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 :)

Egg Rolls (vietnamese style)

I love egg rolls, especially Vietnamese ones, so when I make my own, I always go for that style.

I've blogged about these before, but last time I baked them. Since fried ones are so much better and you're allowed to indulge during the holidays, I fried them this time. Everything else was pretty much the same.

I made these weeks ahead of time and froze them individually and fried them up the day of and served them with chili sauce. A tasty and easy appetizer for any time of the year!

Ingredients:
- ground pork
- carrots
- onions
- glass noodles (mung bean noodles)
- garlic
- wood ear mushrooms
- fish sauce
- soy sauce
- egg rolls wrappers
- oil (for frying)

Directions:
- Shred the carrots and set aside.
- Finely dice the onions and set aside.
- Mince the garlic and set aside.
- Soak the glass noodles in water until they're pliable (about 15-30 minutes), then cut them into shorter more manageable pieces.
- Soak the wood ear mushrooms until they're soft (hot water will speed this up), then cut it into thin strips.
- Mix everything together, seasoning to taste with soy and fish sauce. You can always fry up a small portion of the filling before wrapping the egg rolls to make sure it tastes good.
- Take a sheet of egg roll wrapper and fill it with a diagonal line of filling and wrap it up.
- You can either fry them immediately or put them in the freezer at this point to fry up at a later date.

Japanese Curry

I had leftover katsu because I figure if I'm gonna make a mess breading and frying stuff, I might as well make extra, right? I also thought I'd mix things up a bit with the extra katsu and make some japanese curry to go with it for Katsu Curry!

In the end, the hubz and I decided we liked the katsu better with the katsu sauce and the curry on it's own over rice. Either way, japanese curry is a winner in my book =)

I'm also going to submit this entry to Joelen's October Tasty Tools event! She's highlighting Dutch Ovens this month and I can't even begin to tell you how much I loooooove my Le Creuset. Even though this dish can technically be made in any old pot, I used my Le Creuset dutch oven for it, so it qualifies for Joelen's event!


Ingredients:
- 2/3 lbs ground meat (other non-ground meat like chicken or beef would be good too)
- 3 carrots peeled and chopped
- 1 onion diced
- 1 tsp minced ginger
- 1 potato diced
- 1 tbs of oil
- 2 tbs of flour
- 1 tsp of curry powder
- water or chicken broth as needed
- 2.5 blocks of S&B Golden Curry (pictured below)


Brown the meat and then remove it from the pot. Or if you're lazy like me, you can add it into the pot after sauteeing the onions and toasting the flour and curry powder.

Heat the oil and add the onions. Sautee until soft.

Add the flour and curry powder and toast until fragrant.

Add the ginger, carrots, potato, the browned meat and water/broth to deglaze the pan and make a sauce.

Add the blocks of curry and stir until melted. Simmer the curry until the vegetables are soft. Keep adding broth/water as needed and to make as much sauce as you'd like. Taste. If it needs, add more curry powder, salt, white pepper, etc as needed.

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.

Mapo Tofu

I bought some szechuan peppercorns and was so excited to use them. Alas, they were weak or imitation peppercorns and just not up to par. I was so disappointed. Szechuan peppercorns are supposed to literally make your tongue numb when you bite into them (usually accidentally since you're not really supposed to eat them). The "Ma" part of mapo tofu actually means "numb". But even without the proper spices, this dish is always a good one.

There are so many ways to make mapo tofu and as usual, I pull my recipes out of my ***, so this is by no means the only or best or traditional way of making it. In fact, almost everytime I make it, I make it a little differently. This is what I put into it this time around....


Ingredients:
- 1 block of soft tofu cut into cubes
- 1/2 pound of ground pork, turkey or chicken
- 1 clove of minced garlic
- 2 tbsp of hot bean paste (if you don't have this, you can use a regular chili paste)
- 1 tbsp soy sauce
- cornstarch slurry (~1-2 tsp cornstarch mixed in a tiny bit of cold water until dissolved)
- 1 tsp ground szechuan peppercorns (optional)
- 1 scallion sliced for garnish (optional)

Direction:
- Heat up your wok/pan and put enough oil in to coat the bottom
- Put the ground meat and the minced garlic and the soy sauce and cook until most of the pink in the meat is gone.
- Add in the tofu, chili paste and peppercorns. Stir gently to avoid breaking the tofu. Taste and adjust accordingly. Sometimes I'll add a bit more chili, salt, or even some sugar, depending on how it tastes.
- The tofu should release some water. If it's pretty dry, feel free to add a bit of water or chicken stock. Then add the cornstarch slurry to thicken the liquid. If it doesn't thicken up immediately, don't worry, it will thicken more after you turn off the heat. Or you can always add more cornstarch slurry. This step is actually completely optional, you'll just get a more watery sauce.
- Add the scallion
- Eat over rice!

Ants crawling up a tree

Yes, that's the literal translation of this Chinese dish. The noodles are trees and the bits of meat are the ants! It was always one of my favorites growing up because it had a silly name and it tasted good!

Anyway, this is a super easy dish to make that I did because I soaked extra bean thread noodles and defrosted extra ground turkey from the eggrolls I made the other day.

You can use any ground meat, I personally prefer pork, turkey or chicken and tend to stay away from beef, although that could work too. You can also add all sorts of veggies/garnishes if you want, along with other seasonings to make variations of it. I made the simplest version below:


Ingredients:
- 1 packet of mung bean thread noodles soaked in water until softened (20 mins)
- 3 oz of ground pork, turkey or chicken
- 1 Tbsp oil
- 2 Tbsp soy sauce (this should actually be to taste and is an estimation)
- water as needed (~1/4 - 1/2 cup)
Optional additions/garnishes:
- scallions
- sesame
- peas
- shredded napa cabbage and/or carrots
- minced garlic
- sugar
- whatever you feel like tossing in
- Sacha sauce (replace half of the soy sauce with this to give it a bit of heat and a unique flavor)


Directions:
- Heat up the wok until it's very hot and then add the oil
- Add the ground meat and half of the soy sauce and use a spatula to cook and break up the meat until mostly cooked
- Put in the noodles, the rest of the soy sauce, and a bit of water
- Toss/Mix the noodles and meat until the the water is absorbed by the noodles. If more water is needed to fully cook the noodles, add it as needed.

Easy peasy!