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.

So I wish I could say I celebrated our American culinary heritage on the 4th of July by eating Georgia Possum and Taters or Mississippi Molasses Pie or Washington Aplets and Cotlets, just a few of the regional dishes written about in Mark Kurlansky's new book, The Food of a Younger Land, but in fact I did not. Instead, my cookbook club assembled on just a regular old Sunday to eat old-fashioned food, drink mint juleps and discuss the fascinating dishes that once filled the American plate.

The Food of a Younger Land is a collection of essays once destined to be a book put out by the Federal Writers' Project, an arm of the Works Project Administration created to employ out-of-work writers during the Depression. The FWP dissolved before the book was published and the five boxes of raw material -- essays, recipes, photographs -- sat quietly in the Library of Congress until Mark Kurlansky stumbled onto them while doing research for another book. He has edited together "the chaotic pile of imperfect manuscripts" into a collection of surprising depth and variety. Some essays read like short stories, others like anthropological reports. One is simply a list of "New York Soda-Luncheonette Slang and Jargon." (A favorite: "14" means Look at the beautiful girl, while "14 1/2" means A beautiful girl, a little on the plump side.)

Unfortunately for those who want to recreate the recipes, the one trait all the essays share is a certain impreciseness, a tone which implies you probably know exactly what "Don't have the solution too strong" means when you are preparing lutefisk (cod soaked in a lye solution for 15 days, if you didn't know) and you find the instructions "Cook until done" perfectly clear. Not only did America once eat differently; America once cooked differently too.

Looking for a little more guidance, I turned to a recipe in Saveur for my Florida Shrimp Pilau, the Caribbean variation of a Middle Eastern pilaf. Others in the group used recipes from their grandmothers or just winged it. After loading up my plate, I realized suddenly how mushy everything was, all soft grains and smooth purees, food meant to be easy on those with bad -- or fake -- teeth. America once chewed differently too, it seems.

My favorite of the day was Oklahoma Kush, a sort of cornbread stuffing written about in what may be the most sparse essay of the book. It's just a single paragraph:

"Kush," popular dish among pioneers: Take cornbread and crumble it up, cut up some onions, add black pepper, a pinch of salt, a little lard or butter, put it in a pan, pour boiling water over it (add eggs if desired), then put in the oven and bake.

Lily also added mushrooms and herbs to her kush, which made for a moist, perfectly seasoned hash I would happily eat straight from the bowl with a big spoon.

One particularly tasty surprise was the Depression Cake, apparently the invention of some sad housewife who needed to make a cake but had no butter or eggs. Instead she used bacon grease, stewed raisin juice and lots of spices (to mask the taste of bacon grease and stewed raisin juice). Jessica was a little terrified of her creation, but it was like a yummy gingerbread: tender, not too sweet and deeply spiced. Does the bacon grease PR team know about this yet?

To drink we had Mexican Coke in bottles, emulating the Coca-Cola parties in Georgia, a "simple, inexpensive form of entertainment [which] is particularly popular with the young matrons and young girls." To really drink, there were mint juleps being made on the spot by Erin, who offered two types, as explained in the essay "The Mint Julep Controversy":

There are, broadly speaking, two schools of thought regarding their preparation -- the don't-crush school and the do-crush school. The don't-crushers austerely contend that an abundance of mint sprigs in the top of the glass, to give the partaker a fragrant aroma of mint as he sips the drink, is sufficient. The do-crushers insist that the mint should be bruised and crushed so that its flavor is incorporated in the drink itself.

Do-crushed or don't-crushed, the drinks were potent. You'd think the two mint julep schools would just forget their differences after a couple rounds.

Or maybe embrace them. There was a time when you could drive across the country and not see a single Outback, Applebee's or Red Lobster -- which today sounds as mythical as unicorns roaming the plains. More than anything else, this book is a reminder of how beautiful regional food differences are, and how fleeting.

Now go cook something your granny used to make!

Cooking. Books. Friends. Kittens. To-do lists. Finding street parking in Hollywood on a Saturday night -- or, even better, not going anywhere near Hollywood on a Saturday night. These are a few of my favorite things, so it made sense to talk to a few of my food-loving friends about combining the first three into a cookbook club, inspired by an article I read in Gourmet. Luckily, they were just as excited about the idea as I was, and it wasn't long before we had chosen the first book, A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg, the writer behind Orangette, one of my favorite food blogs.

The idea was simple: we would each cook from the book for about a month, then we'd meet for a potluck and discussion, with everyone bringing one dish they had made from the book. Our first meeting took place at my apartment on the sort of golden Sunday afternoon in spring that makes you happy to be in LA. Especially with a roomful of food-loving girls and their homemade fare.

A Homemade Life is more memoir than cookbook, but there are actually a lot of recipes, each with an accompanying essay. I find it kind of impossible to not be charmed by Molly, who is as self-aware as she is sweet and who tempers the preciousness of her tales with a generous helping of humor. How can you not like someone who describes a pickle as "a little green sidecar, the dinghy that floats alongside the ship"? There is a grace to her writing, an easy liveliness that I think also characterizes my favorite recipes from her book.

Take the Red Cabbage Salad with Lemon and Black Pepper. It is beguilingly simple -- just thinly sliced red cabbage tossed with lemon juice, olive oil, black pepper and Parmesan -- so simple that it seems unlikely to taste like anything but a lot of sliced red cabbage. But then you eat it and realize you never before appreciated the crunchy goodness that is red cabbage, each ingredient in the salad the perfect complement to its subtle sweetness. And it has a kind of elegance on the plate, making even the most humble grilled cheese sandwich somehow more sophisticated.

"This is the best book for lunches," Lydia said when we sat down to talk and eat, and I think that pretty much sums it up. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Lydia chose the red cabbage salad as her contribution.) You won't throw a show-stopping dinner party with these recipes, but then again, how often do you have big dinner parties anyway? More often than not, it's a weeknight and you don't have the time or energy to make a new dish with a million ingredients, but you did go to the farmers' market so your fridge is full of humble vegetables waiting to be transformed into something simple and wholly satisfying. On these nights, A Homemade Life will be your friend.

The biggest surprise of the book were the Bouchons au Thon, a rather bizarre-sounding mix of canned tuna, tomato paste, Gruyere and eggs, baked into little cakes in a muffin tin. No one thought they could possibly be good, including Jessica -- and she was the one who made them. But we all loved the little coral-colored cakes and midway through the afternoon, Jessica held up her phone to show us a text her roommate had just sent: "Good tuna muffin!"

I made the Pickled Grapes with Cinnamon and Black Pepper, intense little orbs of sour, spiced sweetness. A few people baked, and when we all compared notes, we realized the baking times and temperatures in the book seemed off. (Everyone ended up having to bake for 10 to 20 minutes beyond the recommended baking time and a couple people found the recommended temperatures too high.) That and the need to double the salt of pretty much every savory recipe were our only complaints. We finished the meeting and the meal with a couple bottles of Sauvignon Blanc, some Black Pepper Ice Cream made by Jessica, its lushness tempered by the floral jolt of pepper, and a plan to meet in a month to talk about The Gift of Southern Cooking by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock.

I can't wait.