lsanderson | Food, glorious food... well, wine too.

A Visitor Welcomed in Cold Weather
By ERIC ASIMOV

PEOPLE who love cold weather appreciate it not just for the skiing, the ice fishing or the joy of having their eyelashes turn brittle enough to break in the winter chill. No, they love it because when the insanity is over, getting warm feels so gloriously wonderful.

That is the moment for a cozy fire, woolen socks and a favorite robe; for Tolstoy, not a tell-all; for nutritious resonance rather than fleeting charm. And it is the time for barley wine, the robust, complex brewed counterpart to Port, Madeira or Armagnac.

Traditional Flavors of the Lunar New Year
By DANA BOWEN

TWO sisters sat at an ingredient-strewn table at Vietcafe, gossiping as they prepared the sticky rice cakes that are adored across Vietnam at this time of year. Lan Tran Cao, the younger of the two and the owner of Vietcafe, a TriBeCa restaurant, spoke of a relative's recipe.

"The way she seasons it is different," she said to her sister, Nga Thi Tran. Clearly, "different" meant not as good.

A cook, Mai Nguyen, walked in and spotted the women mashing dried mung bean balls into banana leaves with great force. "Ah, banh chung!" she sang, and smiled. For her, the bundles contained distant memories of New Year's celebrations in Hanoi.

Lunar New Year begins on Sunday, and in many traditional Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese households in New York, the cooking is under way. Chefs like Ms. Cao find themselves in a peculiar spot at the beginning of the Year of the Dog, poised between a public hungry to learn about the world's cuisine and a community where many culinary traditions are slipping.

Recipe: Vietnamese Caramelized Pork (Thit kho to)
Recipe: Korean Rice Cake Soup with Dumplings (Duk Mandu Gook)

Making Ravioli, With the Inside Out
By MARK BITTMAN

I LIKE stuffed pasta - ravioli, agnollotti, tortellini, cappelletti, you name it - as much as the next person. But there's a world of difference between eating stuffed pasta and making it. Eating it takes 10 minutes; making it takes hours, and real work, no matter how many shortcuts you take.

Recipe: Naked Ravioli (Ravioli Nudi)

Please a Kangaroo: Drink Green Tea
By FLORENCE FABRICANT
Please a Kangaroo: Drink Green Tea

A lack of arable land in Japan led the country's largest tea company, Ito En, farther afield. So it began cultivating in the state of Victoria, Australia. Tea from the new plantation is now available at Ito En's store at 822 Madison Avenue (69th Street). It is a "first flush" green tea, meaning that it's the first picking from the mature plants. The tea, called Australian Winter Shin-Cha, is highly perfumed, silky and extremely delicate. It will be sold until the end of the month in three-ounce boxes for $30: (212) 988-7111.

From Scottish Waters, Hand Cut by a Peer
By OLIVER SCHWANER-ALBRIGHT

AN artisanal smokehouse raising its salmon is like a neighborhood bakery growing the peaches for its pies - breeding and smoking fish are very different businesses. But Fergus Granville, 45, is both the owner of the Hebridean Smokehouse and a co-owner of Langass Hatchery.

Because of his hereditary title, Earl Granville has come into a family estate that covers most of North Uist, a wind-battered island off the coast of Scotland that combines the coastline of Nantucket with the remoteness of North Dakota. It's in the Outer Hebrides, a chain of islands that the Scottish regard as one of the last unspoiled corners of the earth. And it's here that Earl Granville does the improbable by rearing salmon with their ultimate state in mind: rosy, smoked, and thinly sliced.

My Week as a Waiter
By FRANK BRUNI

IT'S 7:45 p.m., the East Coast Grill is going full tilt and I'm ready to throttle one of the six diners at Table M-8.

He wants me to describe the monkfish special. For the fourth time. I hoarsely oblige, but when I return yet again to my riff on the apricot lager mustard, which comes right before my oratorical ode to the maple pecan mashed sweet potatoes, his attention flags and he starts to talk to a friend.

Does he mistake me for a recorded message, paused and played with the push of a button? Doesn't he know I have other tables to serve?

I need to go over and massage the mood at R-5, where one of the two diners has a suspiciously shallow pool of broth in her bouillabaisse, perhaps because I spilled some of it near M-2.

And I need to redeem myself with the two diners at X-9, who quizzed me about what the restaurant had on tap and received a blank stare in response. I'm supposed to remember the beers? Along with everything about the monkfish, these oddly coded table references, more than 10 wines by the glass and the provenance of the house oysters?

I had no idea.