Nongshim Hearty Rice Noodle Soup

Nongshim runs some great ads. They always get me to buy their new instant noodle products. My latest try was their "hearty rice noodle soup" or duk bae kee noodle soup.  Nongshim tends to be hit-or-miss and this noodle was a bad miss.  The rice noodles take forever to cook, and if you follow their directions, the soup is just a gross mess.  But the ad is still great!

Basturma

By RosarioVanTulpe [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons

Today, for lunch, I finally tried a basturma sandwich. Basturma is an Armenian cured meat that reminded me a lot of Spanish cured hams, except that it's intensely flavored with spices like paprika, garlic, salt, and fenugreek. Doing some research, I found out that basturma is found all over what used to be the Ottoman Empire and can also be called pastirma. Apparently pastirma has the same etymological roots as pastrami but the two meats are worlds apart, since pastirmas are not cooked. Armenians make basturmas out of beef or lamb, but it can also be made from goat or camel.  I liked it, but a little goes a long way.

There's a great article about the basturma and what it means to Armenians by Nigol Bezjian. Just click here.

The Story Of Three Peppers

Every time a recipe calls for green bell peppers, I groan.  Because, these days, cultivated green bell peppers are pretty horrible:  rubbery, tasteless, old, and expensive.  Almost $3 a pound?  You've got to be kidding.  Most of the time, I just leave the peppers out.  But there are some recipes you really need a pepper for, like sloppy Joes.  So, what does a girl do?  How about replacing bell peppers with Anaheims or pasillas, my brain suggested as I browsed the produce section of an upscale chain supermarket with half-rotten vegetables.

The thing is, Anaheims and pasillas are almost half the price.  And they give really good flavor.  My only caveat is that if you use pasillas, make sure you fry them for at least ten minutes on low heat, because they're a bit tough.  Pasillas, which are actually poblanos, are usually roasted, so they need a bit more extra care if you're going to use them like bell peppers (apparently, US stores always mislabel fresh poblanos as pasillas).

Corn Pancakes á la Bindae Duk

One of my favorite things to eat is a type of pancake made with mung beans called bindae duk. But the problem with making this at home is that you need mung beans, which you have to soak for several hours and then grind. So I don't make it very often. But then one day, I was at a Korean restaurant in London and they served a kind of pancake made with cornmeal that was very much like bindae duk. I thought that was brilliant: a quick, easy way to make bindae duk using a very common ingredient. In addition, they'd added baking powder which made the pancakes fluffy and light. I really liked that. Of course, pancakes made with corn aren't the same as pancakes made with mung beans, but when you have a craving, they're awfully close, and so wonderfully hearty and delicious. Here's my version of it.

Corn Pancakes á la Bindae Duk

About a cup of very roughly ground cornmeal
About a 1/4 cup of flour
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1 egg

Add water to the cornmeal, just enough to barely cover. Let soak for two to three hours. Add flour, salt, baking powder and egg. The batter should be fairly thick, but still runny, so if it's too thick, add more water. If too thin, add more flour.

Heat a skillet. Add oil. Wait until the skillet is fairly hot. Then fry up pancakes — the size is up to you.

There's also a dipping sauce, but it's fairly simple: soy sauce and vinegar, the proportion up to you.

Eating these pancakes with just the dipping sauce is pretty satisfying, but it's so much more fun if you add things like kimchee, green onions, bacon, etc to the pancakes. Just remember that you're going to have to fry up these ingredients beforehand, especially bacon. That's fairly easy. Just fry the ingredients in the skillet until they're mostly cooked and then scoop some batter right on top. Just be careful when you flip the pancakes over.

Swiss Beer Fondue Macaroni and Cheese

Today I really had a craving for macaroni and cheese.  Usually I do the whole thing myself, make the béchamel sauce, grate the cheese, etc.  But today, we didn't have any Cheddar cheese.  Or milk.  But in the back of the fridge, I had my emergency package of Trader Joe's Swiss Beer Fondue (this thing has an obscenely long shelf life so you can keep it in the fridge for months).  Um, I'm not sure why TJ decided to do a fondue with Swiss beer — fondue is usually done with wine and kirsch — in addition, when was the last time you heard of Swiss beer?  Swiss beer is hard to find even in Switzerland, so all in all, it's kinda weird.  Well, the idea, that is — the Swiss Beer Fondue is actually pretty good.

To make the macaroni and cheese, I just smeared the thick goodness all over cooked conchiglie shells (the small ones) and put it in the oven.  So how did it turn out?  Pretty good.  Nice boozy smell all over the house.  Nice oozy cheese.  Took care of my craving!

BLD Tweet A Dish

When I found out that one of my favorite restaurants, BLD, has an on-going Twitter contest for free food, I knew I had to enter.  I really like BLD.  It's just one of those great neighborhood places where you can go for good food and good wine, where the staff is knowledgeable and friendly, the atmosphere both fashionable and relaxed, where you're perfectly free to dress up or dress down — you can even bring your kids.  Unfortunately, it's not the sort of place I can go to too often because most of the entrees are in the $15-$27 range, and when you're pinching pennies, even a $6 hamburger can seem formidable.

So how does the contest work?  You go on Twitter and suggest a dish that BLD might want to make for its Thursday night special.  Past winning dishes have included chicken and dumplings and Moroccan tajine.  I suggested that yummy Portuguese dish of pork and clams.  Well, much to my surprise, I actually won.  I mean, I never win anything, and I'm one of those poor suckers who enters everything.  I can't tell you how many stupid hoops I've jumped through, from writing slogans for lawn mowers (we really needed one) to designing t-shirts with eco themes for a hopeless chance at a Smart car.  Well, finally!  Who knew all those hours of reading cookbooks would pay off!

The prize for Tweet A Dish is a complimentary 3-course meal for two!  And that includes wine!  I was in heaven...!  Originally, I thought part of the deal was that you had to have the special you suggested, but, no, the staff said we could both order anything we wanted!  BLD is just so generous.  Absolutely no fine print involved.  As our waiter Peter said, "We just want you and your guest to have a good time."  And boy did we.  The featured wine for the night was this incredibly fun, delicious white from Slovenia called "Jarenincan" (Crnko winery), an interesting blend of riesling, sauvignon blanc, and chardonnay which made for a slightly sweet flavor with the most floral, fruity aftertaste — starting off with that how can anything go wrong?

Of course I couldn't wait to try my special.  I'd noticed that on the menu, the dish had become "Portuguese sausage and clams".  I hadn't realized that there were two similar Portuguese dishes, one with pork and clams done in an Alentejo style, and another with sausage and clams called cataplana, which is a specialty of the Argave region and is more like a bouillabaisse with lots of seafood.  BLD did the cataplana version, only with their own spin, making it more like a risotto, or, paella, I suppose.  The dish was very delicious, full of flavor from the shrimp stock, and with plenty of nice heat.

It was such a wonderful evening, with all my thanks going to BLD.  They really go all out to make the Tweet A Dish winner feel special, and it's that kind of graciousness which makes L.A. a fantastic town.

Iced Peach Tea

 (These are peach blossoms.)

While shopping at Whole Foods, I was caught by that wonderful floral smell of ripening peaches and ended up buying three.  I'm always wary of buying peaches at supermarkets as they never ripen, or if they do, they just become mealy and tasteless.  (Avocados too.)  And sure enough, while these peaches continued to produce an amazing amount of fragrance, they never properly ripened, wizening and drying out instead of softening.  I tried tasting one, but the tannins nearly bit all my taste buds out.  So what to do?  I couldn't throw them out.  In desperation, I peeled and cut them up and threw them in a pot with water and tons of sugar.  The stewed peaches were OK, but the resulting sugar syrup was phenomenal.  I knew instantly what to do with the syrup — make iced tea!  Using my favorite jasmine green tea, of course.  If life gives you hard peaches, make iced tea! :)

BTW, I'm really not liking how these large fruit producers are now breeding fruit just for smell.  A pretty nasty way of tricking us shoppers.  Why I'm buying most of my fruit at farmer's markets.  Although, I have to say, I've been very impressed by the fruit that's on sale at Trader Joe's.  Their small watermelons have been real winners, nice and sweet with good texture, and I was very happy with the avocados that were on sale in May.

Hamburger Buns

Today, I really wanted to make hamburgers for lunch.  Unfortunately, we didn't have any buns.  I thought about making a quick trip to the store to buy some, but then the thought of those horrible tasting store buns made me think twice.  I had several bun recipes but those recipes take four-five hours with all the rising and stuff.  And then I began to wonder about  Ken Hom's baos (see post below for recipe).  They only take about 30 minutes.  Would they make good hamburger buns?  The answer was a decisive yes.  They made fantastic hamburger buns, flavorful, tender yet sturdy enough to stand up to all the juices of a good burger.  I only made two small changes.  I added about 1/4 teaspoon of salt to the dough, and, instead of steaming them, put them into a 375 degree oven for 25 minutes.  This is now my go-to recipe for any kind of bun:  hamburger, sandwich, hot dog.

BTW, I made the hamburger patty from some tri-tip I got at Costco.  $4.99 a pound and packed with flavor — not like supermarket meat at all!

Chinese Steamed Buns

Our family is crazy about Chinese stuffed buns, the ones called baos.  Usually, we'll make a special trip to a restaurant to get some, but every once in awhile, I actually feel like making them at home.  And they're not as hard as you'd think they'd be to make.  For the bun part, I like to use a recipe by Ken Hom which is extremely easy.  For the stuffing part, I just put in whatever is around.  Like ground pork, garlic, ginger, frozen peas, cellophane noodles, carrots, etc.  The only trick, if you're using nonfatty pork loin, is to add some cold water or else the stuffing could get very dry.

Baos can be baked or fried, but mostly, they're steamed.  The ones I cook at home are the steamed version.

Recipe for the Chinese steamed buns
(adapted from Ken Hom's Illustrated Chinese Cookery):

6 fl oz warm water
1 packet of yeast
1 tablespoon of sugar
2 tablespoons of oil (something without much flavor like peanut)
13 oz plain flour

Mix the water, yeast and sugar in a large bowl.  Leave for about 10 minutes, at which point the mixture should be foaming.  (If it isn't, you've got dead yeast and will have to go and get some live ones.)  Add the flour and mix until you have a nice, smooth dough (if it's too sticky, add more flour).  At this point, you can just make steamed buns.  Just roll out the dough into a large snake and evenly divide the snake into as many pieces as you'd like.  Put a little piece of parchment paper on the bottom of each piece and let rise for 30 minutes.  The parchment paper keeps the buns from sticking to whatever tray you've put them on.  And then steam for about 10.  (Uh — you should know to use a steamer of some kind, right?  I have a two-tiered one I got at a Korean store.)

Recipe for stuffing

About 3 - 4 pork loin cutlets, ground
half a carrot, chopped into tiny squares
garlic, minced
a teaspoon of minced ginger
1/4 cup of defrosted frozen peas
3 tablespoons of cold water
1/2 teaspoon of salt
lots of pepper
cooked cellophane noodles, finely chopped

Now the secret here is to make sure the pork loins are ground to a paste.  I do it in a small food processor.  Add all the ingredients and mix extremely well with your hands.  You MUST use your hands.  It will be gooey, but that's what you need to have a moist stuffing.

Now to assemble the baos, take a small chunk of dough and swirl it around both palms until you have a rough ball.  And then flatten it, again with your palms.  Unto the little pancakes, add enough stuffing to fill about 85% of the pancake.  Now, very gently, pull the dough up and around the stuffing, going around and around.  You should get little rough points meeting up at the center.  Pinch together the points and twist.  Now you have a bao!

Grease the bottom of your steamer (I find Pan pretty good).  Fill the steamer with the baos, not crowding them too much, as the baos will rise.  Let rise for about 20 minutes. And then steam for about 10 minutes.

Rosemary Helps Reduce Toxins in Grilled Meat

I always get nervous about grilling meat because of all the cancer concerns.  Cooking meat at high temperatures produce something called heterocyclic amines and supposedly, these things are linked to cancer.  Even though I have a family history of stomach cancer, I try not to remember this because who can resist charred meat?  Come on — it's primeval.  Just the smell of the grill significantly raises my happiness index.  So I was really interested in reading a recent NYT article about rosemary and how chemicals in rosemary counteract the nasty heterocyclic amines.  Unfortunately, I find rosemary overwhelming and don't use it very much.  Luckily, other marvelous ingredients like lemons, onions and garlic do the same thing!

I wonder if people instinctively knew this because all these ingredients are classic parts of marinades.  In Greece, it's olive oil, garlic, and rosemary.  In Asia, onions, garlic, and sometimes lemons or limes.  Seems like too much of a coincidence...

My Favorite Cooking Show

I have a favorite cooking show. But I don't know what it's called, I don't know who the host is, and I can't understand a word (except hao, which means good). That's because my cooking show is on ZWTV, which seems to be a local Chinese station. I can't get any info because the only thing ZWTV translates into English is the ads, and only the addresses. Even the website is in Chinese and, apparently, untranslatable (I tried plugging in the URL at the Google translation site: nada).

Even without understanding the Chinese, I still find it riveting. Mainly because of the host, who is an absolute riot. The first half hour of the show is when she has guests — she really shines here, laughing, buffooning, teasing. On one recent show, she actually cried. At first I thought she was joking, but no, she was crying. The guest chef had made a chicken in a pressure cooker. At the bottom of the pot was an intense liquor of chicken broth. The host drank it, and almost instantly, started tearing up. I'm sure she was reminiscing about her childhood, about her mother or grandmother taking all day to prepare this dish, how the aroma and taste reminded her of all that love. She cried for a good five minutes. I couldn't imagine Martha Stewart or Julia Child doing that.

I think ZWTV is Taiwanese. And I've noticed that Taiwanese shows are really cartoony, very heavy with graphics and physical humor. Even this cooking show will often have cartoon bubbles sprouting out of the guest's head. It's such a fun show. And with food shows, I notice you really don't need to understand the language. So check it out if you get ZWTV.   In LA it's 57.9 and the show appears at 9 in the morning on weekends.

Shish Barak

One of my favorite cookery writers is Claudia Roden, and one of my favorite cooking books, Roden's Arabesque.  The book is a wonderful collection of easy recipes from Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon.  Yum!  I can't tell you how much I love food from Turkey and Lebanon.

Shish baraks are from Lebanon and they're hard to explain.  Stuffed with meat, they're vaguely like tortellinis, but the taste and texture is very different, mostly because the wrapping isn't pasta but filo dough.  Shish baraks are exquisite, in large part because of the sauce, which is simply yogurt!  But on top of the shish barak, it doesn't taste like yogurt at all — more like a savory, creamy, rich gravy.  Talk about heavenly chemistry!

Of course, not having all the ingredients, I had to modify Roden's recipe.  For instance, I didn't have pomegranate molasses, so used a combination of honey and tomato paste — what you want is a sweet and sour taste and this combo works.  I also halved the recipe.  So here goes.

Shish Barak adapted from Claudia Roden's Arabesque

For the filling:

1 onion, chopped
1/2 pound ground lamb or beef
11/2 tablespoons sunflower oil (I just used peanut)
About an ounce of pine nuts (I didn't have pine nuts so used slivered almonds)
salt & pepper
1 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses (I used a tablespoon each of honey and tomato paste)

For the pastry:

3 sheets of filo
4 tablespoons of butter, melted

For the sauce:

1 small container of yogurt at room temp
sprinkle of salt
1 small clove of garlic, minced
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
some dried mint

To make the filling, fry the onions in the oil until they're nice and golden.  Add the ground meat, salt, pepper and spices.  The trick here is to make sure everything is extra spiced because it's going to have to support the blander yogurt.  Stir and make sure the meat is fully cooked.  Then add the pomegranate molasses (or honey and tomato paste mixture).  Turn the heat off.  In another pan, put in a drop of oil and cook the nuts until they're golden.  Add to the meat mixture.  Give everything a good stir.

Now you have to deal with the filo dough.  Usually they come in large rectangles.  Just cut them up until you have rough rectangles of 6 inches by 4 (I think I just halved the large rectangles and then halved the smaller pieces).  Brush a sheet with melted butter.  Make sure the longer edges of the rectangle is facing you.  Then put a thin row of meat filling along that long edge.  Then roll the filo like you would sushi.  When you have a long snake, begin to shape the roll into a tight coil.  The trick here is to crush the roll a little while coiling, otherwise, the filo tends to break.  Put the little coil on a large baking tray (which should be greased).  Repeat with the rest of the filo and filling.  Right before you put it all in the oven, brush all the coils with melted butter.

Make sure the oven has been pre-heated to 400 degrees F and bake for about 30 minutes.  When ready, the little coils should be nice and golden, with the intense aroma making you salivate.

For the sauce, beat the yogurt with the salt and minced garlic.  You can heat the yogurt or serve at room temperature (I like it slightly heated, but be careful that you don't curdle the yogurt by heating it at too high a temp).

Serve the coils with a little bit of sauce and garnish with the dried mint (I used oregano).

The Gratitude of Bones

Kartika Review just came out with their fabulous Home issue.  OK, I am a little biased as my short story "The Gratitude of Bones" is included.  But it is a pretty cool issue with tons of wonderful things to read, including essays by Asian American artists on what home means to them.  To download the full issue, just click here!  And please read my story and say something nice in the comments because I'm a pretty sad charity case and am not too proud to beg. ;)

Instant Ramen Channel

Toshio Yamamoto eats instant ramen five times a week for breakfast.  I found out about him through Lisa Katayama's post on Boing Boing.  Yes, he has a blog in which he rates his ramen experiences (i-ramen.net), but more interestingly, he has his own YouTube channel called Ton Tan Tin's Channel in which he has videos dedicated to each packaged noodle.  The videos are so well done, you feel like you made the ramens yourself.  Unfortunately, there are no English subtitles, but you don't really need them.  Here's a sample:

Plum Salad Dressing

The nice thing about spring is all the abundance of fruits that are coming to market.  I know — you can get fruits year round, but I hate buying fruits in winter because they're usually pretty tasteless.  You also find a lot of good bargains in spring, like the plums I found — a package of six for about $2.00.  The plums were the really sweet kind, with almost no acidity.  Problem with packages, though, is there are always two or three that are too ripe and mealy.  Most people would just pitch them, but I can't stand waste.  So I decided to make salad dressing with the mealy ones — the flavor was still fantastic, and the mealiness actually is better for a salad because the plums will disintegrate nicer into the liquids.

Since the plums were so sweet, I decided to go a little Japanese with the flavors.  Unfortunately, when I make dressing, I never measure, so the following are estimates and suggestions.

1 mealy plum, peeled and chopped
1/8 cup of light soy sauce
1/4 cup of rice vinegar
1/2 teaspoon of Japanese mustard (the kind in the tube)
1 tablespoon of honey
1 small clove of garlic, peeled
1 tiny chunk of ginger, peeled
1/4 cup of light vegetable oil (I used peanut)

If you have a small food processor, throw everything in and whiz.  It's by far the easiest way.  Of course, adjust for seasonings.

Fuchsia Dunlop's Chicken With Tea Leaves

One of my favorite cookery writers is Fuchsia Dunlop. An English woman, she trained as a Chinese chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. Her recipes are rarely too difficult and are always interesting. Like Junshan Chicken with Silver-Needle Tea (from Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province). She says the dish is a banquet delicacy in Junshan, and it incorporates the area's famous "yellow tea". I'd never seen a recipe with tea leaves in it so I thought I'd give it a try. The resulting dish was flavorful and delicate, which surprised me because, unlike so many Chinese dishes, there was no garlic or green onions. The dish is simply sliced chicken breasts that have been marinaded in a simple solution of salt, Shaoxing wine, potato starch and egg white. The breasts are quickly fried and then boiled in a tea infusion, leaves included. The key, of course, is having really high-grade tea leaves which are infused at a very low temperature beforehand (I didn't have Junshan tea so I used a silver-needle white tea). Even so, I still found it remarkable that you can achieve such wonderful, complex flavors with so little. Chicken and tea leaves — who would have thought?

Ginkgo Nuts

Whenever I'd go into an Asian grocery store, I'd look for ginkgo nuts. I absolutely love ginkgo nuts — they have this unique, indescribable flavor, fragrant, slightly bitter, with an amazing translucent jade color. It's like finding treasure anytime I see them in a dish. Unfortunately, the only ginkgo nuts I ever saw in stores were processed versions in the frozen cases. (I don't know what they do to those poor nuts, but frozen, packaged ginkgo nuts are pretty horrible.) My mother couldn't understand. She says you see them fresh all the time. Really? Where?

Well, apparently, everywhere. I just didn't know what I was looking for. In fact, Asian grocery stores have piles and piles of them. Which they label as "white nuts". Having never seen fresh ginkgo nuts, I had no idea these "white nuts" were ginkgo nuts!

Thrilled with the discovery, I brought a small bag home. Wow. Ginkgo nuts are hard to shell. They were too small for my nut crackers so I had to use the back end of a knife. It takes two smacks. The first smack at the large end goes pretty well. The second smack never does, the knife smashing into the little end so that I rarely got a nice whole nut.

Now what to do with all these nuts? Most recipes only call for a small handful. Doing some research on the Internet, I found this advice from Lisa Katayama at Boing Boing. She likes to eat them fried and salted. There is something really wonderful about frying ginkgo nuts — something about the light covering of oil really brings out the nuttiness. A really interesting part of Lisa's post was the warning from her aunt: don't eat more than ten or you'll get indigestion and nose bleeds. I'd never heard that before! Upon further research, I turned up more warnings about the possible toxicity of ginkgo nuts. Quite a few people advise that you remove the "xin" inside the nut (a little strip which you can find by halving the nut — you can sort of see it in this picture).

And Wikipedia says:

When eaten by children, in large quantities (over 5 seeds a day), or over a long period, the raw gametophyte (meat) of the seed can cause poisoning by MPN (4-methoxypyridoxine). Studies have demonstrated that convulsions caused by MPN can be prevented or terminated with pyridoxine.

No idea what a gametophyte is (even after looking up the word), but I think the end advice is not to eat too many ginkgo nuts!

Green Papaya Salad

One of my favorite salads is a green mango or green papaya salad (although I have to give green mangoes the edge). You usually see the dish on Vietnamese or Thai menus. I'd never really thought of making it at home until I saw a pile of green papayas at the store the other day. Well, why not?

Plenty of reasons, as it turned out. Green papayas are big. Like the size of butternut squash. And they get sort of wet and slimy. Peeling one is not an easy task. And trying to cut a large papaya into long strips, as required for a salad, is hard. Green papayas can't be easily managed with a knife. I ended up using my Japanese slicer, getting the papayas into the thinnest slices possible before hand cutting the strips. It took more than half an hour.

An easier way, if you're a master, is to chop it up with a knife while holding it in one hand. I posted a video of that technique below. Really an amazing thing to behold.

I didn't use the recipe posted on the video; I used a really delicious recipe I found at The Passionate Eater.

So what does green papayas taste like? When a friend asked me this, I wasn't sure what to say. Green papayas are basically unripened papayas, so they only have the vaguest papaya taste and are much more chewier. I wouldn't eat it plain, but somehow in a salad with a very fragrant and pungent dressing, they became addictive. The Passionate Eater describes the salad as a kind of slaw, and it definitely is a dish in which the sum transcends the parts.

Thai Eggplant

I really love Thai eggplants. They're small, sweet and perfect for curries. The problem is that you often have to get a package of two dozen or more. That's a lot of eggplants. So what do you do with them all? I decided to deep-fry half a dozen. In a nice light batter I adapt from Marcella Hazan*: flour, salt and water — enough water to make the dough pour like sour cream. I cut up the eggplants into quarters, dipped them lightly in batter and deep-fried for about five minutes in pretty hot temperature. To keep the deep-fried eggplants hot, I parked them in a 350 degree oven, which made them even nicer. Sorta like french fries. I'd definitely give this dish a solid A. But how can you go wrong with deep-frying?

*BTW, USA Today once took Marcella Hazan to Olive Garden for her take on the chain's "Italian" cooking efforts. It's a pretty funny article.

Green Papaya Shredder

Wow! This woman shreds green papayas in her hand with just a knife!

The Grid by SiliconeZone

This is a picture of my new love.


It's called The Grid and it's a potholder, trivet and jar opener. Made from InSILate, this potholder is safe to 675 degrees.

Now, I've been searching for a good potholder for years. I really don't like the traditional cloth ones because they're too clumsy and get really grungy (The Grid is dishwasher safe). So when the first silicone mitts and holders came into the market, I was really excited. But, unfortunately, they didn't live up to the hype. While they were wonderfully flexible and had a fantastic grip, they didn't give you much heat protection. With the one I have, after three seconds of holding onto something really hot, I get burned. Why can't they make one that's doubly thick, I've always complained. Well, The Grid is more than a quarter of an inch thick. Great heat protection with fantastic flexibility. And it comes in lots of different colors. Of course, it's not cheap — around $8, but hopefully it'll last me for years and years. There's also a mitt but it's half the width so I'm not really sure how well it protects you. Unfortunately, sometimes you do really need a mitt so I think I'll go and buy one.