Cold sesame noodles are essential for the summer. My signature sauce blends tahini and peanut butter for the perfect texture and flavor balance.
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Cantonese tomato beef, a Hong Kong classic, is great for nights when you need a fast dinner.
Read MoreI am sitting here writing this blog post in 100 degree (!!!) weather. The apartment I'm moving out of has no air conditioning, and all I have to prevent myself from melting is a fan and a hibiscus mojito. We hardly had a spring (at least here in New York), but summer came in full force!
A few years ago while living in China, mojitos became my de facto drink for cooling off during the muggy summers in Beijing and Shanghai. The main reason, other than the fact that mojitos are delicious, was that Bacardi rum seemed to be the only liquor that wasn't outrageously more expensive than it is in the U.S. Don't ask me why. When I traveled down south to Macau I could cool off with all the vinho verde I wanted, but up north in China, rum cocktails were the only good drinks I could have that didn't break the bank. So when I found a great gigantic tea market on the outskirts of Beijing, I bought hibiscus tea in bulk and made hibiscus mojitos every week.
Read MoreBack when I made black pepper beef in Beijing, flank steak was surprisingly difficult to find. Sure, black pepper beef is more of a Cantonese stir-fry, and the Chinese eat pork way more than beef, but somehow I just didn't expect to have to buy all my flank steak at a gourmet market for expats. Luckily, now I'm back in Brooklyn and living within walking distance of at least five big grocery stores, all of which have flank steak in abundance.
Over the years I've altered my recipe (first published July 27, 2008) to include ground black pepper in the sauce instead of the marinade, so the flavor is now more pronounced. The proportions of the sauce ingredients have also been updated; this sauce has less sodium, less sugar, less oil, but still maintains plenty of flavor. Try it out and let me know what you think!
Flank steak is something I hardly ever cook in China, mostly because I am almost never in the vicinity of a good butcher. But last weekend, I decided to treat myself to a massage to help with a sore back. Walking out blissful and somewhat painfree, I realized I was near Boucherie Michel, the only place in town where I could find quality cuts of meat and imported cheeses and wine and pricey organic food. (How I miss the days when I could pop down to the Fairway in West Harlem for all my grocery needs.)
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Really, who can resist juicy chicken wings braised in a bath of soy sauce, garlic, cinnamon, and star anise?
Read MorePork salad! If these two words make you perk up at your desk, please read on.
[But before I begin, an apology first to anyone who has used the "Contact Me" form in the past couple of months. It had been broken for a while before a vigilant reader got a hold of me through Facebook and I realized this error. (And I've always wondered, when using contact forms myself on other websites over the years, if messages just disappeared into a black hole because of coding errors.) So I got rid of the form, but still want to hear from you guys! From now on, just email me at appetiteforchina (at) gmail (dot) com with any questions or comments.]
Now on to the salad. I first learned how to make larb mu (also spelled laap mu, larb moo, laap moo, etc.) from my friend Sandra, who taught cooking classes with me at the Hutong in Beijing. When we met, she already had already built an impressive globetrotting life, having lived and worked (mostly for NGOs) in Haiti, Vietnam, Taiwan, and mainland China, with Afghanistan soon to follow. In her spare time she made a habit of sniffing out the best local restaurants and street food wherever she was, and developed a ravenous curiosity for ingredients and techniques. Lucky for me, she had also spent a good amount of time traveling in Thailand and Laos, where this salad comes from (it originated in Laos and spread to Northern Thailand). After Sandra taught her Thai cooking class at the Hutong and made 4 pounds' worth of larb mu, I couldn't stop talking about the salad for weeks.
Over the years it's become an standby for whenever I crave Northern Thai food and want it fast.
Read MoreThese days, over the course of a typical week, I bring home and cook about five pounds of meat and seafood. This may not seem like much for a family of four, but when you're one person testing and retesting full recipes for a cookbook, it amounts to a lot of carnivorous consumption a week. (Leftovers, of course, are cheerfully shared.)
Meat is great and all, but sometimes you just crave vegetables for a meal.
It's not that my cookbook has no vegetarian recipes, but as far as Chinese food goes, almost all of the most beloved dishes involve meat or seafood in some form or another. In both China and the US, all-vegetable soups often have a base of pork or chicken stock. Vegetarian stir-fries and tofu dishes sometimes have dried shrimp or ground pork as flavor enhancers. The only vegetarians you are likely to find in China are Buddhist monks.
Read MoreAlmost every omnivore in the U.S. goes wild for chicken wings. Juicy meat, glistening skin that can be roasted, grilled or fried...what's not to love? Yet very few of us seem to feel the same about chicken thighs or chicken legs. Last July, when every store in my Brooklyn neighbordhood was out of chicken wings, I had no trouble finding abundant supplies of fresh, organic chicken legs for less than $2 a pound.
A recent article in Slate about the U.S. needing new markets for exporting dark chicken meat made me ponder (again) why we are a nation of wings and chicken breast lovers who toss or export the rest of the bird. You can't find more polar opposites, as far as chicken parts go, than wings and chicken breast. One is all skin and rich dark meat that oozes flavor, the other is lean and frankly, rather bland on its own.
While I like chicken breast in chicken noodle soup and somestir-fries, it's rather boring compared with dark meat and shines only when paired with tastier ingredients. You can't just rub a skinless chicken breast with olive oil and pepper and salt, stick it in the oven, and call it good.
Read MoreI've been on a spicy food kick lately, more than usual, mostly from recipe testing for my cookbook. Many of my meals end up being all heat, such as dan dan noodles and spicy stir-fried shrimp with a dollop of kimchi on the side (I keep a jar in the fridge just to satisfy kimchi cravings, not for recipe testing). But, I rationalize, the more spicy food you eat, the more tolerance for spicy food you build up. So I'm actually bettering myself every day. And that's what January is all about.
Two weeks ago I found myself needing chili oil, on one of those snowy, slushy, windy days that we in the Northeast have been seeing too many of. Chinatown and Sunset Park were too far just for one item, and for some reason neither of the two supermarkets by my apartment had chili oil in stock. I've previously made chili oil in small batches just to use for a specific meal, but decided it would be as good a time as any to make enough for a bottle.
So here's a recipe to try if you, like me, can't find chili oil near your house or just want to have the good homemade stuff without any preservatives. You'll need just 3 ingredients: some peanut oil, sesame oil, and dried red chili flakes (or chopped dried red peppers). You'll also need an oil thermometer (if you have a candy/oil thermometer, you're golden) and a small, heavy-bottomed pot or pan. I use about a third of a cup of dried red chili flakes, which makes a medium-spicy oil that takes a second for your tongue to register, but feel free to adjust the amount to your liking.
Read MoreSlow-cooking meat in a nice enamelled cast iron Dutch oven is a pretty sublime experience. I've done my fair share of braising in metal pots, woks, Crock-Pots, and even sauté pans, but really, nothing compares to the ease of searing and stewing everything in the same pot, and one that needs minimal heat to stay bubbling hot. When most of your favorite dishes (boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin, chicken adobo, red-cooked pork) are braises or stews, you start salivating over the Le Creusets and Staubs upon entering any kitchen supply store.
I've used Le Creusets a good number of times when teaching at cooking schools, but hadn't actually own a proper Dutch oven until now. This Christmas I received a lovely red Staub "cocotte" from my chief taste tester/bf and have been using it as much as possible. (A great present, by the way, for someone craves chicken adobo every other day and can make it in her sleep.)
Read MoreMy bookcase is resembling the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It's not a very sturdy piece of furniture to begin with, and under the weight of all my cookbooks it has begun to lean more and more to the left, about an 1/8 of an inch each day for the past week. There's probably a loose screw in the back. Every time I remove a book or put one back on the shelf, it makes a creak that says "I'm going to topple at any second". Either I buy a new bookcase, stat, or stop purchasing cookbooks.
Buying a new bookcase was the easier option. While I wait for a new bookcase to be delivered (a nice sturdy mahogany one), I've had to momentarily suspend cookbook buying. Unfortunately, because the Brooklyn Public Library does such a good job of stocking up on newish tomes, my piles continue to grow.
Thanks to the library, my favorite cookbook discovery from the past month was actually published in 2008. And it's not Chinese.
Read MoreI can't believe that we are already almost halfway into October. Where did the September go? For that matter, where did the entire summer go? It seemed like only yesterday that I had been busy bookmarking summer concerts and looking forward to beach trips and lazy days in the park, most of which did not materialize. (This summer I did, however, finally discover Arrested Development, and spent a good many 100-degree weekend days with the Netflix instant queue, a powerful fan, and an icy gin & tonic.) Yes, in general, the summer seemed to have flown by.
To be fair, many of my waking hours this summer had been devoted to not only side editing projects but also something pretty big and exciting. So I apologize for having been somewhat absent on the site. But the absence has been for a good reason and I can't wait to share the news with everyone in the coming weeks. And postings will definitely become more frequent again.
Read MoreEver gone apple-picking on a 90-degree day? Last weekend probably had the last of such summery temperatures until next June. But instead of lounging on the beach, I was at the apple orchard helping to pick about 30 pounds of crisp, earlyish-in-the-season apples. Signs of fall weren't completely missing: on the drive up the Hudson from New York, I spotted abut one in 30 trees with a vibrant red or orange hue.
The cool weather on the radar for this week (and my insatiable craving for appley desserts) is probably a good sign that it had been the perfect time to go apple-picking.
What does one end up doing with 30 pounds of apples? Apple bread, apple fritters, and apple cookies were all cranked out this weekend. In lieu of apple pie, we attempted apple pandowdy (which, I was reminded, is in the lyrics of an oldies hit.) For something savory, I decided to try apple dumplings.
Read MoreAugust is the beginning of eggplant season in the Northeast, so this is as good a time as any to indulge in my favorite plump vegetable.
When I was living in Beijing and teaching Sichuan cooking classes, one of the recipes that became a regular part of the curriculum was Fish-Fragrant Eggplant. Most students were indifferent to eggplant until they tried making this particular dish. The eggplant is cut into thick slices, stir-fried, then braised in a mouth-tingling Sichuan pepper and chili bean sauce. It's one of the few hearty main dishes in Chinese cuisine that's completely vegetarian (well, if you subtitute chicken stock with vegetable stock.)
This eggplant dish I'm posting today doesn't even pretend to be vegetarian. It's more Hunan-style, and uses chopped bacon to flavor the sauce. (You can also use ground pork.) In Hunan, it's more common to see eggplant deep-fried. However, I find that with deep-frying, the eggplant gets way too soggy a day later. This is an important consideration if you're cooking for one and end up with a ton of leftovers. Plus, there is no point in wasting a couple liters of oil.
Read MoreMost sane people keep a drawer full of delivery menus for the sole purpose of...ordering delivery. I too have a menu drawer, but can count on two hands the number of times I have actually ordered delivery in the past few years.
Call me a bad New Yorker. I'm pretty good with picking up takeout while out somewhere, but dialing from home is another story. Being so dangerously close to the kitchen, I usually wind up studying the menu for half an hour, choosing an entree, then deciding, screw this, I can make the same dish, except way better.
This hubris usually leads me to spend another couple of hours ransacking my cabinets, schlepping to the grocery store, figuring out a strategy, then executing it. Even if it is already past 9pm and I'm starving. Sure, it would have been easier and about 1 hour and 50 minutes faster to just call the damn Golden Panda Dynasty, but definitely not as satisfying. Or so I tell myself.
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