Several images are from a dinner in December at Benu. A few are from recent meals at Monsieur Benjamin and Mama Ji’s. The rest are scenes from our kitchen.

As usual, click a picture on the mosaic for a larger-sized version.

Endive salad with walnuts, mustard vinaigrette and apple.

Monkfish liver steamed in rice wine, with toasted seaweed and chili.

Milk pudding, salted caramel sauce, peat

Barbecued quail from Wolfe Ranch.

Pickled long beans with pork and chile peppers.

Pernil – Puerto Rican-style roast pork.

Grilled veal short ribs, seasoned with sesame seed, perilla seed and pine nuts.

Black truffle steamed bun.  Basically a play on Peking duck – stuff the bun with quail, top with condiments and enjoy.

Xiao long bao with lobster coral, house-made soy sauce, vinegar.

Caviar with hand-pressed sesame oil, sesame leaf and daikon.

Arctic char amandine, haricots verts, brown butter.

Chicken with tree ears and Chinese mushrooms in a clay pot.

Shrimp tempura, jellyfish, seaweed

Left: Pickled crosnes and pearl onion. Right: XO sauce, house-made soy sauce.

Blood sausage, sweet rice, squid ink, shiso.

Chrysanthemum leaf and scallion salad.

Chicken wing stuffed with abalone and abalone liver mousse.

Omija sorbet, olive oil

Chicken meatballs with ricotta and lemon.

Salted walnuts, dried persimmons, sweet rice cakes

Spicy fermented bean paste with tomato, served with crudités.

Asian pear and Napa cabbage kimchi.

Quail liver mousse, au jus, black truffles.

Coconut chiffon cake

“Shark fin” soup – Dungeness crab, ham, egg white and black truffles.

Sea urchin marinated in fermented crab sauce, with thinly sliced celtuce

Kohlrabi kimchi.

Broccoli rabe with garlic and lemon.

Sauternes.

Anchovies and parsley.

Ginkgo flour “tortilla”, matsutake mushroom, pine needles, 10 year old aged pine syrup.

Butter lettuce salad, French breakfast radishes, chervil.

Marinated mussel, root vegetables.

Thousand year old quail egg, cabbage juice, ginger.

Whipped ricotta cheese, chestnut honey, chopped pistachio nuts.

Butter with orange blossom honey and ginseng. Not shown are some sprouted grain rolls.

Steamed Japonica rice with powdered scallion.

Short ribs.

I’ve never committed to a regular blog posting schedule in the nearly 13 years this blog has been in existence, but I suppose I should start doing that, no? That should be my New Year’s resolution…or one of them, anyway.

So here’s to a beginning of sorts.