Dejah

sheetz: You are much more ambitious than I! The layers look perfect. Maybe some day, even I can produce that! If you can get some whole plums in brine, try steaming spareribs with meen see sauce and a few mashed plums on top. Saltyilicious! Ben Sook: My kitchen is always ready to feed you. Bruce: I loved the way you described my food! I never gave thought to combinations - I just did. Thanks to you, I'll have to pay attention now.

Finally, time to sit down, process and post some pictures from our Sunday dinner: The "mess in my place": Clockwise from high noon: chicken, vegetable medly and special BBQ sauce for hot plate, pickerel with dow see, ginger and green onions for the steamer, appetizer platter with baked curry chicken in puff pastry, shrimp chips and spring rolls ready for deepfrying, steamed gai lan. Spring rolls, curry chicken, and papaya: I could never make the same dipping sauce as Vietnamese restaurants, so I just threw together some fish sauce, seasoned sushi vinegar , chopped mint and ground white pepper. It was surprisingly good. Just like doing perfect french fries, this is the "first fry" for the ginger beef: The ginger beef after the "second fry" and tossed with the spicy ginger sauce. I deep-fried some fine threads of gingerr and toss them on top. The leftover scallops. I was a bit late with the trigger finger. These Sechuan salt and pepper shrimps were great! I'm trying to remember who posted the recipe for them. They were tossed with rice flour and 5-spice powder. Texture was wonderful - like glass shrimp. I don't care for Sechuan peppercorns, so I just used 4-peppercorn spice and roasted sea salt on top. And finally, chicken hot plate with BBQ sauce. When I poured the sauce on top, there was a huge column of smoke - delicious smelling smoke! On the lower portion, you can catch a glimpse of the hot'n'sour soup. The round white dish at the top was the pickerel that I didn't get a picture of. We had Tsingtao beer, Pinot Grigio, and a Placido Chianti throughout the dinner and evening. Dessert was mango pudding.

Looks and sounds like you "kicked it up another notch!" Went out to our "farm house" for the afternoon, so supper was a throw together of leftover fresh chicken stir-fried with lots of Spanish onion, chopped up chilis and curry powder. Vegetable was steamed gailan finished with a drizzle of sesame oil. No rice as I had high fibre WASA biscuits with cheese for a snack. I need time to process my Sunday dinner pictures.

Dejah, there is a recipe for bao in In the Vietnamese Kitchen, but the dough does not call for yeast, just baking powder for leavening (and it also calls for milk). I'm interested to hear about any experiences with this dough. The Chinese bao dough I've made calls for yeast. ← Susan: Before I found bao mix, I used an old recipe from my Mom. It too had flour, baking powder, sugar and milk in the mix. It made beautiful fluffy baos, and tasted great IF the baking powder was mixed in well. I have never used the recipe with yeast, although one of my Chinese cooks did with the baked char siu bao. My customers preferred the steamed ones, so I never got into baking them again. The bao mix that I buy now has baking powder mixed into it. Again, just milk and sugar are added. I use my KitchenAid and it doesn't take long, especially with my trusty old tortilla press. But then, to make from scratch doesn't take long either - just a matter of convenience.

Yum! Bruce! Any leftover char siu for baos?

Say" Mmmmm yeet ", and Gastro can shoot back at the offensive server and say" "Chee seen ah."

Found the recipe for gima wu in Grace Young's Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen. She said to use rice flour and NOT glutinous rice flour (nor mai fun). Sorry if I screwed up anyone's attempt. If you need the recipe, PM me and I can send it to you.

Short and direct: Point to the item and say" Sun seen mah?" - fresh? in Cantonese.

Wow! Gastro Mui. That's 4 hours of simmering for 1/4" x 1/2" slices. I'd be interested to know if the meat end up as slices.

The techniquee in cooking mung bean noodles and sweet potato noodles are very different, so be aware.

They look pretty thick for fun see. Could they be the Korean style sweet potato or potato starch noodles for chap chae?

Thanks, XiaoLing. I do sometimes make my own dough, and they seem to be the best when I use cake flour instead of all purpose. This time, for convience sake, I used a pre-mix bao flour. I always worry when the baking powder is not mixed in throughly, and I can taste the bitterness. Makes my tongue curl. My trusty old cast iron tortilla makes perfect circles, and cupcake liners are more convenient than cutting squares of wax/parchment paper.

Wonderful blog, Doddie. I enjoyed every picture and morsel. One final question: Is Bill Senior of Asian descent? I will definitely make restaurant scrambled eggs from now on!

Company's coming tomorrow! Busy, busy here tonight: Per requests: hot'n'sour soup; spring rolls; chicken, sweet peppers, onion, and tomatoes in Soo's BBQ sauce hot plate; crispy ginger beef. My choices: pickerel steamed with dow see, ginger and scallions; seared scallops and gai lan; rice; and mango pudding for dessert. I should never ask if guests have requests.

Mmmm... I could live off of dumplings and pastries. ← OK, then here's some pastry for you, sheetz. The first one is more Middle East, I suppose: ground lamb, cumin, chili peppers, etc in filo pastry baked in the oven. Inga and I did these yesterday. The filling: Rolled up and baked. Would the sesame seeds on top make it ok to be in the Chinese forum? My Mom was wanting chicken baos. The filling has both dark and white meat, Chinese mushrooms, onion, and lap cheung, and a touch of oyster sauce. The filling: hard to keep people's fingers from scooping up dollops while it was cooling! The bao:

Are you ready to make it jtnippon? Cooking tendons takes 2 to 3 hours. I remember that you wouldn't want to spend over 10 minutes to make jook. Here is one way to make it. Same procedure, just use beef tendon instead of beef shank: Beef Shank Braised with Five Spice and Soy Sauce (五香牛腱) ← I think we need to have "project" in here to explain - even for jook. I saw a post from him in another forum. What would he do with sheetz's nor mai gai?

Dejah - here's the actual page where I wrote it 29 years ago. Yes, I still have the notebook. ← Thank you, Doddie. That's excellent.

My Icelandic friend Inga and I had a cook-in all afternoon! We made a variety of dishes: spiced ground lamb in filo pastry, Chinese curry chicken in puff pastry, chicken and ginger potstickers, and hor mok talay - "Elsewhere" fish mousse. In between every item, we "cleansed" our palate with delighful papaya. This fruit is supposed to help with digestion, but I'm still feeling quite bloated. This was the first time I made potstickers with commercial dumpling wrappers. They are small compared to when I used to make my own wrappers. The filling was diced chicken, ginger slivers, Spanish onion, and a bit of oyster sauce. I stir-fried this first, cooled it, then made the potstickers. They were very good! Sorry no pictures. Hubby had the camera at work.

This is a wonderful virtual tour, Doddie, of the food and sights in and around your home. Any chance we could see your first published poem? I'm sure it is on topic as you wrote it at your Mom's burger stall.

Sadly, this is why it's so hard for me to find a place to eat this. The taste of it makes me cringe for some reason, just the way a piece of pork fat would. Yes, you may strip me off my eGullet membership now. I don't think you usually fry the yam cake this way. What my family does is slice it and panfry--crispy edges! ← What makes you cringe? The texture of the cake or the minced preserved radish? If it's the latter, you can leave it out if there are lots of other ingredients. My family is like yours, MLI. We've never cut it up into chunks then stir-fried. We've sliced and panfried for the crispiness.

Cruellers cut into rings so they can get globs of jook inside; diced pei dan; slivers of preserved chili radish; and cilantro! Kids must have pork silk, cruellers. Grandson likes siu mai in his. Smart boy - meat eater!

Doddie: You mentioned in your introduction that you are a writer. Can you expand on that - or did I miss that particular post?

Huh...you young'uns are teaching this old dog new tricks. Thank you! But, to be honest, I don't think I'll ever learn to control my "lieu hand" - so my taro or turnip cake will always fall apart if I try to stir-fry the slices!

I think I've had something similar. It was just plain white turnip cake cut into long pieces (like fat fries) and stir fried with scrambled egg and green onions. ← Really? Must be quite a bit of rice flour in it to make it very firm. Am I missing out on something special?

Taro and turnip cakes are just that - cakes/goh. They are not ingredients to be cooked into another dish. It accompanies other dishes - as part of dim sum or as a snack. There are so many flavours in these cakes : doong goo, lap cheung, har mai, some even put in oyster sauce and cooking wine. If you try to "stir-fry it in with other ingredients, it would just crumble.