Asian Food Bonanza!

Erren, maybe we could put in a category for recipe/experiment requests?

If anyone has successfully made any of the following, I’d dearly love to see a recipe post about it:
- Cold sesame noodles (like the dumpling place in Cville)
- Asian oily rice
- Scallion pancakes
- Winter melon soup
- There’s a daikon soup out there that my dad makes, but when I tried to imitate it, the daikon just ended up thick, like a cooked carrot. Anyone know how to make the fantastically soft daikon soup in Chinese cooking?

And just so I don’t look like a mooch:

Sunomono!

This is not the sunomono with the horrors of the sea. This is just plain ol’ sunomono, cold and perfect as an appetizer.

- 1 cucumber which is neither freakishly huge or small
- 1 tbs rice vinegar
- 1 tsp sugar
- salt
- soy sauce

Cut your cucumber into unforgivingly thin slices. Lay them out on the cutting board in as thin a layer as possible, then salt them lightly. You’re just trying to draw out the moisture in the cucumber, not flavor it.

While that’s going, dissolve the sugar into the rice vinegar. By the time you’re done with this, you can declare your cucumbers good enough. Bonus step: If you want, squeeze the cucumber juice out over the sink. Not really necessary.

Add a splash of soy sauce to your vinegar, then pour it over the cucumbers and gently toss.

They are delicious and nutritious, plus the quickest appetizer in the world to make. When I made these on Lonely Asian Girl Christmas, they got devoured.