Sichuan eggplant is the perfect vegetarian entree or side dish for anyone who likes earthy, garlicky, and spicy flavors.
Read More
I made an easier version of ginger milk tea that involves no frothing in the blender.
Read MoreWhen I first started cooking with quinoa in 2008, I was living in Beijing and needed a change from the noodles and rice that I was eating every day. Quinoa had just started to be widely covered in magazines and food blogs, but wasn't virtually impossible to find in Beijing.
I finally found organic quinoa at a supermarket for expats from a company called Green Dot Dot based in Hong Kong. Quinoa's appearance and fluffy texture reminded me of couscous, but the ease of cooking made it as convenient as rice. Having read that it was a good source for lysine, magnesium, and iron, I decided to make a prepare it for lunch one day, with some black beans, shallots, toasted cumin, and cherry tomatoes. The combination somehow stuck, and with minor tweaks, I began making it regularly for lunch.
Flash forward to 2013 in New York, and I'm still making this exact quinoa dish as a g0-to easy lunch. There's an interesting textural mix of slightly crunchy quinoa, soft black beans, and juicy cherry tomatoes, punctuated by the alluring scent of lightly cooked shallots with cumin. It's gently spiced but flavorful, light but filling, exactly what I need in the middle of the day with an afternoon of work still ahead.
The recipe works for red quinoa as well as regular quinoa. And now I can just pick up my quinoa at Trader Joe's a short subway ride away, instead of searching all over Beijing.
Read More
I love it when recipe ideas spring out of casual conversation. Last weekend, when meeting up with my friends Melissa and Jon, they mentioned they had been making the Kung Pao Chicken from my cookbook on a regular basis. And even using the sauce for stir-frying other things, like brussels sprouts.
Kung Pao Brussels Sprouts? What a genius idea. Why hadn't I thought of that before? Every time I have a craving for brussels sprouts, which is often, my MO is to just roast them in the oven with a bit of olive oil, salt, and pepper. I never thought to give them the Sichuan treatment. But it seemed perfect: the crispiness of roasted brussels sprouts would go so well with the tangy-savory sauce, the chilis, and crunchy peanuts.
I started off by roasting the brussels sprouts in the oven for about 20 minutes. Then I stir-fried the dried red chilis, scallions, ginger, and garlic like I would for kung pao chicken. The sauce had to be adjusted just a bit, to account for not needing to marinate the main ingredient. The brussels sprouts got tossed into the pan at the very end, for only about 1 minute or less, just long enough to coat them with sauce and the peanuts. The result is perfectly cooked brussels sprouts with beautifully golden and crispy outsides, accented with an addictive kung pao sauce.
Read MoreLove egg drop soup? For the second video in the new Appetite for China Cooking Videos series, I decided to update this post with a fun visual guide on making egg drop soup with tomatoes. Let me know what you think!
I first made tomato egg drop soup in 2008 while living in Beijing during the Summer Olympics. At the time, I was in desperate need of something light and healthy for lunch to go with a salad, to counteract all the fried food I had been eating at the Olympic venues. And what could be more healthy and comforting at the same time than tomatoes and eggs in homemade chicken broth? Over the years I've tweaked the recipe bit by bit and come up with this revised version.
There are few ingredients in this soup, so it's important that the chicken stock (or vegetable stock) be homemade. (You can use either Chinese or Western homemade stock.) If you must use store-bought, try to find organic stock or broth that does not have too many preservatives in the label.
Read MoreHave you ever had Chinese-style baked stuffed mushrooms? When I was growing up, it was a popular appetizer at Chinese and tiki restaurants my family frequented. Usually filled with a sesame-accented pork filling that became caramelized in the oven, these bite-sized morsels were hard to resist.
With February designated as National Snack Food month, I decided to create a similar dish using Soy Vay® Veri Veri Teriyaki sauce, a thick flavorful sauce with plenty of sesame oil and sesame seeds. (I started my partnership with Soy Vay last month and have been experimenting with a few of their sauces.) Instead of pork, I decided to use ground chicken as a mushroom filling. For the flavoring, I just added minced ginger, scallions, and the Veri Veri Teriyaki sauce. You simply mix together the filling, fill up the mushroom caps, brush on a little olive oil, and sprinkle extra sesame seeds on top. Then the stuffed mushrooms bake in the oven for just 20 minutes.
The mushrooms make for tasty hor d’oeuvres for parties or just a side dish at dinner. You can also mix the filling and stuff the mushrooms ahead of time, and just pop them in the oven before serving. To test the seasoning of the meat mixture, just sauté a small bit of the filling in a skillet, and adjust accordingly with salt and pepper.
Read More
Chinese marbled tea eggs are super easy to make at home and the aromas of tea, cinnamon, and star anise are intoxicating.
Read MoreHappy Chinese New Year!
The holiday has sort of snuck up on me, actually. I've spent the past two months in such a whirlwind of book promotion and other events, including speaking on a panel at the Roger Smith Cookbook Conference this past weekend, that February 10th was here before I knew it. Other than planning the Chinese New Year Virtual Potluck on this blog (which all you food bloggers should join!), I hadn't had a chance to plan ahead for the first few days of the New Year.
Luckily, there are still 12 days left to plan a big dim sum outing or dinner. In the mean time, I still like to cook Chinese as much as possible, though leaning toward the simpler dishes.
Like this Chinese Walnut Chicken. There are two versions of walnut chicken you might be familiar with, a stir-fry with a very light but flavorful sauce and one with a white creamy sauce made out of mayonnaise or sweetened condensed milk. This is the former, which I actually prefer, because you can actually taste the chicken and the sauce doesn't make you feel weighed down.
Read MoreWeekday breakfasts are a complicated matter.
I am not the sort of person who can have cereal, oatmeal, or toast every single day of the year, as great as they are for folks like me who are married to their computers. Sure, I’ll go through week-long spells of eating one of the aforementioned foods. But then I get bored and move on to the next, and the next, until the cycle repeats itself. Every once in a while (too often, actually), I’ll break down and buy a bagel. But alas, one can’t do that every single day, especially with the amount of cream cheese New York bagel shops typically slather on.
Lately, I’ve gotten back into baking. And hopefully this will solve my breakfast dilemma. My goal is to bake at least one new (healthy-ish) breakfast item a week that can last me 3 or 4 mornings. Then maybe cereal and oatmeal won’t seem so boring after all.
First up is zucchini bread, something we’ve adored in the US since the 1960s. I had been craving zucchini bread since Saturday, when my friend Amy told me she made a loaf to get her vegetable-phobic husband to eat something green. (He ended up loving it.) And I had been wanting to try out a bookmarked zucchini bread recipe from The American Century Cookbook. The author got the recipe in the 1970s from an Illinois woman she interviewed for Family Circle magazine. “This was my first encounter with zucchini bread but by no means my last,” the author wrote. “I have been offered zucchini bread recipes by cooks from all over the country but have yet to find a finer one.”
Read MoreRed-cooked beef is one of those dishes that is just made for the winter. This Chinese beef stew — made by simmering well-marbled beef in a combination of soy sauce, cinnamon, star anise, tangerine peel, and chilies — is as aromatic and delicious as it sounds.
Plus, the bubbling action and warmth in the kitchen while you make this dish is a huge plus when it's 19 degrees F out and your radiator isn't working as well as it should.
Some of you may have tried making red-cooked pork before from this site. My method for red-cooked beef is similar, with some key differences. One big difference is the addition of dried tangerine peel. You can choose to include it or not, but I find that orange flavors pair so well with beef, and adds such a wonderful citrus fragrance to the stew, that I can't pass it up.
You can buy tangerine peel in any Chinese market, but it's also easy to make your own at home. Just peel a tangerine (reserving the insides for a snack!), rip the peel into large pieces, and keep the pieces on a windowsill or another cool, dry spot for 2 to 3 days. Or, to dry the peels on short notice, bake the peels in a 200 degree F oven for about 60 to 70 minutes, until they dry up and look like the peels in the photo above.
Read MoreI was born in July, dead-smack in the middle of summer, and frequently use it as an excuse for absolutely hating cold weather. "But you're from Boston," my friends would remark, "You should be used to the cold."
Well, it's the one part of me that never got New England-ified (that and total disinterest in the Red Sox.) Despite spending most of my life in cold northern climates, I somehow never got used to frigid weather. In winter, I'm usually much more bundled up than anyone around me. In the summer, even during heat waves, I'm the girl who takes a cardigan everywhere, just in case there's air-conditioning on overdrive somewhere in the city. I take hot showers as soon as it dips below 80 degrees.
The only thing comforting about the colder seasons is the food. Or more specifically, big bubbling pots of soup.
Recently I made a big pot of orange-scented lentil soup out of Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table. I've made lentil soup hundreds of times in various forms, but have never thought to put orange peels to add a nice citrus aroma. I had to add a bit more orange peel and coriander than the recipe suggested to get the light citrus scent, but it was a nice change from the lentil soup I usually make.
Read MoreRegular readers of this blog may know that I make braised chicken as often as I can. Fortunately most cuisines around the world — including some of my favorites like Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino — have at least one or two braised chicken dishes that have starring roles.
Today we'll look at Country Captain, a southern braised chicken dish that may or may not have had Indian origins.
As one story goes, this dish of chicken slow-cooked in tomato sauce and curry came from Savannah, Georgia, a major shipping port for the spice trade. It was rumored that a British sea captain who arrived from Bengal, India, introduced it around Savannah. The spiced tender chicken, with some almonds for crunch and currants for sweetness, became a dish synonymous with the Lowcountry cooking of Georgia.
Then there are others who vehemently argue that it actually originated in Charleston, South Carolina, another spice trade port.
However, according to the New York Times, long-time food columnist Molly O'Neill had actually traced the dish back to the mid-1800s Philadelphia. How it migrated south and stayed there is anyone's guess.
Read More
Known as "gua bao" in Taiwan, these buns feature pork belly that has been braised in an aromatic mixture of soy sauce, rice wine, homemade stock, cinnamon, star anise, chilies, and Sichuan pepper.
Read MoreAs an over-consumer of food magazines and Pinterest images, I've come to miss the cookie and cake pictures this month.
Now that the holidays are over, it seems like many of us have taken a hiatus from baking. January is supposedly the time for salads and soups and juice cleanses, right? At least, that's what all the cooking magazines are telling me.
And healthy-eating-wise, I've been doing okay so far. I don't get bagels with cream cheese or pizza slices three or four times a week anymore. But the baking? No no no. It's so impossible to ween myself off it that I'm not even going to try.
Green tea pound cake is one of those foods that just has a lovely sound to it. It's fragrant, light, complex, yet indulgent at the same time. As for this particular cake, the texture is nice and buttery like a pound cake should be, but also airy and doesn't make you feel weighed down, even after a eating a few slices more than you should.
Read More