Dejah

The oven my uncle used in his restaurant was a big square unit that sat at eye level. He'd blanch the ducks with a hot water bath containing honey, star anise, salt, MSG. The ducks were air-dried, then stuffed with a mixture of meen see, star anise, ginger, garlic cloves. Their butts were skewered and tied close so the marinate doesn't ooze out. The ducks were hung vertically on hooks on a rotating rack. They are turning all the while roasting. They always turned out well rounded in colour and flavour. The skin was not crispy, but it had a nice sheen. I have tried to roast mine hanging, but, as with muichoi, my oven is big, but still not big enough to allow the heat to work its magic. Haven't made it for years...oven gets messy, even tho I DO have self -cleaning!

What? Cutlery? You mean you don't bite the head off, suck out the juice, pop the whole shrimp into your mouth, suck the juice off the shell, roll the shrimp around catching the shell with your tongue and teeth to peel the shrimp, spit the shell out, eat the meat? It takes practice. Hubby still uses his fingers. My brother and I are the only ones in the family who eats shrimp in the shell this way.

Cornstarch is like velveting...makes the meat "waht"... Thanks to the poster who gave me the spelling for that word! Welcome to the forum, I_call_the_duck.

" Waht" can be achieved thru' velveting without baking soda. "Chueh" in beef balls is from soda and waterchestnut flour. With the recipe I use from Wei-Chuan series, I use only 1 tsp. of soda in 2 2/3 lbs of meat. We used tenderizer powder (made from papaya extract) on sirloin beef before slicing for stir-fries. Wouldn't soda render tenderloin "mushy" and fall apart as you stir-fry? What is your reasoning behind that?

Yeah, no dialects. Maybe we just post in "standard" Chinese - written ones, the sqaures. Solve the dialect issue. (And scare Dejah away...) ← Careful! I have "friends" in Sacramento!

Fu yu is wonderful with green beans. I loved sweet potato leaves (see yeep) with fu yu...can't get them here.

That's not a problem because the harvesters snack on the chicks as they work.KIDDING!! ← Ba...BA....LUT! (for those of you who remember Desi of I Love Lucy) You bad, Laksa!

Choy poh, as subtitled in an earlier post, is preserved turnip. Please don't be too sensative. In this forum, all we talk about is choy - different Chinese dishes. ← Ok, so choy poh = ham choy

If they use fresh abalone, good quality Korean ginseng, sea cucumber, fa guoo, etc, I wouldn't consider the price excessive, unless 4 people are sharing one rice bowl full. A salad can cost upwards of $10.00 in restaurants...so consider the ingredients in this dish...and the opportunity to watch a buddha jumping over the wall.

GRRRRR Tepee! How could you leave off such an important ingredient!? You KNOW I love cilantro...roots especially. hrzt, try to speak without your HK accent... What is choy poh? To me, this sounds like an elderly Chinese woman with the surname of CHOY. I take exception to being minced!

HmmmI don't know any teochew cooking, but with fish, I would venture to say "add cooking wine"?...or lily buds would go well with this dish...or... garlic?

The fat and the now no-so-crispy skin of siu yoke is perfect as a bed for haum ha! A big bowl of fluffy rice and this stuff.... Drooling yet? Ben?

Brought home a humongous raft of amaranth, which will be flash wokked with haum ha , and a couple of bunches of chrysanthemum greens, which will be cooked with fu yu. The amaranth I grew was small, about the same size as spinach. As Ben mentioned, flash wokked with haum ha is probably the most common way to cook these. Is the Toisanese for chrysanthemum greens "tung how"? If it is, then you can eat my share! Mom loves it, but I can't get it past my nose...and they look so good!

We used to be able to get pomfret - frozen. Now, we get a black variety and I don't care for it. This is really interesting: using dried? salted plums. Is this a typical ingredient in this dish? Would salty plums in brine work the same? The thought of them make my mouth water. Rinsed and slices salted vegetable...is this ham choi? Does this dish have a tangy flavour then, with the salty plum and tomatoes?

My Mom used to make her own lap yuk. I get a craving for them but the kids are not crazy about it. Cooked on top of rice, or stir-fried with taro is our usual method. I enjoy chewing on the rind. It's great when it is still hot, but when it cools off, you could find your teeth (real or false) on the floor! In the winter, when I want comfort food, I make lap mai fan: put lap cheung, lap yuk, lap ngap all on top of the rice and cook! The rice will be full of flavour, and with the collective meat juices, the rice will be a little sticky. Now, if you cook sweet potaotes along with that, toast the rice on the bottom of the pot a little more, mash the sweet potaotes into it, hit it with hot water...scrape it all up and...what a treat! Fan jiew!

Yuki: (1) Do you cut the slit along the long edge of the tofu, or across the long edge of the tofu? (2) Do you use corn starch to dust the tofu, or to dust the fish paste? ← Myself, I dust the inside of the tofu or gua. This acts as "contact glue" between the filling and the cavity. I think if you dust the filling, it would meld into the filling quickly, thus changing the texture rather than acting as glue. Besides, kind of tedious to dust each spoonful before placing it into the tofu?

Guess you'd have to have had a Wimpy Burger to understand the reference. Sorry about that. I just assumed you're being in the UK will have had one of those. I suppose that smacking the meat with the flat side of your cleaver would achieve the same results as my stiring like crazy with my chopsticks or with the plastic paddles of my mixer.

If I pounded the #@&* out of the pork until it is paste like, then I'd lose the desired texture: sticks together but still chopped meat rather than like the Wimpy Burgers of England. God! I remember the first time I ate one of those...pork cardboard. I was happy (THEN, not now) to find McD's had an outlet in London...

Has anybody tried to stuff fish paste on firm tofu? I have not been successful cooking it. The fish paste always separates from the tofu (because the tofu edges are so smooth). What is the trick that would make the fish paste stick to the tofu surface? ← Try dustin g the inside of the tofu with cornstarch. That's a suggestion from some book about stuffing mushrooms.

I have never made these with fish paste, but do make them with a mixture of ground pork, chopped shrimp, minced ginger and cilantro. Sometimes, I omit the sauce and we just dip the triangles in hot sauce.

Definitely not green leafy vegs cooked in the microwave. As you said, blanching and reheating is very convenient. I DO cook veg such as carrots and cauliflower for non-Asian dishes in the microwave. Again, this is more of a steaming process in the microwave rather than dry cooking. If I may ask, muichoi, are you involved in the restaurant biz or an avid, knowledgeable home chef? You've added fresh interest to the forum. Thanks!

You can achieve the crispy and bouncy texture without the baking soda. I do this by using my chopsticks and stiring the mixture vigorously round and round in the bowl after I've added all the seasonings, a little cornstarch, minimal amount of oil and stock or water. This method incorporates air pockets which in turn creates the bouncy texture. I do this with my beef dim sum balls...with my Kitchen-Aid and it produces great results. Have to be careful with the baking soda. If not incorporated well, you could get a bitter tasting morsel. Welcome muichoy. My maiden name was Choy. I have a cousin named Mui Jin...and the poor kid was was always teased and called Jin Mui Choy.

Of course it's a very sensibly Chinese thing to understand that bones and dark chicken meat are the best...but try and convince some people of that is impossible. My half Chinese daughter does not like the texture and taste of dark meat where as my son (of the same mixture ) loves dark meat. I will eat anything! Even breast meat will taste wonderful if it is prepared well...silkened, seasoned and not over-cooked. How many restaurants use only the very finest artisanal raised birds? What are these? You mean like the beef raised in Japan, with beer and massages? How many restaurants can afford to use these and keep prices reasonable?

To prevent yellowing, you must do the cold water bath step. I never blanch my small bok choy or gai lan on the stove. I do it in the microwave while I am cooking the rest of the ingredients. As soon as the timer goes off, I rinse the veg. in a colander under the cold water tap, and top with the stuff from the wok. If I start them too early, I forget about them, THEN they turn yellow. With the large bok choy, I just cut them into bite-size pieces and cook them a little longer in the wok with broth. The leaves are thrown in when the stalk is nearly done. I am like Tepee when it comes to gai lan Shanghai bok choy. I like to arrange them even when I don't have compnay.

I think you'd get more of the garlic flavour if you tossed the blanched bok choy in the pan with the garlic, oil and salt.