On the Side | Already, an overflowing plate for a food scribe

Barely a week into January and the year's agenda, as usual, has grown absurdly long, unscrolling through West Philly, where Marigold Kitchen's new chef promises modern Southern fare - seared cornbread with creamy collards and Virginia Wigwam ham (that's mild, aged country ham) topped with sunny-side-up eggs, and the like.

It weaves down 11th Street in Chinatown, where Yakitori Boy - the grand-opening pennants still strung, the dragon dancers just finished - has at long last opened, the city's latest room offering small-plate tapas, though here they're calling them japas.

So, yes, they're on the list, no question. Along with the Indian fare at new Bindi, over on 13th. And Paraguayan brunch at Arbol Cafe at Second and Poplar. And the meat-curing fad that's going on, it appears, in half the restaurant kitchens in town.

I'm on the hunt, as well, for vegetable love, having dipped a toe in the nouveau vegan (and vegetarian) scene. (Stay tuned for reports from Royal Tavern and haute Horizons.)

But there's no getting around the perennial detour: It's the leftovers, in this event, 2007's unfinished business; the stragglers still waiting to get their due.

A scribble - never actually acted on - in last year's pocket diary says to find out how Reiker's, the Fox Chase meat market, concocts its subtly spicier (is it clove?), brothier, vaguely German-style snapper soup.

Another puzzle: Is the greasy, old-Philadelphia street-cart fishcake rousing itself from oblivion? (I'm starting to see curbside stirrings.)

Another: What's up with fruity, scarce Castelvetrano olives, which are threatening to upstage the fresh Lucque, my current olive pet?

That's just a sampler. Other pending investigations: Will Philadelphia food ever evolve a theme like, say, Tex-Mex? Will New Jersey's produce grow fat off the Salinas Valley's sins? Whither the native pawpaw?

The fact is I did get my fair share last year - a tour at the front during the city's foie gras wars (currently on low simmer); the epiphany that "local" crab these days is from Indonesia, the Chesapeake fishery having been overworked; a jaw-dropping taste of my first Scotch egg (hard-cooked, jacketed with ground pork, deep-fried and dipped in hot Colman's mustard) at the Whip, the horsey-set tavern south of Coatesville; an entire - and delicious - snail dinner at Le Bec-Fin; and a judge's seat at the maiden outing of Reading Terminal Market's oddball Scrapplefest.

I found myself at the Bent Spoon in Princeton, slurping amazing artisan gelato with Carlo Petrini, the guru of the Slow Food Movement. And having a downhearted farewell dinner at Deux Cheminees with his eminence, chef Fritz Blank (who retired to Thailand). And admiring the sheer staying power of Kurth's, the fried-fish stand that has weathered seven decades at Ninth and Susquehanna in North Philadelphia.

Our dismantled kitchen - hurrah! - got put back together.

But there's so much more, and so little time. This week, if the creek don't rise, I'm off to the Pennsylvania Farm Show, Harrisburg's annual salute to the joys of angel food cake and champion steers (but silence on the hot-button issue of why the Ag commissioner is disallowing "No Hormones" labels on milk produced without added growth hormones).

You can bet the farm show alone will pump up the 2008 list. It always does. A few years ago, it was where I discovered a fascinating trend: There'd been a bumper crop of women running small-time farms.

There are bound to be other fresh encounters. I ran into brewer Tom Kehoe a few days ago; his relocated riverfront Yards Brewery - the flooring reinforced - is opening in a few months.

Over the weekend I snagged my first box of Balinese long peppers in Narberth. They look like miniature pine cones; but what do they taste like?

And the other night, cooling my heels at Chick's Cafe at Seventh and Bainbridge, I was offered a sip of an extraordinarily mellow, domestic apple brandy.

So the menu inexorably grows, order and restraint subverted at every turn by recipes for rutabaga fries and Abruzzo delicacies, by upstart Chester County cheese-makers and vegan BLTs - and now and then just an innocent, head-turning sip in the night.