Because they are no joke when it comes to effort. You have to chop and squeeze and mix the filling, cooking off bits to taste for the correct seasoning until you get it right. You have to knead the dough and roll out dozens if not hundreds of skins. You have to stuff them, form them, pleat them and then, eventually, you get to cook and maybe even eat them. (This is why they are a distinguished weapon in the ever-full quivers of mothers who tend to smother with kindness.)

And I'm not even going to say that there is "nothing like eating a homemade dumpling," because eating one made by someone else can be a lot like eating a homemade one. (Granted, if you take your time and care, these are more delicate and tastier than most.)

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I arrived early, to catch a dumpling-making lesson (which I'll share with you tomorrow), but it wasn't long before I saw what was really going on: a full-scale onslaught of weapons-grade motherly overdoing-it-ness, Asian Momma style. Winnie's mom, Mei, had filled not one but two entire grocery carts with food, and piles of vegetables were lying all around the kitchen, as if houseplants. I saw dried noodles soaking in water, ready for cooking. I saw racks of ribs marinating. I saw a school of fish waiting to be fried. I saw a massive pot that had become the final resting place for two whole ducks. I saw a mound of ground meat roughly the size of a beach ball.

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So, anyway, haggis is a sheep's stomach filled with miscellaneous sheep parts -- heart, lungs, you get the picture. Stuff my Scottish friend Pam refers to as "the hearty meat," and I don't think that's a pun. Americans have not, for decades, been very big on organ meats, and so even though I grew up with liver and tongue and would eat tripe and spleen till the cows came home (to reclaim them?), for me, there's still some vestige of childhood blech that follows haggis around.

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I have this theory about the balance of global culinary power: It exists. It's not perfect -- I mean, sorry, but Turkmenistan is not as tasty a place as Thailand -- but all food superpowers have something keeping them from being the One Perfect Cuisine. The Indians are weak on noodles, Mexicans are weak on bread, the French ... well, who wants to give the French the satisfaction? And no one's ever gotten sick because they ate too many Chinese desserts.

But there is one dessert I saw on a recent trip to Hong Kong that I couldn't get enough of -- ginger milk pudding. Calling it a "pudding," though, isn't entirely accurate, since it's not thickened with eggs or starch or ... anything, really. In fact, the literal translation is "ginger juice steamed milk," and that is actually what it is: a bowl of beautiful white, its texture as much liquid as it is solid, sweet and round and pure with a warming glow of ginger. It's kind of magical, even if the magic lies in a decidedly unwitchy chemistry. An enzyme in the ginger causes the milk to firm up a little when heated, and it does so just enough to turn it smooth and slippery in your spoon, like you may have pulled a custard out of the oven a little early, but man, are you glad you did.

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For one, your parents and their friends will insist on infesting every event with dorky, embarrassing stuff from the old country. Back in my whiny years, all my cool friends from school got to have buttery mashed potatoes and flaky little Parker House rolls at their Thanksgiving tables. And I was stuck with ... plain boiled rice.

"MO-OM! Why do we have to have RICE? I want potatoes!"

"Rice is good," Mom would say. "And Dad wants rice."

End of discussion. (This is another thing Chinese-American kids get to whine about: We never get to have the last word. Ever.)

Thanksgiving, according to my grade-school teachers, was the most American of holidays, a time to celebrate our common heritage by bonding around indigenous American foodstuffs. So I decided it was up to me, as a patriotic native-born American, to protect the sanctity of the holiday from creeping Sinofication.

"You know what Auntie Pat puts in her turkey?" Mom said one night, a week before Thanksgiving, "Naw mai and lop cheung."

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"Guancia" in Italian means pillow, which is synonymous with cheek. And it's the facial aspect of the word, and the animal, that found its way into the kitchens of central Italy. Apparently pancetta, the familiar smoked and cured pork belly, simply wasn't bold enough for rendering purposes, so they went to the face and found a far more profound flavor. To produce guanciale, the jowls of a hog are short-cured (three to four weeks) in salt and sugar and spices. The abbreviated process works well with the jowls' combination of streaked meat and thick fat. And it's that fat/meat quotient (as opposed to pancetta, which is meatier) that makes guanciale such a solid base. The fat melts in a hot pan, leaving the tender meat and a silky lipid of smoke and salt that informs but doesn't overwhelm any soup or sauce.

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Through her Italian class at school, my daughter learned to make a simple bruschetta di pomodoro. As a six year old, she proudly taught me how to make it, with the essential first step of rubbing a garlic clove on the freshly toasted cut edge of bread before adding olive oil, salt, pepper, basil and diced tomato. She also taught me to pronounce its name correctly: "brus 'ketta."

The name for bruschetta, which originated in central Italy in the 15th century, is derived from the verb in the Roman dialect "bruscare," meaning "to roast over coals." The story goes that bruschetta was invented by Italian olive growers, who would toast some bread over the fireplace in the oil pressing room so that when the freshly pressed olive oil emerged, they could taste the new batch. The original snack involved rubbing the fire-toasted bread with garlic, then sprinkling on the olive oil, and adding a pinch of salt.

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My friend Emily, the chief baking officer of the super-cute Sweet Cakes Bakery in Chicago, feels your pain and wants to introduce you to the Bostock. (I swear that’s her job title, not something I made up for my stupid economic downturn angle.) This thing is out of control. You take stale, day-old bread, soak it in almond syrup, top it with frangipane -- sweetened, buttery almond paste -- and bake it until the syrup forms a crisp, lightly caramelized sheen. Moist and rich inside, it's like bread pudding you can hold, but only so much better because, if you recall, it’s topped with frangipane. If you topped a manhole cover with frangipane, I’d break my teeth on it.

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Dad's apprenticeship at the hands of a gifted chef father and savvy manager mother gave him a lifelong love and appreciation of good food and restaurants -- and drove him to stay as far away from the culinary biz as possible.

By the time my sisters and I appeared on the scene, Dad generally stayed out of the kitchen. His culinary responsibilities were limited to standard dad stuff -- grilling burgers and steaks in the backyard -- and a single indoors task: folding wontons.

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It was missing my grandmother one year that led me to decide that I would make the tamales for the family, my Christmas present to everyone. What I had failed to realize was just how much brutal labor goes into tamales, especially if you hope to make a quantity large enough to feed a family the size of mine. If I wanted to, I could put away a dozen tamales myself and I needed to make enough to feed everyone. But I did it. Instead of doing them all the day after Thanksgiving, I did it in phases. I made the masa and put it in the fridge. I made the filling and put it in the fridge. I made a few tamales and put everything away. I did, over the course of a week to 10 days, what took an army of family members one day. By the time I was finished with those tamales, I was sick of them. Sick of looking at them. I was sick of scraping dried masa out from underneath my fingernails (which were connected to chili-stained cuticles, by the way). I never wanted to look at another tamale again. I was so tired of them I didn't even want to do the final cooking and then handed them off to my mother to finish, and I admit I got a little angry when she balked. Anyway, I gave them to my mom sometime in early December and didn't have to think about tamales again. When Christmas rolled around, I was eager to see how my first ever solo tamale adventure had gone. They were, if I do say so myself, excellent. They were fluffy, they were savory and they were made by someone in my family.

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Part of my motivation for writing about food is to leave a record for my children, so they will have recipes and recorded memories of our family life. I want my daughters to be competent in the kitchen, to know good food and feel comfortable preparing it; that's why I make homemade pasta and let my girls join in.

I wish I could say that I learned to make pasta from a nonna, one of the Italian grandmothers that Carol Field writes about in "In Nonna's Kitchen." My Alabama grandmother was a society lady who wore Italian leather pumps and could make a mean tomato aspic from Campbell's soup. For my own kitchen education, I turn to books, like those of Carol Field and Marcella Hazan. When I first started making pasta, I used the detailed instructions in Marcella’s "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking." I recommend it as the premier primer on homemade egg pasta.

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Those are scalding words for one of the best coffee shops in a city percolating with so many new ones that in March The New York Times decided to list the 40 "best." The irony is that until a few years ago New York couldn't compare to the Pacific Northwest -- where the specialty-coffee trade was born in the '60s -- or cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles or Chicago. In New York, drinking diner coffee was almost a badge of distinction. But now the market here for specialty espresso has grown so frenetic that even Portland's groudbreaking Stumptown and San Francisco's Blue Bottle entered the East Coast fray, suddenly turning the city into an all-star showcase of American coffee.

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I don't know what I expected when maman demanded earlier that morning, "Come with me to buy some meat," but it definitely wasn't this. In fact, if I were to write a memoir of the four months I spent as a student in Senegal, I would probably call it, "I Don't Know What I Was Expecting, but It Wasn't This: The Ryan Brown Story." Every moment, especially in the early days, was rife with opportunities for bewilderment. I would get into a taxi, only to have the driver stop along the way to pick up his friend -- and then drive him home first. Or I would respond to a man's "hello" on the street and he would shoot back, "Je pense que je t'aime." I think I love you. Apparently the concept of "Africa time" doesn't apply to matters of the heart.

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The Mongols were brutal and pragmatic and mobile. I was self-indulgent and listless, but now suddenly obsessed with their stories. When I arrived in Mongolia as a Peace Corps volunteer two years later, it was with a rucksack full of romance, too little long underwear, and a hunger. Mongolians ate horses, and I wanted to join them. I wanted to ingest some history and culture. Perhaps I did a little too much reading.

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I was a hardcore Francophile, and scoring a gig just out of college as an au pair for a family living near Lyon, France's second-largest city, seemed like a dream come true. In retrospect, there were clues the size of Humvees that something was very, very wrong with that family, but I was too starry-eyed to notice.

Maman, as she had informed me in an introductory letter written in creepily impeccable penmanship, did all the laundry herself. At first, I wondered why she bothered mentioning such a trivial detail. When I got to Lyon, I realized why: Maman didn't just do laundry. She did laundry the way Kobayashi does hot dogs. She ironed every single sock and piece of underwear her family wore, and engaged the housekeeper (who came in every day) in endless debate about the proper technique for folding fitted sheets so that they lay perfectly flat in storage.

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Koreans revere their traditional foods, ascribing to them medicinal properties (some scientists floated the idea that kimchi could inoculate you from avian flu). Michael Pettid, professor of Premodern Korean Studies at Binghamton University and author of "Korean Cuisine: An Illustrated History" explains that the food philosophy is based on the idea of balancing one's ki, the flow of energy that courses through your body. "In East Asian cosmology, the idea of regulation of one's ki is vital to overall health. Food is an important means to keep one's ki properly attuned to the external environment," he writes.

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In short: In this crowd of gastronomic hauties, I'm the token vox populi. I'm the man on the street they always interview after someone important comes to town, only with hamburgers.

That said, I've also had the good fortune to both grow up in what Said Food Editor calls "mayonnaise America" and spend chunks of my life, including part of my childhood, in China, appreciating the tapestry of food there and missing it desperately when I'm home.

Then one day, Said Food Editor came to me and barked, "Make me a burger. Make me remember it." And it dawned on me: Why not take the best peppery, pungent, garlicky tastes of the street stalls of Sichuan (that's how we obnoxious China hands spell "Szechwan," the province where blunt-force cooking reigns) and transplant them into the American backyard burger?

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Recognized by many names in various international cuisines, eggplant is botanically classified as a berry that has lots of edible soft seeds containing nicotinoid alkaloids, which is a close relative of tobacco. That is what gives the plant its bitterness. It is possible nowadays to find eggplants without seeds: The Japanese variety, which is light purple, long and thin, is a good example of this. Also, when you buy eggplants, don't go for the very hard ones; that's indicative of seeds within.

There are, of course, male and female eggplants, which can be identified by their indentation and protrusion, opposite the stem ends of the plant. I avoid the indented ones as those are the unwanted females full of seeds.

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It may be hard to imagine that a hot dog could be called a jewel, as a jewel is a rarity found in the depths of the earth, and a hot dog is a collaboration of the mystery meats in the depths of a pig, but the cool thing about food is that you can find jewels of any sort. And in Tucson, one of our jewels is the Sonoran Dog. (Tucson itself is kind of a hidden culinary jewel, with special tastes like Indian Fry Bread at the San Xavier Mission and Prickly Pear Meringue Pie at the Bread and Butter Café.)

The first time I had a Sonoran dog was when I was working a campaign for a waterless wash-and-wax. I would stand outside in my black skinny jeans and high heels, looking cute as can be with the blue company polo and can of wax in my hand ... I was dirty and stroke-ready and stinking to high heaven.

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I was first introduced to Korean food through a Korean Baptist church. This particular house of worship was theologically strictly Southern Baptist: no drinking, no dancing, and members of the congregation addressed each other as "Brother" and "Sister." The church was also culturally very Korean. Elders were addressed with the proper honorific terms: "Ajooma" for the older ladies and "Ajooshi" for the older gentlemen.

Like any faith community, this body has its share of church luncheons and picnics, all involving vast quantities of Korean food prepared by the church ladies in the basement kitchen. The picnics included the standard hamburgers and hot dogs, supplemented by marinated barbecued short ribs (galbi) and kimbap.

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