Rice Vinegar

Spicy, flavorful Kung Pao Chicken is coated with a sauce of garlic, ginger, red chili peppers, and soy sauce. Serve it over noodles, symbolic of a long life. Kung Pao Chicken Makes 2 servings 1. Cut chicken into thin slices (about 1/4-inch thick). Mix soy sauce, rice vinegar, red chilies and garlic. Place ginger slices in garlic press and squeeze juice and pulp into sauce. Add chicken and let stand, tossing once or twice. Prepare the noodles. 2. Remove chicken from marinade.

You may think fried food isn't the best bet for dead-of-summer cooking, but frying itself isn't the enemy. Time is. So fry. Just do it quickly. Try seafood. Even big plump sea scallops are done in less than five minutes in a hot pan, hardly time for a cool cook to break a sweat. The scallops are dusted with a cayenne-spiked cornmeal mixture, then cooked to a golden crisp. A perfect dipping sauce needs no cooking at all. It combines the cleansing flavors of rice vinegar, ginger and cilantro as a foil to the sweet scallops.

Some "quick cooks" cook quickly because they keep it simple. Others show up at the table just as quickly offering full-fledged meals and complex flavors. They know something the other quickies don't: how to organize. It can be done, but it takes most of us too much time to plan - time that we're trying to save by keeping it simple. The next best thing is to have the game plan given to you. Here's one for a menu that begins with Grilled Japanese Eggplant Salad, features Grilled Chicken Legs With Gingered Sauce and is accompanied by steamed asparagus and rice.

Stepping into Cafe Hue is like walking into an episode of "China Beach. " This dim little no-frills place in Old City, with its wistful Vietnamese music, beaded curtains and staff that struggles with English, feels like another world. I've found livelier food at other Vietnamese restaurants. But if bargain prices are what you're looking for, this is the place. The fat spring rolls ($2.50 for two) are wrapped with rice paper so sheer that you can see the shrimp, chicken, lettuce, sliced cucumber and vermicelli noodles inside.

It's a fact. Times are tough and money is so tight that even supper from the local fast-food place makes a hefty dent in the budget. So what's the answer? Eating well on that shrinking dollar means cooking at home. And home cooking is in - just ask career couples, single people (young and old) or young families. They'll agree that dining even in a neighborhood spot is just too expensive to make it a habit. Now we're discovering that cooking is therapeutic and sensually satisfying.

Pizza, bagels, egg rolls - these are only a few ethnic foods that have long been part of the American food scene. Although they weren't brought over on the Mayflower, each is so firmly entrenched in our eating habits that we don't even stop to consider the origin. Now there's a refreshing influence on the culinary front, so strong it was the focus of a recent conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, of the International Association of Culinary Professionals. In that city, which in recent years has absorbed an influx of Thais, Chinese, Japanese, Cambodians, Vietnamese and Koreans, trend-setting chefs are integrating Eastern ingredients with Western flavors.

Ever since many of us can remember, a common accompaniment for the meat at dinner has been peas and carrots. All too often this side dish was not particularly exciting. Usually it consisted of mushy carrot cubes and grayish-green peas. In the process of canning, their colors were muted and their texture became soft and tired. Frozen peas and carrots did not produce excellent results, either. However, peas and carrots can be a lively combination. My favorite formula is to combine fresh carrots with sugar snap peas.

Chae Yang and her father, Yong Yang, left Seoul, South Korea, for the United States 19 years ago. They took along one suitcase packed with winter clothes, modest savings and ambitious hopes for the future. In the years since, they have parlayed their resources into Yang's Farmers Market along Lancaster Avenue in Berwyn. Yong Yang buys the store's fresh produce, and his daughter selects its eclectic mix of ethnic and gourmet goods. Chae Yang, 27, (whose first name is pronounced shay)

Will success spoil Gary's Little Rock Cafe, the best little restaurant downtheshore? Oh, the food is still terrific, creative, reasonably priced and attractively served. It's just that complacency seems to be gnawing at the edges of this year-old Ventnor restaurant. Telephone manners seem frayed, the greeting at the door aloof. Spending 12 minutes in the narrow entrance waiting for an 8 o'clock reservation, clutching a rapidly warming bottle of chardonnay - that's not my idea of a prelude to a fine dining experience.

First, there was a crackling sizzle as the cool vegetables hit the hot pan. Then the aroma of garlic, ginger and onions cooking floated across the upper floor at Borders Book Shop on Tuesday night. One by one, as if lured by the Pied Piper of smells, bookworms let their noses do the stalking, following the superb scent to the corner of the shop. Lynn Soisson-Power, executive chef at Catering Inc., was at the Rosemont store, demonstrating how to prepare Asian appetizers for the holidays.

Filet mignon is one of the tenderest and easiest cuts of beef to cook. Too bad it's also one of the priciest. Get the most beefy bang for your buck by serving this cut with a sauce that adds flavor, color, and texture. Here are three sauce recipes. All are easy to make, so don't feel you're stuck with serving one sauce at a time. Remember how half the fun of an old-fashioned beef fondue was having a variety of sauces on the table to dip your cooked meat into. Offer one, two, three (or more!

Spicy, flavorful Kung Pao Chicken is coated with a sauce of garlic, ginger, red chili peppers, and soy sauce. Serve it over noodles, symbolic of a long life. Kung Pao Chicken Makes 2 servings 1. Cut chicken into thin slices (about 1/4-inch thick). Mix soy sauce, rice vinegar, red chilies and garlic. Place ginger slices in garlic press and squeeze juice and pulp into sauce. Add chicken and let stand, tossing once or twice. Prepare the noodles. 2. Remove chicken from marinade.

First-time visitors to the city's new (well, in a manner of speaking) Headhouse Farmers Market a few weeks ago fell hungrily on the assembled bounty, making short work, in particular, of the somewhat-exotic harvest from Queens Farm. The farm's name is curiously at odds with its produce, which leans heavily to the East - long-leafed Chinese lettuce (now gone by), tender edamame beans, homegrown shiitake mushrooms, and bok choy, supplementing the more common bunches of basil and fava beans, snow peas, and not-so-usual purslane.

Ever since many of us can remember, a common accompaniment for the meat at dinner has been peas and carrots. All too often this side dish was not particularly exciting. Usually it consisted of mushy carrot cubes and grayish-green peas. In the process of canning, their colors were muted and their texture became soft and tired. Frozen peas and carrots did not produce excellent results, either. However, peas and carrots can be a lively combination. My favorite formula is to combine fresh carrots with sugar snap peas.

Will success spoil Gary's Little Rock Cafe, the best little restaurant downtheshore? Oh, the food is still terrific, creative, reasonably priced and attractively served. It's just that complacency seems to be gnawing at the edges of this year-old Ventnor restaurant. Telephone manners seem frayed, the greeting at the door aloof. Spending 12 minutes in the narrow entrance waiting for an 8 o'clock reservation, clutching a rapidly warming bottle of chardonnay - that's not my idea of a prelude to a fine dining experience.

Chae Yang and her father, Yong Yang, left Seoul, South Korea, for the United States 19 years ago. They took along one suitcase packed with winter clothes, modest savings and ambitious hopes for the future. In the years since, they have parlayed their resources into Yang's Farmers Market along Lancaster Avenue in Berwyn. Yong Yang buys the store's fresh produce, and his daughter selects its eclectic mix of ethnic and gourmet goods. Chae Yang, 27, (whose first name is pronounced shay)

First, there was a crackling sizzle as the cool vegetables hit the hot pan. Then the aroma of garlic, ginger and onions cooking floated across the upper floor at Borders Book Shop on Tuesday night. One by one, as if lured by the Pied Piper of smells, bookworms let their noses do the stalking, following the superb scent to the corner of the shop. Lynn Soisson-Power, executive chef at Catering Inc., was at the Rosemont store, demonstrating how to prepare Asian appetizers for the holidays.

Pizza, bagels, egg rolls - these are only a few ethnic foods that have long been part of the American food scene. Although they weren't brought over on the Mayflower, each is so firmly entrenched in our eating habits that we don't even stop to consider the origin. Now there's a refreshing influence on the culinary front, so strong it was the focus of a recent conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, of the International Association of Culinary Professionals. In that city, which in recent years has absorbed an influx of Thais, Chinese, Japanese, Cambodians, Vietnamese and Koreans, trend-setting chefs are integrating Eastern ingredients with Western flavors.

It's a fact. Times are tough and money is so tight that even supper from the local fast-food place makes a hefty dent in the budget. So what's the answer? Eating well on that shrinking dollar means cooking at home. And home cooking is in - just ask career couples, single people (young and old) or young families. They'll agree that dining even in a neighborhood spot is just too expensive to make it a habit. Now we're discovering that cooking is therapeutic and sensually satisfying.

Stepping into Cafe Hue is like walking into an episode of "China Beach. " This dim little no-frills place in Old City, with its wistful Vietnamese music, beaded curtains and staff that struggles with English, feels like another world. I've found livelier food at other Vietnamese restaurants. But if bargain prices are what you're looking for, this is the place. The fat spring rolls ($2.50 for two) are wrapped with rice paper so sheer that you can see the shrimp, chicken, lettuce, sliced cucumber and vermicelli noodles inside.