Last weekend I attended the Bay Area chowhound picnic, a foodie potluck set in Tilden Regional Park, in the hills above Berkeley. It was a shame that, having stayed up late preparing my dish and overslept the next morning, I had to rush past the park’s gorgeous scenery to reach the picnic site.

My contribution was chapchae, a Korean dish of “glass noodles” (made of mung bean or potato starch) mixed with cooked shredded vegetables and meat. Strictly speaking, “chapchae” means mixed vegetables; in Korea I’ve had Chinese-style chapchae, which is just a veggie stir-fry.

I rarely make chapchae from scratch. Like bibimbap, it’s great for using up extra bulgogi and vegetable sides. In fact, it’s kind of a pain to make fresh — not complicated, exactly, but tedious and time-consuming, as every ingredient needs to be prepped separately.

There are a variety of possible vegetables that can show up in chapchae. I always make sure to have strips of carrot and cucumber, the cucumber (only the outer part with the skin) salted and squeezed before sauteeing, Korean dried mushrooms (which may or may not be shiitake, I’m not sure) and strips of egg, beaten and cooked in a thin pancake, then sliced into strips. The idiosyncratic touches that I think set my chapchae apart are a touch of heat in the sauce, from kochujang (chile paste), and the anise-like aroma of fresh sesame leaves. I slice them in a chiffonade and fold them into the warm noodles so they just wilt.

Cooking this dish for the picnic, I discovered that a) telling yourself that you’ll be organized and start the prep a day or two in advance is admirable and all, but not likely to happen, at least, not if you’re me; b) trying to stir-fry 8 cups of julienned vegetable in one big pan is not efficient; c) I haven’t perfected this recipe yet. Thus, I’m not going to post it. I loved my sweet-hot sauce, but thought there wasn’t quite enough of it in the final analysis. I need to make a more normal batch to really figure it out. Stay tuned!

But what did sweep me away at the picnic was the sorbets from Scream Sorbet. In a way, the comparison is a bit unfair; proprietor Nathan Kurz brought his samples in a fancy portable ice-cream dispenser. But hey, they tasted very, very fresh — especially the melon and raspberry. I’d say they were exactly like flavorful farmer’s market fruit, even hyperreal, like watching a movie in HD. Because even if I were there with my glasses on, I wouldn’t be able to pick out the waves on the surface of the ocean in the opening scene of “Casino Royale” and the precise musculature of Daniel Craig’s arms as he scrambled across scaffolding hundreds of yards above, like I could when we watched it at home on Blu-Ray.

This sorbet was intense like that. I was also pleasantly surprised by the cucumber-dill-vinegar flavor, which reminded me of a kind of delicate, faintly sweet Japanese pickle.

Scream Sorbet is currently available at farmers’ markets in the East Bay.