Potstickers Revisited

Yes, I'm still alive.  No, I'm not cooking nearly as much as I used to, and when I do, it's not all that exciting.  That's one reason for the lack of posts.  Another reason is that I'm pregnant again!  Baby #2 is due on January 5, 2012 and we are super excited for the new addition!

So while the posts will still be far and few between, I promise that this blog is not dead and I will be back periodically with little additions here and there.  And today, I'm blogging about dumplings again!

I love that dumplings are so versatile.  You can use any meat, or no meat at all and any veggie(s).  This time, I used ground turkey, bok choy and ginger and that's it!  Easy, delicious, healthy and baby friendly too!

Ingredients:
- Ground turkey
- Bok Choy
- Ginger
- Soy sauce
- White pepper
- Oyster sauce
- Sesame oil
- Dumpling wrappers


Directions:
- Finely chop the bok choy.
- Grate the ginger 
- Mix the turkey, bok choy, ginger, soy sauce, sesame oil, white pepper and oyster sauce in a bowl

- Take a wrapper, put about a tablespoon of filling in the center, dab water around the edge of half of the wrapper, fold it over and squeeze closed, pleating it you've got the skills to achieve a half moon shape (you can skip the pleating if it's too difficult).

- When you're done wrapping all the dumplings, heat a nonstick pan with a bit of oil.  Line the dumplings in the pan, making sure the bottom of each one is coated in oil.  Add about a cup of water and cover the pan.  Turn the heat up to high and let it boil and evaporate.
- Once the water has mostly cooked off, take the lid off and let it continue cooking until the water has completely evaporated and the bottoms of the dumplings are nice and crispy.
- Serve it with your favorite dipping sauce.  I like mine simple, just black vinegar and soy sauce.

Chive Boxes

I love all dumpling'ish foods such as dumplings, pot stickers, steamed buns and of course chive boxes, also known as jiu cai he zi in Chinese.

Garlic chives or Chinese chives are much more potent than regular chives and I love the flavor and fragrance.  I started growing garlic chives in the garden, but I still don't have quite enough to make a decent batch of chive boxes, so store-bought will have to do for now.

The main components of chive boxes are egg, glass noodles and of course chives!  If you like, mini dried shrimp make a tasty addition as well.  And if you decide that you don't like the flavor of garlic chives, which can be a bit strong, you can easily substitute it for other veggies such as spinach and even add some ground pork or shrimp to make your own tasty creation!

I'm also submitting this dish to Weekend Herb Blogging which is being hosted by Chris at Mele Cotte.  Check out the other submissions if you get a chance!

Ingredients:
(Dough)

- All Purpose Flour
- Hot Water

(Filling)
- Garlic chives
- Glass noodles aka mung bean noodles, cellophane noodles, etc.
- Eggs
- Salt and/or soy sauce

- Sesame oil

Directions:
- Mix together the flour and hot water (about 2 parts flour to 1 part water) until a nice smooth dough is formed.  Cover it and set it aside.
- Chop the chives into 1/2-1/4 inch bits.
- Scramble the eggs in a pan with a bit of salt and/or soy to taste.
- Soak the glass noodles in hot water until soft and pliable.  Then chop the noodles into approximately 1 inch lengths.
- Mix the chives, glass noodles and eggs together in a bowl.  Season with soy sauce and sesame oil as needed.

- Cut off a chunk of the dough and roll and stretch it into a rope of about 1 to 1.5 inches in diameter.
- Slice the rope into approximately 1 inch chunks (depending on how big you want your chive boxes to be and how thick you like the skin to be), turning the rope 90 degrees in between each cut so that you the dough doesn't get flattened into an oval.

- Smoosh each chunk into a circle, dust with flour, set aside, and cover them with a kitchen towel so that they don't dry out.
- Using a wooden dowel, roll out the dough into a circle (or as close to it as you can get).  I find that rolling the dough from the edge closest to me halfway to the center of the circle and back out with my left hand while using my right hand to turn the dough a quarter turn in between each roll of the dowel works best for me.
- When you have achieved the desired thickness (depending on how dough-y you like your chive boxes to be), you can use a cookie cutter to get a prettier circle, but I'm lazy and don't bother with this step.
- Place some filling in the center of the dough and wet the edge of half the circle with water.  Bring the wet edge and the dry edge together (sort of like a taco) and press the edges together.  You can make pretty pleats if you want, but it's really not necessary.  Just make sure it's closed tight.
- Set aside and repeat until you are out of dough or filling.
- Heat some oil on medium in a non-stick pan.  Place as many of the chive boxes in the pan, seam side down, as you can.
- If you want, add a bit of water to the pan as if you were cooking potstickers.  You can also cook them without water too.  Both methods work and will just give you a slightly different texture in the dough.
- Let them cook until the crust is a crunchy and has a light golden brown.  Flip them and cook the other side until light golden brown as well.
- Serve plain or with a mixture of black vinegar and soy sauce.
- You can also freeze these and pop them back in the pan to reheat whenever you're in the mood for them!

Cabbage and Tomato Stir Fry

This is a simple and healthy side dish. That's all there is to it, really. If I ever need a quick veggie dish, I whip this up in a few minutes.

Ingredients:
- Cabbage
- Tomatoes
- Garlic
- Salt
Directions:
- Mince the garlic and set aside.
- Cut the cabbage into strips, about a quarter inch thick or so.
- Slice the tomatoes into thing wedges.
- Heat some oil in a pan.
- Add the garlic and stir for a few seconds, until fragrant.
- Add the tomatoes and a bit of water and cook until the tomatoes soften a bit. Adding a sprinkle or two of salt will help with this.
- Add the cabbage and salt to taste.
- Stir everything in the pan until the cabbage is cooked through.
- Enjoy this healthy side dish guilt-free!

Crispy Pan-Fried Noodles

Chow mein is great on it's own, but frying the noodles makes it even better!

Liang mian huang or crispy pan fried noodles are noodles that are fried into a crispy disk and topped with a stir fry of meat and vegetables and a nice, flavorful, thick sauce. Mix the noodles, meat, vegetables and sauce at the table. The perfect bite has a bit of noodles that have soaked up the sauce, a bit of noodles that are still crunchy, and a bit of meat and vegetables. It's a fun dish to prepare and to eat!

I'm also submitting this for Presto Pasta Night which is hosted by Once Upon a Feast this week. Check it out to see all the other yummy submissions.







Ingredients:
- Yellow noodles (you can find these in any Asian supermarket. You can go with thick or thin, I happened to go with thick)
- Any combination of meat (typical options are chicken, beef and shrimp)
- Cabbage
- Carrots
- Garlic
- Soy sauce
- Oyster sauce
- Water
- Corn starch

Directions:
- Cook the noodles according to the package directions, drain them and set them aside.
- Slice the meat into bite size pieces. Marinate them in a mixture of corn starch and soy sauce while you prep the other veggies.
- Slice the carrots into thin slices (I like to do it at a bias)
- Chop the cabbage into roughly 1 inch squares
- Mince the garlic
- Mix a few teaspoons of corn starch with a few teaspoons of cold water and set aside.
- Heat about at least 1/2 inch of oil in a pan (you can deep fry the noodles too if you'd like) until placing placing a chopstick into the oil makes it bubble.
- Carefully dump the noodles into the oil and fry until crispy.
- Flip the noodles and fry the other side until crispy.
- Remove the noodles, drain the oil, and set them aside.
- Heat a bit of oil in another pan (or dump most of the oil out of your original pan) and add the meat, some soy sauce, and the garlic. Stir fry it until it's mostly cooked. If you're using shrimp, add the shrimp at the last minute so that it doesn't overcook.
- Add the veggies and oyster sauce. Cook through while keeping everything in the pan moving.
- When everything is done, add more water if you need to (you should have quite a bit of sauce for the noodles to soak up) and the corn starch/water slurry to thicken up the sauce.
- Spoon the meat, veggies and sauce over the noodles and serve while hot.

Garlic Steamed Scallops

This is a dish that I had in Hong Kong and Singapore and I absolutely adored it. There are these restaurants with live seafood. You go up to the tanks, pick what you want and tell them how you want it prepared. This is a picture of the tanks at one of the restaurants on Lamma Island in Hong Kong. So fresh and delicious!

My favorite dish to order at these types of restaurants was the garlic steamed scallops. Humongous fresh scallops, steamed with garlic and glass noodles. Yum, yum, YUM!

I'm not sure what else they put in because as I tried to recreate it, it just wasn't quite the same. If you've ever had this dish, please help me out and let me know what I'm missing. I'm dying to recreate it properly.

In the meantime, here is what I did...

Ingredients:
- Sea scallops
- Glass noodles
- Garlic
- Scallions
- Sea salt
- Oil (I used sesame, but I suggest using olive oil or butter instead)

Directions:
- Soak the glass noodles in hot water until soft. They should be pretty much cooked since they won't be steaming for long.
- Finely dice/crush the garlic.
- Lay down a bed of the noodles, then the scallop, then a generous dollop of garlic and a bit of chopped scallions.
- Sprinkle sea salt on top and drizzle a bit of oil on top. I used sesame oil, but the flavor was way too strong. I'm thinking maybe olive oil or butter would be better.
- Place it in a steamer for about 5-10 minutes or until the scallop is cooked (be careful not to over cook them).

Spicy Eggplant

Eggplants are so pretty raw, but after you cook them, they're one of the most unappetizing looking foods out there. And using a phone to take the picture because my camera was out of batteries and I couldn't find the charger doesn't help matters either. But it's the flavor that's more important, right? And with this dish, the flavor was definitely there!


Ingredients:
- Eggplants (I like using the thinner Japanese style ones)
- Ground meat (pork or turkey)
- Enoki mushrooms (totally optional, but I love the texture of these mushrooms)
- Garlic
- Chili sauce
Soy sauce
- Oil

Directions:
- Slice the eggplant into wedges about 2-3 inches long. The thinner you cut them, the faster they'll cook.
- Finely chop the garlic.
- Heat some oil in a pan or wok.
- Add the garlic and stir it for a few seconds until it's fragrant.
- Add the ground meat and some soy.
- Cook the meat, breaking it up as you go and then remove it from the pan and set it aside.
- To cook the eggplant, you can either deep fry it (faster, crispier, tastier and prettier, but not as healthy) or "boil" it.
- To deep fry, heat a lot of oil in the wok, toss the eggplant in (you may want to do this in batches to keep the oil hot) and keep the eggplant moving until it's cooked through.
- To "boil" it, just add the eggplant to the wok with some soy sauce and water. Keep the stirring the eggplant until it's cooked through, adding more water as necessary.
- Add the meat back in with the eggplant, add chili sauce and the enoki mushrooms and stir until everything is well combined and the mushrooms are cooked. It shouldn't take very long at all.
- Serve it over a bed of rice.

Chinese New Year Dumplings

Gong Xi Fa Cai!
Happy Chinese New Year!

When I was a kid, my mother always made a Chinese New Year feast with all the "lucky" foods and my favorite was always dumplings. She'd hide a peanut, candy, or a quarter in a select number of the dumplings (yes, we'd bleach the quarter and then wrap it in saran wrap - which was always my job) and a select lucky few would eat these special dumplings. Whoever got a peanut would be blessed with good health, the candy symbolized love, and the money meant fortune. It was a fun tradition that I definitely intend to continue with our kids!

Ingredients:
- Ground meat (I used a combo of ground pork and turkey. Shrimp is also a common filling)
- Vegetables (I used napa cabbage, but garlic chives, spinach, mushrooms, etc are all great options)
- Aromatics (Ginger, garlic, scallions, etc)
- Soy sauce
- Salt
- White pepper
- Sesame oil
- Dumpling wrappers

Directions:
- Finely chop the napa cabbage, salt it and set it in a colander to get rid of the excess water. Once it's been wilted, rinse off the salt and drain it. You can also put it into the food processor and then use a cheese cloth to squeeze out the water.

- Finely dice or grate the aromatics.
- Mix the meat, veggies, aromatics, and seasonings together in large bowl.
- Take a dumpling wrapper, place about a tablespoon of filling in the center along with one of the little surprises if you want. If you're having trouble getting it closed, use less filling or more if you want plumper dumplings. You'll get better at folding them with practice.
- Wet one half of the edge of the wrapper with water, fold over to close it and if you can, pleat the edges like this.

- Repeat the previous step until you run out of filling or wrappers. At this point, you can freeze them to cook at a later time or cook them now.

- To cook, you can use one of the following methods:

• Boil - Bring a pot of water to a boil. Carefully drop in the dumplings and give it a stir to keep them from sticking (there's no need to defrost them if they were frozen first) Bring it back up to a boil. When it reaches a boil, add a cup of cold water and bring it up to a boil again. Repeat this again. The third time it comes up to a boil, the dumplings should be floating and cooked through.
• Steam - Line a steamer basket with napa cabbage leaves. Put the dumplings into the steamer and steam for 10-15 minutes.
  
• Pot stickers - Pour enough oil to coat the bottom of a non-stick pan. Line the dumplings in a single layer (my husband likes to make it pretty, while I just dump them in haphazardly). Add a cup of water and cover with the lid. Let it boil/steam until all the water is almost dry. Remove the lid and keep cooking until the bottoms are crispy. Flip them out of the pan.

- Serve with your favorite dipping sauce. Personally, I like black vinegar and soy. Enjoy and happy year of the tiger! Rawr :)

Ginger Pork

I really like the flavor of ginger and really don't use it enough in my cooking. I always have it on hand and keep it in the freezer, but because it's in the freezer, it's one of those out of sight, out of mind things and I never really use it. To remedy this, I decided to make ginger pork and make ginger the star of the show!

This is a quick and tasty dish to make and since the hubz has taken a liking to keeping the freezer stocked with pork tenderloin (I think he's tired of chicken), I'll probably be making this a lot more in the future.

Ingredients:
- Pork tenderloin
- Onions
- Ginger
- Soy sauce
- Brown sugar
- Corn starch
- Edamame (optional)

Directions:
- Slice the pork into thin strips.
- Marinate the pork in some soy sauce, brown sugar, corn starch and lots of grated ginger (I used a microplane zester) while you're prepping the rest of the ingredients.
- Slice the onions into thin strips.
- Slice some ginger into super thin strips (you can skip this step if you want. I just thought that the grated ginger was a bit mild, so I added more strips of it for more ginger flavor).
- Heat a wok or pan with a bit of oil in it.
- Add the onions and saute until they are mostly softened.
- Add the sliced ginger and the pork along with the marinade and keep everything in the pan moving until the pork is cooked through, adding more soy sauce and brown sugar to taste as needed and water/stock if it gets too dry or you want more sauce.
- Add the edamame if you want it to just heat it through.
- Serve everything over rice.

Hot & Sour Cabbage

I love hot and sour flavors together, and I'm assuming I'm not the only one since hot and sour soup seems to be pretty popular (which I'm dying to make one of these days btw, so if you if you have a great recipe, please share it with me).

Anyway, this hot & sour cabbage is a quick and easy veggie dish to go with any meal. It's also decent alternative for when you're craving kimchi but don't have the patience to wait for it to ferment.


And since the secret ingredient for Weekend Wokking is cabbage this month, I'm submitting this to Erbe in Cucina who is hosting it this month.




Ingredients:
- Cabbage
- Dried chili peppers (chili pepper flakes will work too if you don't have the peppers)
- Chili oil (optional)
- Vinegar
- Salt
- Oil

Directions:
- Chop the cabbage into bit size squares. Wash and drain them.
- Heat up some oil in a wok or pan.
- Add the chili peppers or flakes and toast them until you can smell the spice. Be careful not to let them burn.
- Add the cabbage and salt and vinegar to taste. If it's not spicy enough, I also like to add a bit of chili oil too.
- Stir everything around until the cabbage is cooked through but still has some crunchiness to it.

Chao Mi Fen

If you're Chinese, you call this mi-fen. If you're Filipino, you call this pancit. If you're Malaysian, you call this bihon. In America, they call it Rice Vermicelli. Regardless of what you call it, I call it yummy!

Asian foods have a lot of overlap. I had a friend in high school who was Korean, and we used to have arguments, along with a Filipino friend of mine, on whether something our moms made was Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Japanese, etc. And if she couldn't win the argument, she'd just throw her hands up in the air and declare "It's Mongolian! We all descended from Mongolia!" Whether or not that's true, I don't know (I suck at history), but it was her way of saying "If I can't win, no one can!" :)

I like that there's a lot of overlap in the types of food Asians make and I love how each culture puts their own little spin on the same dish. In fact, even within each culture, there are countless ways to make this dish. I learned this way from my mom, but I've never seen it made like this in a restaurant or anyone else's house, which makes me think that she made it up to get me to eat more carrots, but who knows. Regardless, it's what I grew up with and what I enjoy, so I continue on the tradition by making this way too.

I know it looks like a scary amount of carrots, but somehow, it just works. The carrots lend a sweetness to the dish that I really enjoy and it doesn't taste too carrot-y. Plus it gives the dish color and makes it pretty. It's also a great way to use up carrots that have been sitting in the fridge for waaay too long!

This is my submission to Presto Pasta Nights, a wonderful event created by Ruth of Once Upon a Feast, which is being hosted by Joanne of Eats Well with Others. Check out the roundup at the end of the week for more noodly goodness.

Ingredients:
- Half a bag of dried rice vermicelli
- 5 carrots
- Half a head of napa cabbage
- 2 to 3 chicken breasts or pork chops
- Soy sauce
- Oyster sauce

Directions:
- Soak the rice vermicelli in water while prepping the other ingredients. It should be soft and pliable by the time you need to use it, which should take about 10 minutes or so. Soaking it longer does no harm.
- Slice the chicken or pork into thin strips of about a quarter inch thick. If you want bigger pieces of meat, that's fine too, there are no real rules to this.
- Mix in a bit of soy sauce and corn starch with the chicken/pork to marinate and tenderize it.
- Peel and shred the carrots. I find the shredding blade of the food processor especially handy for this task.
- Wash and thinly slice the napa cabbage. You can use more or less if you'd like, or use regular cabbage or even other veggies such as spinach if you'd like too. There's a lotta flexibility here. My mom used napa cabbage, so that's what I use too.
- Heat a bit of oil in a large pot or wok.
- Put the marinated meat into the pot/wok and stir it until it's about 80% cooked through. You can add more soy or oil if it seems to be sticking to the pan too much.
- Add the carrots and cabbage and give everything a good stir. Sprinkle a bit of salt on top and put the lid on. Check on it every few minutes, giving it a stir if necessary, until the carrots and cabbage have wilted and softened significantly.
- Add the soaked noodles in and flavor with soy and oyster sauce to taste. Stir everything together until the noodles are soft. If the pan keeps drying out while you're stirring or the noodles are too hard, add more water.
- I love to serve this with Sriracha sauce.

Broccoli Beef

Before I finish posting about our 4th of July BBQ, I wanted to post this so that I can participate in Regional Recipes this month. They're featuring China and it's being hosted by Darlene of Blazing Hot Wok.

Broccoli beef is probably one of the most well-known Chinese stir fry dishes in America and it's also one of the easiest, though all stir fries are pretty easy. It's just a bit of oil, some aromatics, a protein, and vegetables with some sauce.

You can do almost any combo of:

• aromatics - garlic, ginger, scallions, etc
  
• protein - chicken, shrimp, beef, tofu, etc or even skip it altogether if you want
• vegetables - brocolli, carrots, onions, cabbage, pretty much anything you want!
• sauce - soy, oyster, hoisin, hot sauce, pretty much anything you can find in the sauce aisle of your local asian market.

Stir fries are great for cleaning out the fridge!

Ingredients:
- Beef
- Broccoli
- Carrots (I added it for color and to sneak in extra veggies, but it's totally optional and not really "traditional")
- Garlic
- Soy Sauce
- Oyster Sauce
- Corn starch

Directions:
- Slice the beef into thin bite-size pieces. Flank steak is great for this, but any beef will do really, as long as you slice it against the grain to keep it tender. If you have trouble slicing it thinly, either use a sharper knife or put it in the freezer for about 10 minutes.
- Marinate the beef in a few teaspoons of corn starch and soy sauce while you prep the other ingredients. This will keep the beef tender and help thicken the sauce.
- Cut the broccoli florets off into bite-size pieces. You can also peel off the tough skin of the stem, slice it, and add them to the florets.
- Peel and slice the carrots at a bias (if you're using them)
- Finely mince the garlic.
Heat a pan or wok until smoking hot.
- Add a bit of oil to coat the bottom and let that heat up too.
- Add the garlic and stir it quickly for only a few seconds so that they don't burn.
- Add the beef with a bit of extra soy sauce.
- When the beef if about 80% cooked, you can take it out and set it aside. If you're being lazy like me, don't bother with this step :)
- If you're using carrots, add them to the pan. You can also add more oil at any time if things start sticking.
- Add the broccoli to the pan and oyster sauce to taste. If you don't have oyster sauce, more soy is fine too. If you like more sauce, feel free to add a bit of water or chicken stock.
- If you took the beef out earlier, add it back in now. Don't let the broccoli cook too long or it will get mushy. You want it to keep a bit of crispness.
- If you want to thicken the sauce more, mix a bit of corn starch in a bowl with a bit of water until fully dissolved and add the slurry to the pan. It should thicken even more as it cools.
- Serve over rice.

Nuo Mi Fan

Almost every Chinese family I know makes this sticky rice dish (known as nuo mi fan or you fan) in place of traditional stuffing during Thanksgiving. In fact, for me and most of my friends, it's the highlight of Thanksgiving dinner! My mother in law does a better job with it than I do, so even though I've hosted Thanksgiving the past two years, I always ask her to bring the "Chinese Stuffing". I also always ask her to make extra so that we can keep the leftovers, though there's never much left because, like I said, it's the highlight of Thanksgiving dinner. When people are packing up doggy bags at the end of the night, the hubz makes it known that the leftover nuo mi fan is off limits :)

The reason my mother in law's version of nuo mi fan is better is because it's just somehow more fragrant than mine. I thought it was the fried shallots, but no matter how much I put in, it's still not the same. I'm going to have to watch her make it and steal her secrets one of these days, but for now, my version is not bad either. In fact, it's pretty darn good if I do say so myself.

I make my nuo mi fan in 3 different methods, depending on how lazy I'm being. I believe the traditional way is to fry it a bit first, and then steam it to finish it off, but that also requires the most work. My semi-lazy way is just to stir fry it the whole way through and skip the steaming. This yields just as good results in my opinion, so this is the method I use the most. And my lazy way is to the user rice cooker. It's super quick and easy and can be done with just a little prep, then you can "set it and forget it". The rice cooker method produces grains of rice that don't quite have the same resistance as the other methods, but it still tastes great and will save you a lot of time.

For today, I decided to go with the steaming method, but I'll explain all 3 below...

Ingredients:
- 2 cups of glutinous rice (the package might say sweet rice on it)
- 6 Dried Shitake Mushrooms (you can use more or less depending on your personal preference)
- 4 Xiang Chang (or Lap Cheong in Cantonese) which is a Chinese Sausage. Again, you can use more or less of it, depending on your personal preference.
- Soy Sauce
- Oyster Sauce
- Fried shallots
- Scallions or parsley for garnish

Directions:
- Rinse the rice in running water, then soak it overnight. If you plan on using your rice cooker, put the rice in the rice cooker pot and fill it to the line as you would when cooking rice normally. Otherwise, just make sure the rice is fully covered with water.
- Either the night before or the day of, soak the mushrooms to soften them. If you don't have time to wait for them to soften because you're impatient or forget to plan ahead, put them in water, pop them in the microwave for about a minute or two and then let them sit for another 5-10 minutes or so. This should soften them up faster. (Save the soaking liquid).
- Dice the mushrooms and the Xiang Chang.
- If you're using the rice cooker method, add soy sauce and oyster sauce to the rice and water to taste. Then toss in the mushrooms, xiang chang, mushroom soaking liquid (minus the grainy bits at the bottom), and a healthy dose of fried shallots. Give everything a good stir and turn on your rice cooker. When the rice cooker indicates that it's done cooking, serve it with a garnish of freshly chopped scallions or parsley.
- If you're not using the rice cooker method, heat a large wok or pan. You can add oil if you want, but I don't find it's necessary since the sausage has plenty of oil already.
- Put the xiang chang in the wok/pan and cook it until fragrant.
- Drain the rice and add it to the xiang chang, along with the mushrooms. Stir everything together so that the rice is coated with the oil from the sausage.
- Add soy and oyster sauce to taste. Also add in the reserved mushroom soaking liquid (be careful not to pour in the grainy bits that have settled at the bottom).
- Keep everything in the pan moving until the liquid has been absorbed.
- If you want to steam it, mix in the fried shallots and move everything to a steamer. Steam it until the rice is soft and chewy and no longer crunchy. Serve with scallions or parsley.
- If you want to finish it in the wok/pan, add the fried shallots and just keep stirring and flipping the rice until the rice is soft and chewy and no longer crunchy. As the rice cooks, it will get stickier and you'll find that it gets harder and harder to mix and stir, but that's okay. Keep at it! Then serve it with some scallions or parsley.

Century Egg Tofu (Pi Dan Tofu)

I apologize for the lack of posts recently. Both work and life in general have been keeping me busy, but here's another super quick and super easy dish. *Warning* - it's not for everyone.

See that black jelly like stuff in the picture? That's an egg. Yup, a hundred year old egg! It's not really a hundred years old, that's just what it's called. It's also known as century egg or pi dan in Chinese. Here's what it looks like with the shell on.

How do they get the egg that way? They cake it in clay, ash, salt and some other stuff to preserve it. Even if you can get passed its appearance, it's definitely an acquired taste and texture, and tastes nothing like an egg. I know a guy who will eat everything from chicken feet to scorpions to bull testicles, etc, but won't touch this stuff with a ten foot pole. Then there are people like me who absolutely adore it.

So, if you're feeling adventurous, give this a try. It's a nice refreshing dish that's especially nice on a hot summer day, and who knows, you may fall in love with it too!

Ingredients:
- 2 century eggs
- 1 block of silken tofu
- Soy sauce
- Oyster sauce
- Sesame oil
- Green onions or bonito flakes as a garnish (optional)

Directions:
- Dice the tofu into large cubes.
- Dice the century eggs into large cubes.
- Top the century egg and tofu with a few dashes of soy, a healthy drizzle of oyster sauce and a splash of sesame oil.
- Garnish with green onions or bonito flakes if you want.
- Mix everything together and serve cold.

Asparagus and Mushroom Stirfry

I think of asparagus as being a "meaty" veggie, so to make a quick, easy, and healthy stirfry, I decided to pair it with mushrooms, which I also think of as being "meaty". While I think a king oyster mushroom would have been better, I always have dried shitake mushrooms in my pantry, so that's what I used. That's one of the best things about stir fries, you can just toss in whatever you have on hand! Though, next time I'll try to plan ahead and get some fresh king oyster mushrooms and try this again.

Ingredients:
- One bunch of asparagus
- 5 dried shitake mushrooms or king oyster mushrooms if you have them
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 3 tablespoons (to taste) of oyster sauce (soy sauce is fine if you don't have oyster sauce)

Directions:
- Wash and trim the asparagus by cutting off the tough end.
- Cut the asparagus on the bias into thin slices.
- Soak the shitake mushroom in water until they're soft. If you want to rush the process, put the mushrooms and water in the microwave for a minute.
- Slice the mushrooms into thin slices.
- Mince the garlic.
- Heat some a bit of oil in a pan or wok.
- Add the garlic and saute for just a few seconds.
- Add the asparagus, mushrooms, and the liquid the mushrooms were soaking in (minus the bit at the bottom with the dirty mushroom remnants).
- Add the oyster or soy sauce.
- Saute everything together until the asparagus is cooked through, but still has a nice crunch to it.

Homemade Noodles

I love nice thick chewy noodles and the texture that can only come from fresh noodles, not dried. Since it's sometimes hard to find them at stores, I decided to make them myself. The only problem is that even though it's easy, it makes a big mess, so if I'm going to the trouble of making them, I like to make extra and freeze them. I floured them heavily and froze them in individually sized portions. Unfortunately, they stuck together even though I dusted them with a ton of flour. If you have a suggestion on on how store/freeze them, please let me know!


Ingredients:
- 2 parts Flour
- 1 part Ice Water
- lots of extra Flour to keep things from sticking

Directions:
- Mix the water and flour together and knead until it forms a nice smooth dough, adding more flour as needed for dusting the work surface and your hands.
- Let the dough rest for at least 10 minutes.
- Roll the dough out into sheets about 1/8 of an inch thick. If you're having trouble rolling it out, let it rest longer.
- Flour the sheet heavily and roll it loosely.
- Cut the rolls into strips of your desired thickness. Personally, I like them about half an inch wide.
- Carefully unroll the cut strips and lay them out, heavily floured so that they don't stick.
- Bring a large pot of water to a boil.
- Put the noodles into the water for just a few minutes until the noodles are cooked through.
- Drain the noodles and put them into the broth of your choice or toss them with olive oil or sesame oil for use at a later time.

Honey Walnut Shrimp

When you first think about this combination, it sounds kinda gross. Shrimp in a sweet mayonnaise sauce? If I saw that on a menu, I'd probably pass on it. Luckily, they've come up with a much more appealing name for it - Honey Walnut Shrimp. That sounds much tastier, doesn't it? And it really is tasty, no matter what you call it.

A few things I'd like to point out when making this dish. Use decent sized shrimp if possible. A big part of the beauty of this dish is biting into a juicy, succulent shrimp with crispy breading. If the shrimp is too small, you won't get that same satisfaction from the "popping" of the shrimp when biting into it. Plus, you run the risk of the breading being so thick and heavy that the shrimp just disappears.

Another thing that I recommend you do is to add the nuts in AFTER you've mixed the shrimp with the mayo sauce. I tossed them in first without thinking, and the nuts got all covered in goop and didn't make for a very pretty presentation. Sprinkle the nuts on afterwards as an edible garnish. It'll look much more appetizing.

Ingredients:
- Shrimp
- Cornstarch
- Oil
- Honey
- Mayo
- Sweetened Condensed Milk
- Walnuts (sugar or honey glazed is best, but plain is fine too)

Directions:
- Peel and devein the shrimp.
- Coat the shrimp lightly in the cornstarch. You can definitely use your favorite breading technique instead, but I use cornstarch because I just like a little bit of crispness without it being too heavy.
- Heat some oil in a pan or wok. Throw in the shrimp and toss it around for a few minutes until it's cooked through and crispy. If you're using a heavier batter, deep frying is probably a better way to go.
- Mix equal portions of mayo and condensed milk and a squeeze of honey until smooth and combined.
- Fold the shrimp into the sauce and sprinkle the walnuts on top as a garnish.

Moo Shu Chicken

Moo shu is essentially a stir fry, except that it's served in a pancake instead of over rice. Stir fries are quick, easy, healthy, and great for clearing out leftovers in the fridge. I had leftover shredded chicken and half a head of cabbage, so I decided to make moo shu out of it! I added a bag of bean sprouts and a carrot that I added mainly for color more than anything else. Oh, and a bit of wood ear since I had it lying around the house too. You can put whatever you like/have into yours and I'm sure it'll turn out great! Some other popular moo shu ingredients are scrambled egg, bamboo shoots, lily buds, bok choy, etc, but you should really just put what you like or what you have on hand. You can also replace the chicken with any (or no) protein you want.

And since stir fry is the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of woks, I'm submitting this recipe to Joelen's Tasty Tools event. She's highlighting woks during the month of March. Check out her roundup to see what other goodies people have made using their woks!

Ingredients:

• 1 leftover chicken breast shredded
• 1 bag of bean sprouts
• 1 clove of minced garlic
• 1/2 a head cabbage, cut into strips as if for coleslaw
• 1 carrot julienned
• a few wood ears also julienned
• soy sauce
• oyster sauce
• tortillas (you can find mushu pancakes in the freezer section of asian stores, but tortillas work just fine)
• hoisin sauce

Method:
1. Prep all your ingredients so that they're ready to go!
2. Heat your wok/pan until smoking hot, add a bit of oil and swirl it around. Then add the garlic.
3. Since the cabbage takes the longest to cook, add that in.
4. Next, add the carrots and wood ear.
5. Last, add the sprouts.
6. Add soy sauce and oyster sauce to taste.
7. Toss in the turkey last since it's already fully cooked (You'd want to cook this first, before any veggies if it was raw).
8. Make sure everything is heated through but the veggies still have a bit of crunch to them.
9. Smear a bit of hoisin sauce on your tortilla, add some of the filling, roll it up like a Chinese burrito and enjoy! You can garnish it with a bit of scallion sliced on the bias too.

Chao Nian Gao (Stir fried rice cakes)

I love the chewy texture of rice cakes (sometimes called rice ovalettes). It's almost like a tough and savory gum that you're allowed to swallow. Haha, that just sounds super appetizing doesn't it? Hmm, let's see if I can describe it better. Oh, I can also add that it's pretty much flavorless, but you typically add it into savory dishes. I know that doesn't help, but trust me, this is good stuff!

There are many ways to make rice cakes. Some of my favorite include sticking it in a soup with dumplings for Korean duk mandu gook, or stir frying them. Even within stir frying, there are 2 typical ways: Shanghai style with dark soy, veggies, and thin strips of pork or a lighter version with mustard greens and bamboo and thin strips of pork. While I love both versions, I decided to make my own version and use it to help me get rid of some leftover turkey I had in the fridge. Just like fried rice and chow mein or any other stir fry, rice cakes are great for clearing out the fridge.

Here's the recipe for the Shanghai version, plus what I used as substitute ingredients because I needed to clean out my fridge.

Ingredients:
- Pork (sliced into thin strips) - I used shredded leftover turkey. Any other meat such as chicken or beef could be used as well.
- Napa cabbage (sliced into thin strips) - I also added some brocolli. You can add other veggies such as shredded carrots, regular cabbage, spinach etc if you'd like.
- Shitake mushrooms (sliced into thin strips) - I skipped this ingredient.
- Rice cakes/ovalettes
- Dark soy sauce - I used regular soy sauce
- Oyster sauce
- Corn starch - I skipped this since I was using already cooked turkey

Directions:
- Rinse the rice ovalettes in water to separate them. Some packages also require you to soak them, so read the directions on the back.
- Marinate the pork in a little bit of soy sauce and corn starch.
- Heat up your pan or wok and a bit of oil.
- Put the pork in the meat and stir it around until mostly cooked.
- Add the napa cabbage and cook until slightly wilted.
- Add the mushrooms.
- Add the rice cakes.
- Add the soy sauce and oyster sauce to taste.
- Stir everything until the rice cakes are soft. If it gets too dry and looks like things might burn before the rice cakes are done, add a bit of water or chicken stock.

Scallion Pancakes

The Chinese name for this dish is cong you bing which literally translates to onion oil pancake, and that's really all there is to it. Since the ingredient list is so short, it's perfect for this month's Weekend Cookbook Challenge which is run by Sara of I Like to Cook: 5 ingredients or less!

I love green onion pancakes (aka scallion pancakes). You can eat it alone as a snack, dipping it in a simple sauce if you'd like. You can eat it as a side instead of rice. You can wrap meat and veggies in it with some hoisin sauce - yum! Fry it up with scrambled eggs for a great breakfast. The list goes on and on. Plus it freezes really well, so you can make a ton and freeze them for convenient future usage! I even had a green onion pancake-off with a friend once. We both made them and fed them to our friends for judging, and I'm proud to say that I won :)

Another thing I love about green onion pancakes are the layers. Look at those gorgeous layers! As a kid, I loved peeling off the layers and eating them one by one, and I'm not ashamed to say that I still play with my food to this day!

Anyway, enough babbling, here's the recipe!

Ingredients:

• All purpose flour
• Hot, preferably boiling, water (approx 2:1 ratio of flour to water)
• Oil (I like to use a combo of vegetable and sesame and will elaborate below)
• Salt
• Green onions (diced)

Method:

• In a stand mixer, or by hand, mix the flour and water together and knead until a nice dough is formed. The ratio should be about 2:1 and should be a non-sticky but relatively soft dough. It's pretty forgiving, so this doesn't have to be perfect. Hot water is important however because that will give you the texture you want (or so I was told when I first learned to make it).
• Take a small piece of dough (however big you want your pancake to be) and roll it out as thin as possible. The shape doesn't matter (as you can see below). And it's even okay if you rolled it so thin that there are holes in it.

• Drizzle some oil and rub it in with your hands so that the entire surface is lightly covered, but there are no pools of oil in any one spot. I like to use a combo of vegetable oil and sesame oil. I find that all sesame oil is a bit too strong for my taste, but vegetable oil alone is a bit boring, but really, use what you have and what you like. In fact, lard is probably the best option if you're brave enough to use it! (I'm not)
• Sprinkle on the green onions. Again, it's up to your personal preference how much you like.

• Roll the dough into a long rope. It's okay if oil and onions squish out the sides.
• Next, coil that rope into a circle.

• Using your hands and/or rolling pin to flatten out the pancake to your desired thickness. Some people like super thick pancakes, others like thin ones. Both are perfectly acceptable. You may need to let the dough rest a bit if it's being difficult to work with.

• In a pan, heat up a bit of oil over medium/low heat. Plop your pancake down and let it cook until golden brown, and then flip to crisp the other side. Thicker pancakes will obviously take longer (you might want to put the lid on and turn down the heat so that it doesn't burn before it's cooked through) and thin ones will take less time. Deep frying these is another delicious alternative!

• Cut them into wedges and serve them however you like. My favorite is with a dipping sauce of half black vinegar and half soy sauce, but experiment away to find what you like!

Sa Cha Green Beans and Meat

August was pretty pathetic, huh? Only 3 posts...sorry about that. Things have been busy, and are still busy, but I'll try to be better about posting. And with this post, I only need 3 more to "improve" on last month!

Sa cha sauce is often referred to as Chinese BBQ sauce though it doesn't resemble BBQ in the traditional sense at all. Sa cha is a little spicy, a little smokey, not sweet at all, very unique and very yummy. Typically I like to use Chinese long beans for this dish, but I didn't have any on hand, so I used regular green beans and it still turned out great.

Ingredients:
- 1 tbs cooking oil
- approximately 1 pound of green beans or Chinese long beans
- approximately 1/3 pound of ground pork (or turkey/chicken)
- 1 garlic clove minced
- approximately 1 tbs soy sauce (to taste)
- approximately 2 tbs of sa cha sauce (to taste - I like a lot, so you should probably start with less and add keep adding it to your liking)

Method:
If you're using green beans, clean and cut them into ~1/2" dices. If you're using Chinese long beans, cut them into smaller pieces.

Heat some oil in a pan/wok and add the garlic, ground meat and soy sauce and keep it moving until mostly cooked through.

Add the green beans and sa cha sauce and keep everything moving until it's all cooked through. Taste the dish and add more soy/sa cha according to your preferences and serve over fluffy white rice.