After reading my wok post yesterday, Eater Matt Aalfs sent this query:

"I have an old steel wok, maybe 15 years old, made of thin steel with a round bottom and wooden handles. Possibly due to improper cleaning, the wok has developed a brown-black sheen on the inside, which leaves a bad taste on the food and also seems to inhibit heat transfer from the wok to the food. Can this be fixed, or do I need to start over with a new wok?"

For an answer, I again turned to Grace Young's "The Breath of a Wok." Below, find her recipe for cleaning a rusted or overly sticky wok. Grace says this cleaning technique works best on a gas stove, though I'd give it a shot on an electric stove if that's all you've got, Matt. Better yet, find a friend who's cooking with gas and promise to make them something delicious after you've got your wok in working order.

Schmutz -- or patina? Patina, with roast pork and bok choy.

Now, before you toss out your old wok, try this cleansing trick:

There are few food writers as talented as Seattle Weekly's Jonathan Kauffman, and I was sorry to read the announcement today that he's blowing out of town, heading back where he came from: San Francisco.

In a brief post on Voracious, Kauffman wrote:

I'm both sad and excited to announce that on January 1, 2010, I will be moving back to San Francisco to become the restaurant critic for the SF Weekly. For the past three and a half years, I've had the privilege of writing about food in Seattle at a time when this city's restaurant scene is exploding. Covering everything from the Korean suburbs to the newest crop of artisanal butchers has been a blast, and I'm sad to leave a paper that I think is producing some of the sharpest, most interesting writing in Seattle. At the same time, I'm excited to return to San Francisco. Not only is it another one of the nation's best restaurant cities, it's the place where I learned to cook, where I ordered my first bowl of pho, where I ate my first bowl of octopus-shrimp cocktail off the side of a taco truck in a grim Oakland parking lot. My roots there run deep.

Meanwhile, as his Seattle fans weep, the folks at SF Weekly are ordering Cantonese seafood in his honor. John Birdsall, editor at Voracious' sister-blog SFoodie, posted the news in San Francisco minutes after Kauffman pushed the "send" key on his preliminary farewell post.

First came the outrage: who could be cruel enough to steal nearly $2000 worth of food from a food bank?

When the Rainier Valley Food Bank staff arrived early Wednesday morning, they found the lock on their storage container cut. Missing, according to a Seattle Times report, was several hundred pounds of produce plus 30 crates of canned fruit, soup, chips, peanut butter and vegetables collected by volunteers last weekend in preparation for the coming Thanksgiving holiday. The need is particularly dire: this time last year, the food bank served about 5,000 people a month, but this year, the number has risen to approximately 10,000 says executive director Sam Osborne.

But good news has followed the bad.

Today, on the tenth and last day of United Way's Give 10/Tell 10 campaign, every dollar raised will go directly to the Rainier Valley Food Bank. What's more, according to United Way staffer Madeline Moy (who asked me to help spread the word), the non-profit plans to match those donations dollar-for-dollar. So quick! Tell your friends, your family, your social network-pals: donate right here via the United Way website.

UPDATE: 11/19/09 5:11 p.m. PCC Natural Markets also put their money where hungry mouths are today with a donation of more than $1,000 worth of fresh, organic produce to Rainier Valley Food Bank. With the assistance of produce suppliers Organically Grown Company and Peterson Fruit Company, PCC will deliver a shipment directly to the food bank on Friday -- a day before the food bank's planned Thanksgiving distribution. Through the generosity of shoppers' donations, thousands of pounds of staples are distributed to local food banks each month courtesy of the Seattle-based co-op's Food Bank Program.

I've owned several woks, but never got into the habit of using them. My first was aluminum and came as part of a cheap boxed set -- with a pair of long chopsticks and a half-moon frying rack. It gathered dust in the far corners of my cupboard till I sold it at a yard sale long ago. I own a nonstick wok that's truly good for nothing, and I married into a small halfway-decent wok with a wooden handle that Mac often employs to stir-fry beef with cabbage and "brown noodles" -- one of the dishes he and Nate eat when I'm out on the town. But a week ago I treated myself to a new wok, for which I paid a surprisingly reasonable $18 at the restaurant supply store. It's the wok I've been thinking about buying since I first read Grace Young's lovely book "The Breath of a Wok," in which she describes that versatile vessel as "the only pan ideally suited for stir-frying, pan-frying, braising, poaching, boiling, deep-frying, steaming, smoking foods, and even cooking rice."

Cost? $18. Thrill-quotient? Priceless.

My idea of a cake is more savory than sweet, so it's no wonder this is my favorite cake recipe:

Cornmeal Rosemary Cake with Lemon Glaze

I bake plenty of bread, but cake? Not so much. With exception to the one above and tiramisu (a recipe "stolen" from my old boss Saleh Joudeh, which isn't baked at all but also includes mascarpone), I don't do cakes. I don't even eat them much. Apparently, I'm in the minority.

Everyone, it seems, loves cakes and their sweet little siblings, cupcakes (have you checked out Seattle's own CakeSpy, or the hilarious Cake Wrecks blog that had all my pals slapping their knees after they read this recent story in the NYT). Perhaps the Food Network show "Ace of Cakes" is fueling their appetite (Nate's addicted).

Nate's "Sticky Chocolate Cake." Got milk?

Well, after I told you about 17-year-old baker Elissa Bernstein and her glorious cakes yesterday, a colleague sent me this kick-in-the-pants column by Petula Dvorak at the Washington Post, whose tale of obsessive cake-decorating involves her search for a way to create the perfect suction cup for an octopus cake -- heaven help her.

If you're a food-lover who loves to read about food, chances are you're familiar with Molly Wizenberg, whose blog Orangette launched the memoir "A Homemade Life" (and whose husband launched the Ballard pizzeria Delancey). Perhaps you've heard of Shauna James Ahern, the Gluten-Free Girl whose blog and book co-stars her husband, "the Chef." And Matthew Amster-Burton, whose Roots and Grubs blog birthed "Hungry Monkey," the story of a Seattle dad's quest to raise an adventurous eater. Now allow me to introduce you to the Bellevue high school senior who gets my vote for "most likely to succeed." Her name is Elissa Bernstein and she shares her love for baking -- and lust for life -- as the vibrant voice behind "17 and Baking."

Bernstein takes the cake -- and shared her recipe and photo for this beaut last July.

Elissa was 14, perusing the cookbooks at Costco when she spotted a book whose recipe for spongecake with meringue frosting would become the catalyst for her sweet obsession. "I convinced my mother to buy it," she told me, and when her earliest effort "ended up looking exactly like the picture in the book," her interest in baking snowballed.

At 15 she got a KitchenAid stand mixer for Christmas. Turning Sweet 16, she added to her arsenal a food processor and an ice cream machine. Her father -- a terrific home cook and his only child's No. 1 fan -- bragged, "You'd have thought we got her a convertible!" Elissa celebrated the occasion by inviting friends to dinner. But not before they had a party in the kitchen, preparing three kinds of handmade pasta.

Today the Interlake High School senior is an intern at John Howie's Seastar Restaurant and Raw Bar in Bellevue. There she works two days each week gaining school credit by prepping salads and desserts, torching creme brulees and baking cookies that impress the Seastar pros, who've begun to call her "the cookie intern."

I hope you had a chance to relax with Sunday's paper the old fashioned way (via newsprint) and read "Dining Out 2009" when, once again, our Pacific Northwest magazine was devoted to my favorite subject. Time flies when you love to dine out, as I mentioned in last year's blog-post "A Decade of Dining Out." That post linked to a 10-year retrospective of my Sunday magazine restaurant cover-stories (a service the old-fashioned print version famously doesn't provide). This year I profiled 10 pairs of restaurant notables old and new, representing a look at where we've been and where we're going. Missed it? Read it right here.

Now meets then: Pacific Northwest "Dining Out" covers 1999-2009

Whenever I write these magazine pieces, I hear from readers who suggest I've left out their favorite spot, or failed to mention a hot new (or fabulous "old") restaurant they adore, or otherwise managed to miss the boat. And, as always, your comments are most welcome.

I just got a tweet from blogger Suddenly Sahm. The acronymic, laid-off S(tay)-a(t)-h(ome)-m(om) who loves to cook thought I'd appreciate her latest blog-post. One that delves into the oft-asked question, "What can I bring?" Suddenly Sahm ponders the ubiquity of that query, and wonders:

"Where did this come from? I was raised to bring a hostess gift when invited to someone's home, but unless the occasion was expressly labeled a potluck, I do not remember my mother ever bringing a dish to someone's home or vice versa.

Funny she should bring it up. She's right, of course. Among my crowd, that's the standard response to any invite, and I'm as guilty of asking the question as the next person. It was the first thing my best friend asked early this week when I called to say, "Mac's making paella, you guys in for Friday night?" (Of course they were in. Who wouldn't want Mac's paella?)

Just show up with a nice Rioja, OK?

So, what do you think: Has every dinner party turned into a potluck? Is there something wrong with that?