I’m sorry, bitter melon, but I don’t think it’s going to work out between us. No, hush, just listen.

I remember when I first saw you at the farmers market. You were so different from all the other vegetables, all rough around the edges. I admit I was afraid to approach you, and I had a real thing going for zucchini at the time, so I just let you be. But I couldn’t get you out of my head. Finally, after reading about your virtues in Cooking from the Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America, I screwed up the courage to talk to you.

Things were going so well when I first brought you home. Remember how lovingly I cleaned your every crease and crevasse with a mushroom brush? You didn’t even complain when, in my youthful inexperience, I cut you in half lengthwise, when we both know you deserve to be cut in half crosswise. And then to look at your seeds. Oh, your seeds. So large, so bright red, your seeds were just screaming of your readiness, your ripeness. As I lovingly filled you with a mixture of pork, onions and cilantro and set you to simmer nice and slow, our future together seemed — and smelled — so bright.

No, don’t cry. Look: it’s not about you, it’s me. I was raised in the American Midwest on two flavors: sweet and salty. Have you tasted our ketchup? Nothing in my culture, my upbringing prepared me for a bitter flavor like yours. So, so bitter. You were like nothing I’ve ever tasted before, and you deserve to be with someone who will really appreciate you.

Maybe if I just didn’t try to consume so much of you at one time, if I chopped you into a salad, if I used you as an accented flavor rather than the main part of the dish, maybe then… No — you’re right. No sense in fooling ourselves. It’s over. Goodbye, bitter melon.

In a world where many people don’t get enough to eat, the fact that Americans waste nearly half their food represents a moral failure. What’s more, with the economic crisis in this country family food budgets are stretched tighter than ever; American families can ill-afford to waste so much. A lot of this waste results from overbuying: stuffing our refrigerators with more food than we can possibly eat before the crisper drawer starts to resemble the cast of Night of the Living Dead. Also responsible, though, are some of the bad — wasteful — habits encouraged by recipe writers that have us discard perfectly good ingredients.

Take chicken skin. Quite a few recipes that call for skin-on chicken parts, browned to contribute to the fond only to remove the skin before continuing with the dish. It makes sense — if the chicken skin was left to stew in the pot it would become flabby and unappetizing, and probably add an unsightly layer of fat. But the implication of the “remove the skin” step is that you should just throw it away. And you’re throwing away a gold mine.

Last night, as I was making a paella with six skin-on chicken thighs, I saved the to-be-discarded skins on a plate. As the paella was steaming, I heated up some schmaltz (saved from a roast chicken a few weeks ago) in a non-stick pan. In went the chicken skin, fried until crisp. Just like that I had the perfect appetizer — think pork rinds, except tastes like chicken — that left me a satisfied and ethical diner.

Tilapia has a lot to recommend it: it’s cheap, grows fast, can be sustainably farmed, and is low in mercury. Probably the only thing not to love about tilapia is its flavor. Not that it’s actively offensive, just that even in terms of white-fleshed fish tilapia is pretty bland.

That blandness can be remedied with ingredients with serious flavor: fish sauce, ginger, chiles, lime juice and herbs. All these are found in larb, the Laotian meat salad that also happens to be the perfect antidote to a long and dreary winter.

My recipe, from Cooking from the Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America by Sami Scripter and Sheng Yang, lists a number of herbs you can choose from: mint, cilantro, Vietnamese coriander, culantro, rice paddy herb, Thai basil, Chinese boxthorn. Tragically our co-op doesn’t carry most of those, so I limited my larb to mint, cilantro, and Thai basil — in spite of the authors’ insistence that authentic larb must contain culantro — but it was still delicious.

The word larb for me is associated with raw meat, particularly raw beef. That’s not necessarily the case — larb can be made with cooked or raw meat — but if the idea of raw beef gives you pause, making the salad with raw fish might be a little easier. Just think of it as a south-Asian ceviche.

Tilapia Larb

Adapted from Cooking from the Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America

• ¾# Tilapia filets
• Juice of two limes
• 2 T minced ginger
• 1 stalk lemon grass, tough parts removed, minced
• 1 hot chili pepper, minced
• 1/3 cup chopped mint
• 1/3 cup chopped cilantro
• 1/3 cup Thai basil
• ½ bunch green onions, chopped
• 1 T fish sauce
• 1 t salt
• 1/4 c toasted rice flour

Chop the tilapia into fine pieces. Toss with lime juice and leave to sit until fish turns opaque. Squeeze off excess lime juice and place tilapia in a large bowl.

Add the rest of the ingredients to the bowl and toss. Serve with lettuce leaves for scooping.

A note on toasted rice flour: I made this by toasting some rice in a skillet until it was tan and then grinding it in my spice grinder. Unfortunately, I didn’t grind it fine enough, and the rice left unsettling crunchy granules throughout the salad. If you’re going to include it, make sure you grind the rice fully to the consistency of flour. You could also leave it out — the salad wouldn’t be authentic, but I think it would taste fine.

It’s safe to say that unless I hit the internet blogging jackpot and finally get to cash in on marthaandtom.com, I’m never going to own the recently-published Modernist Cuisine. $600 for a cookbook is just a little beyond this blogger’s budget. It’s a shame, because everything I’ve seen about the book (eGullet has some of the best coverage including a Q&A with the authors) indicates that it will be an immensely useful — not to mention beautiful — reference, even if you don’t go in for the immersion circulators, centrifuges, c-vaps and other gadgets favored by the Modernist Cuisine laboratory.

Fortunately for me and anybody else that doesn’t have $600 burning a hole in their apron pocket, this book is generating enough buzz and discussion online that some of the key findings are becoming available to the rest of us. In another post on eGullet, Chris Amirault introduced the modernist pasta, and was kind enough to post the full recipe:

• 100 g ’00′ flour (100%)
• 1 g xanthan gum
• 2.5 g salt
• 9 g water
• 56.7 g egg yolk
• 10.7 g oil

Xanthan gum is something I more expect to see printed somewhere near the bottom of a package-side ingredient list than a pasta recipe. The Modernists claim that xanthan gives fresh pasta a chewier texture closer to that of dried pasta. As it turns out Xanthan gum is a popular ingredient among people with gluten intolerances — it adds structure and enhances texture in gluten-less baked goods — so obtaining a small baggy of the magic white powder was no problem — they sell it in bulk at the co-op.

While xanthan gum stands out in the recipe as a weird ingredient, far crazier was the amount of eggs called for. I tripled the base recipe to produce about a pound of pasta (539.7 g or 1.2#), which meant I needed 170.1 grams of egg yolks. Not really knowing how much an egg yolk weighs, I set a bowl on my scale and got cracking. Ten eggs later and the scale was at 168 g. Ten eggs! With the egg I mixed into the ravioli filling, this dinner took a full banker’s dozen. Anybody have a good recipe that calls for ten egg whites?

I mixed the dough in my food processor; it came together extremely dry and crumbly. Ordinarily I would have added a little more water, but the Modernist measurements being so precise — down to the tenth of a gram — I stuck with them.

The dryness was even more apparent as I tried to work the dough through my pasta machine. Even after resting it was extremely difficult to get the dough to pass through the widest setting on my hand-cranked machine. As I worked it through the progressively thinner settings, the dough became jagged on the edges and appeared brittle.

In spite of these difficulties, once the pasta was rolled the advantages of the xanthan gum started to become apparent. Normally, after rolling and cutting pasta I go into paranoid mode, spreading copious amounts of flour to try to keep all the strands separated. I usually break out the pasta tree. But with the Modernist pasta, no tree was necessary: this pasta will not stick together. I was cutting circles out of the dough to form ravioli, but rather than carefully single-layering them on a sheet pan with cornstarch on either side as I might do with regular pasta, I unceremoniously dumped them in a pile. No sticking! To tempt fate I stacked the discs into an orderly stack — still no sticking. I started to become concerned that it wouldn’t be possible to make two pieces of pasta to stick together around a ravioli filling, but water applied directly to the surface finally caused the dough to adhere.

Due to it’s non-stickiness, this dough recipe seems ideal for long shapes — provided I can address the ragged edges.

The real point of the xanthan gum, though, is not that it makes the dough easy or difficult to work with, but that it improves the texture of the finished pasta. The fair way to do this would of course have been a double-blind tasting, with ravioli made with my standard Cook’s Illustrated recipe (2 cups flour, 3 eggs, a tablespoon or so of water) put up against the new competitor. But after the several hours and many eggs already expended in this effort, I didn’t have it in me. Given those many hours I of course really wanted this experiment to have been worth it, so take my observations with a grain of salt, but the texture of this pasta really did seem better than what I am used to. After cooking in just-less-than-boiling for three and a half minutes it was a silky, smooth al dente, with none of the eggy springiness I often get from fresh pasta.

The question that will be raised with all these Modernist Cuisine innovations is, is it worth it? Is the sometimes very marginal gain in quality worth the sometimes extra effort and expense, the high price tag of the book itself not least among these? Who would make this burger? Or in the case of this pasta, is it worth the sore arms and the egg-spenditure? After one attempt at this recipe, I’m not ready to decide, but I am at least intrigued enough to try it again.

Meyer Lemon & Artichoke Ravioli

Filling:

• 1 cup minced artichoke hearts (I used a 14oz can, drained)
• 1 cup whole milk ricotta
• ¾ cup finely grated parmesan cheese
• Zest and juice from one meyer lemon
• 1 egg
• 1 clove of garlic, minced or pressed through a garlic press
• 1 T minced chives
• Salt and pepper to taste

1 # of your favorite fresh pasta

Sauce:

• 3 T butter
• Juice and zest of one meyer lemon
• 1 c cream

Mix all the filling ingredients in a small bowl until evenly distributed and set aside. Roll out the pasta into thin sheets and cut out as many 2″ circles as you can (I used a drinking glass). Keep cut pasta covered to prevent it from drying out. Divide the cut rounds into two even groups (tops and bottoms) and lay the bottoms out across a work surface. Place a teaspoon of filling in the center of each round. Working with a few ravioli at a time, wet the edges of the bottom circle with water and cover the filling with a top. Pinch the edges of the two rounds together to seal.

For the sauce, melt the butter in a skillet and add the cream and lemon juice. Simmer for a few minutes to reduce slightly, then cover while preparing the pasta.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil and add the pasta. Adjust heat so the water does not return to a rolling boil. Cook until pasta is al dente, about 3 minutes with the Modernist pasta recipe outlined above.

Carefully drain ravioli and toss with sauce and lemon zest. Serve hot, preferably in warmed bowls.