Preserved eggs with green peppers.

Don't tell my boyfriend, but I often daydream about moving to a foreign country noted for its cuisine -- say, Italy or Thailand -- and becoming fluent enough in that country's language to attend culinary school there. Fuschia Dunlop lived that dream, becoming the first foreigner to enroll in a professional training course at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu, China. I was excited when my cookbook club picked her Sichuanese cookbook, Land of Plenty, because I read her memoir, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper, while working at a particularly mind-numbing temp job. Tales of eating fish-fragrant pork slivers and learning to master the searing heat of the wok were the perfect antidote for endless data entry, I discovered. I hoped her recipes would be just as good.

Before starting to cook, a few of us took a field trip to the 99 Ranch Market in Arcadia to stock up on staples like Shaoxing rice wine, wood ear mushrooms and Sichuan pepper, a strange, tongue-numbing spice that is an essential element in Sichuanese cuisine. Its numbing coolness provides an intriguing counterpoint to the spicy heat of the chiles used liberally in many Sichuanese dishes, kind of like jumping into a cold pool after a long sauna bake.

Spicy cucumber salad.

We met on a scorching summer day to eat some dishes from the book and talk about the recipes. Like many Asian cuisines, Sichuanese food is fairly straightforward once you have the right ingredients. Often dishes require just a few ingredients yet have a surprising depth of flavor, like the Zucchini Slivers with Garlic I made or Ellen's Spicy Cucumber Salad. Because the recipes are so spare, they demand the freshest, best-tasting vegetables, something I discovered after making the Haricots Verts in Ginger Sauce with green beans that were a bit tough and starchy. After a short blanching and light dressing with ginger, Chinese vinegar and sesame oil, the beans were tough, starchy and tasted faintly of ginger-sesame. Lesson learned.

Of the 23 flavors in the Sichuanese culinary canon, probably the most distinctive is "hot and numbing flavor" (ma la wei xing), a combination of spicy chiles and cooling Sichuan pepper. One of the first recipes I attempted was ma po dou fu -- tofu simmered in chile oil and a small amount of ground meat, sprinkled with Sichuan pepper -- and I was hooked on the odd, numbing sensation, as well as the comforting flavors of the dish. Strangely enough, the combination of chili bean paste and ground beef reminds me of bolognese sauce. In a good way.

Another flavor unique to Sichuan is "fish fragrant flavor" (yu xiang wei xing), which does not taste or smell like fish, but is based on the seasonings traditionally used with fish: Sichuanese chili bean paste, garlic, ginger and scallions. For the meeting, Lily made Fish-Fragrant Eggplants, buttery chunks of fried eggplant soaked in a chili-red sauce spiked with ginger and garlic. I didn't want to stop eating it.

While cooking through the book, I kept thinking back on Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper and wishing I was reading it at the same time, so I could figure out the stories behind the dishes. The two books should be sold together, a boxed set for those who dream of moving far away and cooking their hearts out, but can't because they love their boyfriends who have to stay in LA for career reasons. Or is that too specific a readership?

My recommendation: get both books. Read, cook and dream.