Grocery stores here bear a mark of Japanese influence: dried shiitake mushrooms, wakame seaweed and mung beans are an easy find. Mung beans are tiny dull green beans, almost as small as lentils. Japanese use them to make desserts, but to my mind a bean is a bean and belongs just as well in a soup.

This recipe is another experiment with fiddlehead fern salad. The first one was a complete fiasco. This time it was dashed off intuitively, with Asian cuisine in mind.

Mushrooms, ginger, and pork - a perfect combination of flavors with an Eastern twist. This recipe is inspired by Japanese cooking, but does not require any rare ingredients (because I was too lazy to travel to Manhattan for a visit to a Japanese grocery). And I don't regret it, because this pork dish lacks absolutely nothing.

The idea for this recipe - a steak with a marinade that includes pureed fruit - comes from my boss, who has spent some years in Japan and is more in tune with Asian olfactory sensibilities than me. Pureed fruits are traditionally used in Korean marinades and for good reasons. They add the characteristic tinge of sweetness to the meat, and the acidity present in some fruit can help tenderize the meat.

Hence, for some of us lazy bums, this is a perfect way to create a custom flavor of any ice cream. The green tea ice cream is made with matcha green tea powder. The green tea leaves harvested for matcha are grown in the shade, and have a more intense green color and sweeter flavor than other green tea varieties.

Among squashes like pumpkin or butternut squash zucchini has a rather bland taste when used alone. So very often it is mixed with other vegetables in stir fries or used as a side dish. Zucchini of a bigger size has better more distinctive taste, but for some reason growers do not allow this vegetable to mature and end its life in the beginning.

Those who know me also know that eggplant is one of my favourite vegetables. Unlike many people, including my other half, I absolutely adore this nature's creation. Eggplant (also aubergine) comes in many shapes, sizes, and colors, and today I experimented with different types of this fruit.

This favourite of ours was inspired by Asian salads that became popular in Russia in the 80-s.  Korean salad, as we called it, was made mostly of carrots with the addition of garlic, red and black pepper, salt, white vinegar (there was nothing else in stores), and sunflower oil (also the only option we had at that time). Daikon, Japanese radish (or just Asian radish, since it originates in continental Asia) adds festiveness and visual interest to this year-round dish.