Ideas from Charlie Trotter and Elsewhere

Charlie Trotter's Meat & Game was the first cookbook I've taken a good look through in a few weeks. Maybe I missed the best parts of this cookbook (the treatments of meat and the game, of course) since I cook mostly vegetarian these days, but it still gave me a few great ideas and got me hunting for more.

Ideas to look into:

• spice oils; I'm especially interested by clove oil
• flavorful emulsions as sauce or second sauce
• infusions of anything - got this from watching a clip from the TV show Heston's Feasts
• homemade liqueurs, especially the ones with obvious flavors, like coffee or cocoa
• that dim sum that's shrimp in a translucent rice flour wrapper
• Chinese garlic sauce (?) or whatever Shanghai Teahouse puts on its tofu and cabbage dish