I'm taking a break this week — enjoy the holiday weekend!

The June Daring Bakers' Challenge was hosted by Jasmine of Confessions of a Cardamom Addict and Annemarie of Ambrosia and Nectar. They chose a Traditional (UK) Bakewell Tart... er... pudding that was inspired by a rich baking history dating back to the 1800's in England. You can find the complete recipe on either of their pages.

This is probably one of the simpler projects I've attempted for Daring Bakers, but I loved it, both because it introduced me to a new technique and because it was delicious! While I've definitely eaten sweets with frangipane, I'd never known its name or how it was made — turns out it is sort of like a fluffy version of marzipan, with the moist richness of ground almonds buoyed up by beaten eggs and butter. The Bakewell Tart rests a thick layer of frangipane on top of a jam-filled sweet shortcrust pastry. As one of my guests pointed out, it was a little like a bearclaw filling in a pie shell.

I made this tart with some Five Spice Pear and Apple preserves that I put up a couple years ago. The only drawback of this choice was that I had only one small jar, and it was a mild enough jam that I could easily have used twice as much. Still, the warm flavors and light spiciness of the jam was a perfect match for the frangipane.

Tabbouleh-inspired grain salads are one of my favorite lazy summer meals. They're so quick to pull together, there's no need to heat up the kitchen, and they can be adapted to just about any leftovers you have in your kitchen.

My summer grain salads start with a pre-cooked and cooled grain, like bulgur, quinoa, rice, barley, wheat, or even rye. I always add a bunch or two of chopped parsley, a dollop of olive oil, and a splash of lemon juice. From there, your fridge is the limit... I often include cucumber, cheese, olives, tomato, and fresh herbs. For a one-dish meal, I'll add some leftover meat &mdash poultry works especially well with the lemon and parsley flavors.

I based this week's local meal on the leftovers of last week's (roast turkey thighs with sage and wheat berries). I chopped the turkey, added some parsley, cucumber, and radish, and tossed everything with the wheat berries and some salt, olive oil, and lemon juice. It may have been gray outside, but it felt like summer in here!

The turkey is from DiPaola's, the sage from Stoneledge Farm, the veggies from a variety of farms in New York state, and the wheat from Cayuga Pure Organic.

Macau, our next-to-last stop, looked about as fresh, bright, and peppy as I felt when we arrived there. I had come down with a cold sometime in the middle of our last, and most eventful, overnight train ride.

We were running late when we arrived at the Shanghai train station, where we tried to change our tickets to a more direct route to Macau — we failed, but not before the tickets had been stamped for refund, so we weren't certain, when we arrived at our gate, running flat out with all of our luggage, whether they would let us on the train at all. Then we realized that we had to leave the station and return again through customs to board the train to Hong Kong. With approximately three minutes until departure, we slid through passport control, and onto the train, just under the wire. They let us on, despite our "refund" stamped tickets, but we had hardly found our bunks before being asked to swap seats to another compartment. Flustered, out of breath, and incapable of communicating, it took us a long time to figure out what our compartment-mates wanted and why. In the end, we were happy to change so that the family could sit together, and we found ourselves in the top bunks of a new compartment. We had just gotten settled in, when the group below us spread out a feast... a feast of pickled and preserved meats and vegetables that filled the compartment with an intense odor, soon joined by clouds of cigarette smoke.

I was worried for a little while, but once Greg and I ventured down from our bunks to order some dinner, we quickly found ourselves sharing beers and chicken feet with the friendly group below us. Probably the best chicken feet we had the whole trip, too! Unfortunately, the jollity was eventually subdued when I found myself exhausted, and I woke up in the morning coughing and faintly feverish.

The ensuing trek by subway and ferry was not the most pleasant part of our trip, with both the air and my head full of dense, humid fog. But we managed to find our way to our room at the strange flophouse we had booked, and I spent the rest of the day lying on the grungy bed and staring at the lack of a ceiling. (The rooms were basically low partitions below a high, unfinished roof.)

Greg valiantly ventured out to procure some irresistible Macau egg tarts, which we first tried in Hong Kong back in January and were a big part of our decision to visit Macau on our return trip. The Macau egg tart is very similar to the little custard tarts you might get with a dim sum meal, but with a flaky puff pastry crust and a blistered and caramelized top. They are actually a hybrid of Portuguese and English tarts that was developed in Macau.

Much later, Greg convinced me that we needed to eat dinner, and we decided on a fancy Portuguese restaurant. The knife and fork actually baffled me for a few minutes, but the roast pigeon that the restaurant was purportedly famous for was quite good.

The next morning, feeling mildly better, we walked around the sights of Macau and sampled a few more egg tarts. Macau has several other culinary specialties, including giant flat squares of meat jerky and a variety of nut cookies, all sold at just about every third storefront throughout the city.

So that about sums up our Macau visit, except for one thing: what the heck is "Greek Mythology Service", and why can you get it at the Macau ferry terminal?

As I've mentioned before, the last couple weeks of our trip were markedly less energetic than the earlier parts had been. Our pace was pretty leisurely in Shanghai. We lingered over the exhibits of antique seals at the Shanghai Museum and bizarre historical ephemera at the Propaganda Museum. We spent an evening walking along the Bund, eating candied fruit in the chilly wind off the neon-lit Huangpu River. Best of all, we met up with a group of friends of friends, who were wonderful enough to take us in — or out, I should say — for a couple nights on the town.

Not only was it incredibly awesome to have some normal conversations about non-travel-related topics, it was also pretty great to let some other people, people with some actual knowledge of local cuisine and language, do the ordering. We went out to two massive dinners, and I honestly can't tell you what half these dishes are, but I can tell you they were delicious, and I didn't have to point or gesture or guess about one of them. In fact, the two items I had a role in selecting — cold pickled chicken feet and pickled duck tongues — were probably the only disappointments of the lot. Unsurprisingly, I like them both better hot in temperature and flavor.

This week's meal is a simple supper: roasted turkey thighs with sage, steamed broccoli, and wheat berries. The turkey is from DiPaola's, the sage from Stoneledge Farm, the broccoli from Eckerton Hill Farm, and the wheat from Cayuga Pure Organic. I was particularly excited about the wheat, because last year, when I participated in the Eat Local Challenge in Boston, the only local grain to be found was cornmeal. Now, the cornmeal was delicious, but after a month, one can get pretty tired of corn tortillas and polenta!

Next week is Pollinator Week, and here in New York, Just Food is sponsoring a number of events around the city to promote their campaign to legalize urban beekeeping. To prepare for next week, I finished off my meal with a little dessert of goat cheese and apple drizzled with honey. The goat cheese is from Patches of Star, while the honey is from Crystal's Raw Honey, which was purchased back in Boston, but is produced in apiaries in both MA and NY. Be sure to catch the Honey Fest at the Union Square Greenmarket next Friday, and celebrate your local pollinators wherever you are!

Since my last post was about making xiao long bao, sometimes referred to as Shanghai soup dumpling, it seems fitting that I've made it to the Shanghai stop on our travelogue. Shanghai was a very comfortable city for us. English was everywhere, the weather was nice, and the city presented numerous pleasant walks (and a convenient subway for any time walking was not so pleasant).

One of the best walks was around the West Lake in Hangzhou. While technically outside of Shanghai, the lake is a common day trip, and it's not hard to see why: the lake is beautiful, and it is ringed by charming teahouses, perfectly landscaped parks, and some of the best people-watching in all of China. We played cards in the shade overlooking the lake, slowly sipping endless glasses of tea, and watched the designer shoes stroll by.

We also did some exploring around our hostel, and found a popular noodle spot. The place was tiny, with a huge, completely indecipherable menu on the wall, and after a few minutes of holding up the line while wildly paging through our phrasebook, we tried asking the order-taker what he recommended. Though the tactic had been hit-or-miss before, this time was its most spectacular failure. The man took the book, glared at the question on the page, shook his head, and then pointed at the menu on the wall, waving his hand around to indicate its entirety. We still looked confused, so he pointed more vigorously, the look of contempt on his face clear. What kind of idiots were we to suggest that anything at his restaurant was less than the most delicious thing possible!

So we ordered, half at random, half based on a couple recognized characters, and ended up with one beef soup and one mystery soup. I was pretty sure that the mystery was freshwater eels, little tiny slivers of softly scaly flesh, but I spent the whole meal looking up the characters to prove myself correct. The man at the counter glared at me when I took this photo.

And, did you think I would make it to the end of this entry without some soup dumplings? Of course not! We hit up a place downtown for trays of pork, pork and egg, and crab xiao long bao. Far more beautiful than the ones I made over the weekend, these perfect little full moons. The most interesting were the crab, because their flavors worked so differently than the pork dumplings. Both are incredibly rich, both are paired wonderfully with ginger and vinegar dipping sauce. But in the case of the pork dumpling, the tartness of the ginger and vinegar break the intense savoriness of the broth, while with the crab, it acts as a foil to the sweetness instead — two completely different taste combos in the same adorable packaging.

The dumpling shop also offered a mild soup of congealed blood cubes with bean curd strings. The blood cubes had a pleasant, velvety texture, but the soup itself was on the bland side.

This month's Daring Cooks challenge is Chinese dumplings, presented by Use Real Butter. This is my first challenge for the Daring Cooks, and the topic choice could not have been more fortuitous. Not only have we been really excited about cooking Asian foods since we returned from our trip, but we also had a bunch of foodie friends around this week who we knew would love to try rolling and folding (and eating!) some dumplings. I made four fillings, three of which are shown above: sweet potato pork, mixed vegetable, and pork and chive.

The fourth kind of dumpling was a pork soup dumpling, filling shown above. Soup dumplings, or xiao long bao, have been a minor obsession of mine for quite some time now, and I've wanted to try making them for ages, so this challenge was just the push I needed to pull the pig feet out of the freezer already. Pig feet? That's because soup dumplings, those little pouches of heavenly, savory broth, are made with aspic, which is solid at room temperature, but melts into a glorious, unctuous liquid when the dumplings are steamed.

I was frankly shocked that they worked at all, due to the possibility of screwing up the ratio of pork to aspic and the risk of leakage, but they turned out to be honestly amazing. I can't say they were the best soup dumplings I've ever had — the wrappers were much too thick, really &mdash but the flavor was perfect, the leakage was minimal, and, gosh darn it, we made 'em!

The xiao long bao might have been the most impressive dumpling to me, but there was no group consensus on which was the best dumpling. The mixed veggie dumpling was not terribly exciting, but the traditional pork and chive filling made a good showing, and the sweet potato pork got high marks for its originality and sweet-savory twist.

We made a lot of 'em, too, rolling, folding, and steaming in shifts, with many hands making light work. It was fun to look at the finished product and see the different folding styles of each cook. My folding still need a lot of work (and I plan on practicing again soon!)