Asian

The Japanese man I buy my fish from gave me this recipe. One day I noticed that he was making hand rolls for lunch from the trimmings of a No. 1 grade A tuna loin. He let me have a roll since I’m such a good customer, and I have to say it was the best spicy tuna roll I’d ever had. You’ll get the hang of rolling these in no time—practice makes perfect.

If you have never experimented with Thai ingredients before, try this recipe—the flavors are mental. Lemongrass, coconut milk, basil, lime: They all hit the palate in perfect harmony. If you love Thai food, this is a great dish to start playing around with—and it’s very easy. The floral aroma of green curry simmering on the stove is hypnotic. Kaffir lime leaves are crucial to this dish and are worth the trip to your local Asian market. Serve with Perfect Steamed Jasmine Rice (page 240).

This dish takes a little planning ahead but is well worth it. Don’t be scared—it’s a show-off dish. You may, however, have to shop around for some of the makings. A trip to your local Asian market or a surf on the Internet should do it. Start by marinating the duck the night before you plan to serve it. A smoker isn’t required, but you will need a wok with a domed lid and wire rack insert (sorry, an electric wok won’t work). Serve with steamed Asian greens like bok choy or Chinese broccoli. Round out the meal with Perfect Steamed Jasmine Rice (page 240).

Salads are quick and painless to throw together on a work night, and you won’t feel like you’ll have to do double time at the gym the next day. If you’re on your own, this is also a speedy and healthy dinner for one: Just use one tuna steak and a few less vegetables. The colors of this sophisticated and simple salad really pop. I like hothouse cucumbers because they have minimal seeds and tender skin. The mustard packets that you get from Chinese takeout are really put to good use in this Asian vinaigrette.

Hong Kong is a truly eye-popping place for a food lover. The dai pai dong (food stalls) around Stanley Street on Hong Kong Island are full of noodle shops, fishmongers, live chickens, and a dazzling display of the strangest produce I have ever seen. The whole place smells like ginger and fresh coriander—I had a blast. When I got back to New York I was playing around with some of the flavors that I had experienced and came up with these crab cakes. Although crab cakes are not exactly Chinese, the flavors are pure Hong Kong. These crab cakes can easily be prepared ahead of time. Serve with Perfect Steamed Jasmine Rice (page 240).

This basic, versatile recipe can be adapted to just about any vegetable depending on what you have on hand. While the oven preheats, prepare the vegetables. Serve with oven-grilled chicken breasts and steamed rice.

Tandoori Chicken is a classic northern Indian dish. The word “tandoori” comes from the Hindi word “tandoor,” a tall, cylindrical clay oven originally used in northern India to cook meat dishes and bread. Here, we use a tandoori spice mixture as a marinade for salmon. Traditionalists might balk, but when I’m in a hurry, I use a store-bought tandoori spice mixture. In the convection oven, the salmon cooks quickly and is moist and mildly fragrant. A minty cucumber-yogurt sauce adds an authentic flavor.

Roasting brings out all the aromatics in this seasoning mix.

Crunchy with peanuts and marinated in a richly flavored Asian-style sauce, this is good with steamed jasmine rice and stir-fried snow peas.

If you make this ahead of time, keep it refrigerated but bring it to room temperature before serving.

We'll happily make room on our condiment shelf for yuzu kosho, a blend of citrus zest, garlic, chile, and salt. It adds aromatic acidity (and some heat) to rice dishes, noodle soups, fish, and chicken. We substitute lemon, lime, and grapefruit zest for the hard-to-find yuzu, a Japanese citrus.

This is the definition of minimalist Thai cooking. The steam not only gently cooks the fish until just tender but also creates an instant, complex sauce from a handful of basic ingredients. Scoring the fish's flesh allows more of the flavor to season the fish and facilitates faster steaming. The fish is cooked on a plate that fits inside the steamer, to catch the juices.

Thai salads are full of crisp vegetables and fruits mixed with intense condiments. "It's not about just tossing the ingredients together," says Ricker. "It's about working them into the dressing," which can also be used to dress green-papaya and cabbage slaws.

All Thai curries start with a handful of aromatic ingredients (chiles, galangal, lemongrass, turmeric, etc.) pounded into a paste with a granite mortar and pestle. The paste is then stirred into soups or stews (often with coconut milk) or used as the basis of sautéed dishes. Use a mini-processor to make the curry paste if you'd like, although this incendiary stew will take on a deeper flavor if you use a granite mortar and pestle.

The simplest of all Thai dishes, stir-fries are a great way to showcase fresh green vegetables. You can increase the spiciness of your stir-fry by adding more chiles. The key to this dish's success? Controlling the heat on the pan from beginning to end.

There are two categories of entrée in Thailand: dishes served with rice, and noodle dishes, which are presented as one-pot meals and often eaten on the go. Rice noodles cook more quickly than wheat pasta and are the perfect neutral vehicle for intense Thai flavors. This Pad Thai is not the dish from the neighborhood take-out joint. "It ain't made with chicken," says Ricker, whose traditional take—pleasantly funky with fish sauce and preserved radish and a touch sour from tamarind—is meant to be eaten in the evening as a stand-alone dish.

You can buy premade Chinese dumpling wrappers from any Asian grocery store, and in most cases they work as well and taste as good as homemade wrappers. However, Shanghai Soup Dumplings should be made with homemade wrappers or they will not hold their soup when steaming. If you are making wrappers for Shanghai Soup Dumplings, try to keep the center of the wrappers thicker than the edges when rolling the dough disks.

I stepped up on a cinder block to enter the open kitchen and realized then just how short the cook was; he flicked on the burner and the flame shot up as high as his chin. His broom closet-size kitchen swelled with heat and even with my average height, I towered over him awkwardly as he wielded the wok with beef and soy sauce. "You must play basketball!" he suggested. On his kitchen wall and out of reach of the blazing flame, plastic bags of spices hung from low-set rusty hooks, and his windowsill nearby lay scattered with tangerine peels set out to dry in the sun. Cooks in China are in the habit of keeping the peels of the tangerines they eat and spreading them out to dry in the sun for later use. Then they just rehydrate a few pieces whenever they want to add a nutty, slightly bitter note to a stir-fry or stew. Tangerine Beef is a Sichuan specialty and tall on flavor.

It is no coincidence that in Chinese, the word for "family" (jia) is the same as the word for "home"; home is a central part of family life in China. Parents, children, mothers-in-law, grandparents, and other family members often all live together for generations, taking care of one another. Jiaozi, or classic Chinese dumplings, is a dish that celebrates this supportive community. Often made at holidays, these labor-intensive dumplings are prepared in an assembly line, with the greatest to the least in the family all having a hand in their production. The process starts when wheat dough is kneaded, rolled flat into teacup-size circles, and stacked as dumpling wrappers. The next person in the line spoons a pork or vegetable filling (depending on the recipe) in the center of each wrap before passing them on to the "crimper." My first experience making jiaozi was at the house of one of my professors, Mr. Zhang. Having been invited to dinner, I was surprised when Mr. Zhang put me to work in the kitchen. I was the "crimper," charged with folding and crimping the edge of the dumpling wrappers to form plump, sealed pockets of goodness ready to be thrown into a boiling pot. That night, in the room full of brothers, sisters, cousins, and grandparents who were not my own, all of us working together to make jiaozi, I felt more like family than simply a guest in the Zhang home. Invite your friends and family over and put them to work. We like to make more dumplings than we can eat and freeze the extra for later. If you throw all the freshly made dumplings into a plastic bag, they will freeze stuck together into one giant block of dumplings. To avoid this, first spread out the uncooked dumplings on a lightly greased baking sheet, taking care that they do not touch each other. Place the sheet in the freezer for about 30 minutes. Then throw all the dumplings into a large resealable plastic bag and store in the freezer. When you are ready to eat them, do not defrost the dumplings, but cook them frozen exactly like you would fresh dumplings—just add 3 minutes to the cooking time.

This dish might not be to everyone's (westernized) taste on a hungover morning, and it's also a breakfast with many components—rice, grilled fish, miso soup, pickles and a Japanese-style omelette—and some relatively obscure ingredients. Having said that, this is as clean, wholesome and nutritious as breakfast gets, so if anything is going to make you feel better it may well be this. However, I advise you to steer clear of tofu with a hangover (vegetarians: you may shoot me now); I've used cubes of potato instead.