I have to admit that I have a strong bias towards jiaozi (饺子). Besides Shanghainese soup dumplings (xiaolongbao), my favorite Chinese dumplings are thin-skinned and pan-fried, the kind found mainly in Southern China or New York's $1-for-5 fried dumpling joints. Northern Chinese-style dumplings, which offer more thick doughy skin than filling, just can't compare.
What's better than anything a restaurant or dumpling stall can offer are homemade jiaozi, hot off the skillet. On my last day in Zhongshan my mother and I bought dumpling skins from a lady specializing in doughy things like wrappers and noodles, and spent an hour or two wrapping dumplings for dinner.
Since I have so many photos from that afternoon, I thought I would do a pictoral guide on jiaozi-making. (Often dumpling recipes fail to show the step-by-step process in folding.) Also included is my mother's fool-proof method for getting perfectly crisp pan-fried dumplings without burning them.
Read MoreThis afternoon, less than 24 hours before hopping on a train to Hong Kong, I was faced with a dilemma. Do I boil some instant ramen noodles and start packing early, to ensure I remember everything and not wait until the last minute? Or do I make myself a good, hearty lunch, while updating my iPod with all the new music and podcasts necessary for a long train ride?
A perpetual procrastinator, I chose the latter.
The plan was to make Kung Pao Chicken (Gongbao Jiding), because that was what I was craving. Then I looked in the fridge and saw a pack of lonely-looking tofu, which would certainly go uneaten before the trip.
Read MoreRemember when I wrote about the kaleidoscope of tofu available in China? Here's a couple I picked up today at the market:
The lighter colored pack is 豆干 (dòu gān), the super firm kind I like to use in dishes like caramelized tofu. The other was new to me, and intrigued me because the name on the packaging: 啤酒肉片 (píjiǔ ròupiàn) literally reads as "Beer Meat Slices." I know the character for "meat" in Chinese can also mean the flesh of any food, from pigs to pineapples to tofu. But the "beer" part I couldn't figure out, since it wasn't listed as one of the ingredients.
Nor did it taste much like beer. Then again, Chinese beers themselves don't taste much like beer. (So either it really was cooked with a Tsingdao-like hop-less concoction, or the marketers were desperately trying to find an appealing name.) Either way, the tofu was fried, and although it didn't taste like beer it had the nice slightly sweet flavor and meaty texture I wanted for noodles with hot bean sauce.
Read MoreMy search for quick vegetarian dishes continues. Going out 3 nights in a row with our vegetarian friends from London has convinced me that while it's a bit inconvenient to go meatless in China, it's not impossible. While I'm not considering becoming a strict vegetarian, my conscience dictates that eating more vegetable and grains and having meat only once or twice a week is better for good ol' planet Earth. (The conscience thing I can blame on Fast Food Nation, this Michael Pollan article, and having lived in gentrified Brooklyn, which probably has the highest concentration of vegetarians outside India and San Francisco.)
Pad See-Ew is a Thai noodle dish that can be made with meat or without. (Some people call it Thai-Chinese, because the technique of stir-frying noodles came from Chinese immigrants.) It's a lot like the Cantonese chow hor fun, with thicker sauce and the addition of egg. I have had it countless times in Thai restaurants, but never thought to make at home until I came across Blazing Hot Wok's recipe from earlier this year. This dish has fewer ingredients than Pad Thai and is easier to make, perfect for those lazy "crap, I'm starving but my fridge is practically empty" days.
If you don't have omnivore guilt like I do, feel free to throw in chicken, pork, even shrimp. BHW emphasizes that the main ingredient is mushroom-flavored soy sauce, which can be found in Chinese markets (I believe Lee Kum Kee) makes one. However, I've found that soaking dry shiitake mushrooms in soy sauce for about an hour, while periodically squeezing the juices out, gives a similar umami effect. If you're using flat rice noodles instead of fresh, soak them for about 20 minutes to soften before stir-frying.
Read MoreWith my computer's hard drive still in malfunction state, and months of work on the verge of being lost forever, I decided to make myself feel better with a mojito. Beer has the reputation of being a drink to drown your sorrows in, maybe in a dim bar with sad, sad music in the background. A mojito is a little sunnier, a "hey, cheer up!" kind of drink.
Incidentally, I just watched Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, about Dorothy Parker and writers of the Algonquin Round Table. Aside from the nice flapper dresses and jazz that always plays in the backdrop of everyday life, I am in love with the twenties because people didn't think anything of having a drink in the afternoon. Even with Prohibition in full swing. If you must spend your afternoon slaving away in front of a typewriter, you might as well have a cocktail to ease tension and writer's block.
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