Posts in Recipes
Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies

For the past five years these have been my go-to cookies to whip up when a sugar craving strikes. And I don't see that changing.

I first made them when I was living in Beijing, where good-tasting butter was only available at the expat supermarkets. After an afternoon of googling, I found a peanut butter cookie recipe that required neither butter nor flour.

I changed up the recipe a bit by using chunky peanut butter instead of smooth. And instead of dropping the dough onto the sheet, I used my hands to compact the dough and make smaller, denser cookies and shortened the baking time by a bit. As a result my cookies came out crunchy, whereas the picture on Cookie Madness made them look soft and chewy.

But...jackpot...these taste almost exactly like the large peanut butter cookies my father used to make at his Cantonese bakery back in Boston. The ones I would scarf down whenever I stopped by, to "visit." And since he hardly ever baked at home, I didn't really learn any of his trade secrets. (Yes, it's true that Chinese folks tend to prefer crunchier cookies, having grown up outside the cult of Nestle Tollhouse.)

Read More
Chinese Barbecued Pork (Char Siu) + Video

For the fourth video in my Chinese cooking video series, I decided to make a family recipe that's also one of the most popular in my new book The Chinese Takeout Cookbook. It's a quick fun video set to American folksy music, a nod to the Chinese cooking culture here in the U.S. dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Enjoy!

Along with wonton noodle soup, char siu (Chinese barbecued pork or Chinese roast pork) is the Cantonese people's greatest contribution to mankind. Really, who can resist slices of half-fatty, half-lean roast pork, crisp and dripping with caramelized juices? (I first posted this recipe for Chinese Barbecued Pork back in February 2009 and it became an instant hit.)

You know those enticing pieces of pork dangling in Chinatown restaurant windows? When you get char siu at a Cantonese restaurant, it will most likely be red from a little food dye, used to attract customers. A small amount of dye isn't harmful (think of all those M&Ms and Skittles you've eaten). But sometimes a restaurant will go overboard. My mother still has nightmares of glowing magenta char siu from Boston's Chinatown.

Read More