) 549-5555

I’m not really into restaurants of the moment, although sometimes I hear about a place that shone bright and brief until something fell apart in the delicate balance supporting it, and I wish I’d gotten there before it snuffed. But usually it’ll take me a few months to try out something after I hear about it. When it comes to Chicago, where my parents live and where my once-or-twice-a-year visits usually last only a few days, that lag time is considerably longer. I’ve been wanting to go to the casual, wine-and-small-plates Avec for years, and its more traditional sibling Blackbird for longer still. Finally, I had the perfect opportunity — an evening concert at the Symphony, just down the street, with my food-loving friend Alberto.

Avec doesn’t take reservations, but we thought we’d be fine walking in around 6:30 on a Thursday. We were wrong. The standing tables outside were full, and there was already a short list. But we lucked into a pair of counter seats right in front of the chef’s station.

He introduced himself, and it took me a while to realize that the four-burner stove that he was manning and the prep counter before us was where all the food for the restaurant was being made. One guy, one stove for the entire restaurant. Granted, the place is like an alley with seats (a very warm, chic alley), but watching his hands fly was a great show.

We started with a charcuterie plate. Wait, no — it’s Italian influenced, so this was salumi. Believe me, coppa by any other name tastes just as good. This was a really nice spread, and I was intrigued by the garnish of sliced cornichons with parsley leaves and slices of red onion. It was like a mini salad.

Crostini with English pea puree and watercress-and-arugula salad piled high, plus ricotta salata and lemon zest, was a recommendation I’d seen again and again on the local Chowhound board. It was simple, refreshing and delicious. There’s something really appealing about pureed peas, and they’re almost painfully simple. A few nights later I had dinner at a friend’s house, and she made fillets of salmon, beached on pea-puree islands in a sea of lemony broth. I’m also becoming fond of pureed pea soup (those frozen petits pois from Trader Joe’s are excellent) with mint.

Alberto and I loved the idea of olive-oil poached salmon with melted lardo, but I couldn’t make out the lardo itself by taste or texture. I’m not sure what I expected from thin slices of cured pork fat. Perhaps I was remembering the wildly flavorful lardo pizza at Pizzeria Mozza in L.A., but when I think of it, most of the flavor credit was due to the rosemary and the crust (it’s a glorified flatbread, but an amazing one if you like that), with the lardo just supplying an alluring richness. This was certainly a succulent piece of salmon.

We were swayed on dessert by the excitement of having the orange-and-cinnamon-scented cannoli made before our eyes, but it was kind of like, squirt, dip, plop. I preferred the grapefruit sorbet (right), which came on shortbread wafers like I’d had at St John Bread & Wine. I thought the palate-cleansing sorbet an odd match for buttery shortbread, but it turns out shortbread is an adaptable thing. Next thing you know I’ll be eating it with beef stew.

Still on my short list: Hot Chocolate and a return visit to Green Zebra.

Avec
615 W. Randolph St
Chicago
(312) 377-2002

I never look for Chicago deep-dish pizza, or Chicago hot dogs, wherever I’m living because I know I can get some of the best whenever I visit my parents. The best in my original hometown? I’m still trying to figure it out. My mom likes Giordano’s, but it’s grown into a full-on chain restaurant, and the quality really varies. My dad maintains an open-door policy towards all pizzas, regardless of origin. The original Pizzeria Uno, which invented deep-dish, and nearby Pizzeria Due, are pretty good but awfully touristy. (I notice the chain is now calling itself Uno Chicago Grill… wtf??!!) Then there’s Lou Malnati’s, a laid-back neighborhood restaurant that’s actually in our neighborhood and whose pies (butter crust, please) are favorites of many a local chowhound. Unlike many pizzerias, Lou’s is pretty nice to eat in, but a friend was coming over for dinner so we got takeout.

I’m pretty fond of all legitimate forms of pizza (while scorning the bastard Thai BBQ chicken pizza and its ilk), but there’s a particular kind of satisfaction to eating the deep-dish pizza, which you cannot hope to handle without a knife and fork. The sauce is chunky — when I was researching recipes, several said it’s just reduced, broken-up canned plum tomatoes — rather than the soupy consistency spread on New York pizzas. And while I enjoy the thin-yet-puffy crust of a N.Y. pizza, charred on the bare floor of an oven, it seems austere next to its butter-or-oil slicked Chicago counterpart, virtually fried in its pan.

By family consensus, we always get spinach stuffed pizza. “Family consensus” really just means that my mom likes spinach, my dad is fine with it, and now that I’m an adult I feel guilty about eating a hunk of cheese and bread without any redeeming vegetable. So I’m not crazy about spinach pizza per se, but Malnati’s impresses me — You can really tell that these were recently individual leaves of fresh spinach, and not frozen stuff. The tomato sauce is nice and tangy, and there’s a good amount of cheese.

But the crust just doesn’t thrill me, butter or no. I have a sneaking suspicion that I prefer the towering, cracker-crisp crust at Gino’s East. It was a suspicion that I’ll have to test out on my next trip, though — we had enough leftovers from this pie for the rest of the week.

Lou Malnati’s
958 W. Wrightwood (at Sheffield & Lincoln)
Chicago
(773) 832-4030

What do you do after, in an attempt to schedule a trip home to see the parents after having moved to a new town, in between friends’ weddings in the old town and an upcoming holiday you’d like to spend with your spouse, you accidentally buy a ticket departing on said spouse’s birthday?

Chocolate ganache may not exactly be a balm for all wounds, but it might be said to help a little of it. These buttermilk cupcakes from Sherry Yard’s cookbook are both rich and delicate, probably a result of the unusual procedure: You blend the eggs and sugar over simmering water, then whip them, off heat, until thick. The souffle-like cupcakes collapsed a bit after baking, leaving cratered tops rather than the typical smooth domes, but that just left more room for ganache.

Buttermilk birthday cupcakes
From Sherry Yard’s The Secrets of Baking
About 2 dozen cupcakes

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
4 large eggs
6 oz (1.5 sticks) unsalted butter, melted
1/2 cup buttermilk
2 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 and prepare some muffin tins.

Triple-sift the flour, baking powder and salt and set aside. Fill a medium saucepan halfway with water and bring it to a simmer over medium heat. Combine sugar and eggs in the bowl of a standing mixer, or a mixing bowl that will fit into the saucepan. Put the bowl over the water, making sure the bottom of the bowl doesn’t touch the water. (If you have a double boiler and no standing mixer, I don’t see why you shouldn’t just mix the sugar and eggs in the double boiler.) Stick in a thermometer and whisk steadily until the concoction is 110 degrees (2-3 minutes).

Remove bowl from heat and whip on high speed with standing or hand mixer 5-8 minutes, until the eggs have tripled in volume. The mixture will be thick and pale yellow, and form a ribbon when falling from a spatula. Turn the mixer speed to medium and ship for 2 more minutes, then add the melted butter.

Carefully fold in a third of the dry ingredients with a balloon whisk. Fold in a third of the buttermilk, then repeat those two steps until they’re used up. Blend in the vanilla.

Pour the batter into the muffin tins and bake 20 minutes, until the tops are golden brown and spring back when you touch them lightly. Let cupcakes cool in the pan on a rack for 5 minutes, then remove from the pan and let cool completely on the rack. Frost with chocolate ganache (below).

Ganache frosting
Makes 2 cups

8 oz bittersweet chocolate
4 oz (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup powdered sugar

Chop up the chocolate and melt with the butter in the microwave or in a double boiler. Sift in the powdered sugar and slowly stir it in with a rubber spatula until it smooths out.

Done! Use immediately, or at least within a couple of days. It may need to be beaten in a mixer to regain its pliancy after refrigeration.

For a dish that was once an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink invention of fishermen’s wives, bouillabaisse has come a long way — if you venture to Marseille, its birthplace, to find the best you’re more likely to be trolling the city’s Michelin-starred eateries than any waterfront shacks.

After reading two New York Times articles praising L’Epuisette (one by R.W. Apple), I knew it was where I wanted to go on our day trip from Provence. As we drove into the city, the weather was brisk and bright, and everything looked beautiful to me: the cranes and freighters in the enormous harbor (industrial chic!), the classical buildings of the Vieux Port, the people with African and Arab skin tones … even an audaciously giant, colorful Coke ad.

We parked on the Corniche du President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (that must be a mouthful for the locals), across the water from the island Chateau d’If, featured in “The Count of Monte Cristo,” by Alexandre Dumas (the elder), novelist and grand gourmet. The location was a double thrill for my dad, who as a boy had relished Dumas’ adventures as well as the fact that the 19th century Frenchman was a writer of color (his grandmother was a former slave in Haiti).

The restaurant sits on the water, on a rocky outcrop below the level of the road. Fishing boats bob in the cove beside it — according to the articles I’d read, one or two belong to the restaurant itself, ensuring a fresh catch. Despite the rustic, unassuming exterior, inside it’s all clean modern elegance and exquisite courtesy. As the hostess led the way through the white-clothed tables with smartly clad diners (French business types, it seemed), my heart beat fast as we approached a corner table with windows on both sides, facing the chateau. I could hardly believe it when she indicated that it was ours. I selfishly claimed one of the seats facing the view of the rippling blue water, so I guess it served me right that the hard, bright sunlight started giving me a headache after 20 minutes.

I had read good things about the restaurant’s other dishes, but since we all wanted to try the bouillabaisse, that’s what we all got. We tried ordering some starters for diversity, but our waiter advised against it. Of course he would benefit if we went ahead and ordered them, he said with a Gallic shrug and a charming smile, but it would really be too much food. Because although bouillabaisse is more than the sum of its parts, it is very much about the appreciation of each of its parts.

First, the broth, thick as gruel — but a hot, flavorful gruel. Instead of the ethereal quality that I expect in fish dishes, this was an earthy soup that pulled no punches. Woven among the flavors of the sea was something hauntingly familiar that made me suspect a touch of curry powder, but as I quizzed our waiter, it turned out to be paprika. (I guess that would explain the burnt orange color too.) The broth is traditionally served with pieces of toast that you slather with rouille (we got aioli as well, in top photo) and set afloat in the soup so they soften and meld with it.

Then, out comes the fish:

plus more broth:

The fish was perfectly cooked, of course, although my mother complained the bouillabaisse wasn’t hot enough. But she’s Korean and isn’t satisfied unless her soup comes to the table still bubbling — in which case the fish would have definitely been overdone.

The desserts we ordered were good, but I preferred the petite glasses of chocolate mousse and macarons that they threw in at the end for free.

Unfortunately, our lovely afternoon had an ugly ending, as we returned to the car:

Note to the French government: Those bright red license plates you have for rental cars are not a good idea.

L’Epuisette
Vallon des Auffes
13007 MARSEILLE
Tél : 04 91 52 17 82
Fax : 04 91 59 18 80

Display at Richaud, Confiseur

“Welcome to Apt, the capital of confited fruit,” says a sign at the center of town in Apt, Provence. I stopped there on my way home from India, meeting up with Wes, because my parents were spending the month there. It was the week before Easter, and all the confiseries’ windows were filled with Easter baskets and pyramids of meticulously prettified candies like pointed ovals of pastel-glazed nougat.

As for confited fruit, there are three or four shops selling elaborate assemblages of the sugared treats within a block of that sign. In the ordinary scheme of things, fruits permeated with sugar syrup don’t set my mouth watering, but I’m a sucker for a local specialty, so I got some confited mirabelles (a kind of small plum), a bag of assorted fruits, and assorted pâtes de fruits.

The taste experience of the candied fruit did nothing to change my mind about that class of sweets, but reading an old article in the New York Times gave me some appreciation of their aesthetic qualities. Back in the day (like, Eleanor of Aquitaine’s day), it must have been amazing to see fruit that looked as if it had been transformed into colored glass. It’s also probably not easy to maintain the integrity of each piece of fruit, so that after being covered in boiling sugar syrup it still looks essentially like itself.

But still — if you’ve tasted sugar, you’ve tasted these. I was much happier with my humble bag of pâtes de fruits, small nuggets of sweetened fruit paste that are like the grand ancestors of Chuckles, except that the flavors of real fruit sing out strong. The raspberry flavor was so intense, I was checking my teeth for seeds, but my favorite was the grapefruit, which perfectly captured its bitter sweetness.

Pâtes de fruits look pretty easy to make at home — you use pectin or gelatin, and it’s ready in a day, rather than in a month. I have my eye on recipes for pineapple-lime, and good old apricot.

While in Apt, I also rounded out my collection of bowls from Atelier Buisson-Kessler. There are many pottery shops in Provence, but nothing we saw matched these wares in delicacy paired with gorgeous color.