Photo by Nicholas L. Hall

Very agro.

Over the years, I've come to appreciate the importance of texture and acidity in food. More than almost anything else, save maybe basic seasoning (salt), these are the components I look for in a dish. All too often, I find myself searching for and not finding them, frequently in dishes that might be perfect if only they had a little bit of citrusy brightness, or a bit of crunch for textural contrast.

Acidity helps to bring out other flavors, lifting and highlighting them. When my food tastes flat and one-dimensional, the first thing I do is check for salt balance. Does it need a pinch to underline the flavors? After that, I turn to acid. A squeeze of lime juice after everything's plated, perhaps. A puree of citrusy ponzu and earthy sweet potato, to add an acidic kick to an underlying component.

Texture is similar in its ability to highlight, via contrast. I've made the mistake, more than a few times, of serving a braised dish with only braised elements. They might have tasted delicious (especially if there's a bit of bright, citrusy salsa verde drizzled across the plate for acidity), but they also had the texture of baby food. That's never a good thing. There's a reason mac and cheese is best served with a crunchy topping of broiled bread crumbs.

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Photo by snowpea&bokchoi

I've always been a sucker for taco seasoning packets. While I usually like to make things from scratch, the store-bought packets remind me of the better days when I played manhunt outside before my mom called us in dinner. (Remember manhunt? How cool was that shit?)

I had big plans for an old-school taco night the other weekend, complete with all the fixin's and some homemade margaritas. But just as we started to cook, it hit me: I forgot the seasoning! Such a rookie move. Already a few margs in, I wasn't driving to the store for a packet, so I sucked it up and made my own.

And it was delicious - even better than the store-bought kind, because I was able to season it to fit my tastes. Now, with control of the salt content, the flavor, and the world, there's no way I'm going back to the pre-made blends. I suggest giving it a try. If you're like me, your pantry is stocked with herbs and spices anyway.

Here are some starters, but be sure to taste and adjust as you like:

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Photo by John Suh

Life is complicated enough. Simplify your Korean dinner.

When you want Korean barbecue, and you want it fast, prepared meat marinades are the way to go. Now you can have a weekday dinner that's both quick and tasty.

What is it?

Bulgogi, which translates to "fire meat" in Korean, involves cooking marinated beef, pork, or chicken over a hot grill. In most restaurants, you have the option to cook it yourself on a grill located in the center of the table, or, if you don't want to smell like a barbecue pit, you can request your meats be grilled in the kitchen before serving. Beef is the most popular meat in Korean barbecue, and it either comes as finely sliced sirloin (bulgogi) or as short ribs cut thinly across the bone (galbi or kalbi). Whatever the meat, it needs to be marinated in a concoction of soy sauce, sugar, sesame oil, and garlic. And then everyone's got their own secret ingredient or additional touches to the marinade: sesame seeds, citrus juice, what have you.

Skip all the chopping and mixing -- you can just pop open a bottle of Korean barbecue marinade and essentially achieve the same result. Bibigo, the new line of Korean products for home cooks everywhere, makes three flavors: original, pineapple, and hot and spicy; and they're all pretty delicious and, wait, did I mention quick and easy?

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Photo by John Suh

You say crayfish, I say crawfish.

Wave goodbye to Fat Tuesday. Say hello to Lent, the 40 days (excluding Sundays) leading up to Easter. Lent is a time when many strive for a deepened spiritual faith by fasting. Many Catholics observe meatless Fridays (hence the noticeable rise in McDonald's Filet-O-Fish commercials during Lenten seasons past).

But meatless Fridays don't have to mean blegh Fridays. We're on the cusp of crawfish season, and while there are plenty of crawfish joints around town, they do get super-busy. Come Fridays, all the crawfish restaurants are packed with people waiting more than an hour just to eat. Bit you can point at them, laugh, and then go home and whip up a pot of the mudbugs yourself. Who said your tastebuds have to be miserable during Lent?

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Photos by Mai Pham

The light brown stuff in the bottle is definitely "nuoc mam." But it's also fish sauce.

It's 1:15 in the morning, and I am chatting online with Chef Kevin Naderi, asking for some clarification about his fish sauce vinaigrette. My brain is fuzzy, I'm trying to finish up an article, and we chat about something that, to me, just does not make sense.

"You use a fish sauce (nuoc mam) vinaigrette, right?" I ask.

"No, this is more Birdseye chili, shallot and garlic," he replies.

"I thought you said fish sauce vinaigrette?"

"Yeah, fish sauce but not nuoc mam..."

Okay. Stop. Pause and rewind. He said it's fish sauce but not nuoc mam. Really? Since when is that?

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Photo by John Suh

Turn yesterday's beverage into tomorrow's sauce.

Valentine's Day came and went. You cooked some fancy meal with your significant other, uncorked a bottle of wine, and then after dinner, fed each other bon bons by the fire. Okay, realistically, there was no fire because Houston just hasn't stayed cold this winter. But all the other parts really happened, right?

My Valentine and I did, in fact, cook a fancy meal together, and we did open a wine bottle a former dinner guest had left on our wine rack. But because it was Tuesday and we both had to get up early the next day, we only drank one glass each. Okay, so the wine also happened to be not so delicious, but I like to think we were just that responsible.

Of course, with great responsibility comes not-so-great leftover wine. Instead of pouring the wine down the drain, however, why not use it for cooking? Sure, they say you're not supposed to cook with a wine you wouldn't drink, but recession tells me not to waste anything, even that bad wine someone left at my place.

If your choice of wine was a cabernet, go here to get ideas. Got some leftover white wine instead? Read on, and see what chardonnay can do for you.

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Photo by John Suh

Eat them by the handful.

First, a quick and dirty lesson on the varieties of chocolate:

• Unsweetened chocolate is all cacao and no sugar, making it incredibly bitter. It is also known as baking chocolate and is usually found in the baking aisle of grocery stores in the forms of blocks or bars. The sugar is added separately when baking brownies or cakes.
• Bittersweet, extra dark, semi-sweet, and dark chocolate, at least in the U.S., are often used interchangeably and should contain no less than 35 percent cacao. (Bittersweet and extra dark tend to have more cacao, while semi-sweet and dark have more sugar.) Unlike the cacao, however, sugar content is not regulated so sweetness may vary between brands.
• Milk chocolate contains milk (duh) either in the form of powder, liquid, or condensed.
• White chocolate uses cocoa butter instead of cocoa solids as its main ingredient. As a result, white chocolate lacks many of the health benefits found in darker chocolate.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's dive into the most delectable of chocolates: the dark variety.

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Photo by John Suh

Spurkey? (Spam: the turkey version)

Ah, yes, that mysterious block of meat housed in the blue and yellow can. In 2007, the seven billionth can of Spam was sold. On average, 3.8 cans are eaten every second in the U.S. alone. Since its inception in 1937, Spam has become part of American pop culture--it has acted in films, been acquired by the Smithsonian, and now even has a museum of its own. Indeed, Spam is a rock star.

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Photo by John Suh

Eat a banh chung for New Year.

Happy New Year! Or as the Vietnamese say, Chuc mung nam moi! It's the lucky year of the Dragon -- those born between today and February 9, 2013, are predicted to live fortunate, prosperous lives. And what better way to celebrate the new year than by eating banh chung or banh Tet, the traditional Vietnamese Lunar New Year cake?

I know this technically isn't a single ingredient per se, but with little effort, you can dress it up and make it into a dish with different texture and taste. Read on and learn about the history and possibilities of this Vietnamese New Year cake.

What is it?

Lunar New Year cakes are made by wrapping fatty pork, mung beans, and glutinous rice inside banana leaves and then steaming. The leaves' color is absorbed by the sticky rice, green being a symbol of earth and, thus, life.

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Photo by John Suh

Bibigo's ssamjang: ready-to-eat

Last week, we brought you gochujang, a red pepper paste used in Korean cuisine. This week, we give you ssamjang, a Korean seasoned dipping paste that uses gochujang as an ingredient.

What is it?

Ssamjang is a thick and spicy dipping paste that consists of doenjang (fermented soy bean paste), gochujang, sesame oil, onion, garlic, scallions, and sometimes brown sugar and/or sesame seeds.

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