Dejah

In my mind, it's not so much in the taste as knowing the inherent qualities in a food. However, some foods with a bitter taste, such as bitter melon, would be considered yin - (leung)cooling tonic. Nuts, especially roasted chestnuts, pistachios,peanuts would be yang - (yeet hay - gawn) if you eat too many of these. Sometimes, you need a combination of foods: such as ham jeu tow and tofu soup for lowering fever, dong gwa with the peel on and dried oysters for when you have yeet hay... Whether there are other food groups where the taste would indicate yin/yang, I don't know.

Omit the lettuce, tomato and mayo, toast the bread and that's a Denver or Western sandwich when I make it at home. In a restaurant, that patty would be egg, diced onion, bacon or ham. Gotta have ketsup to dip the sandwich in!

I am having a hard time visualizing oil at a "rapid boil"and deep frying egg foo yung. So, this method would be more like fritters?

Perhaps Dejah knows this better than I, but when they are deep fried, the oil is boiling and a ladle of mix is carefully tipped into the oil and then the ladle is used to immediately splash (or pour) the hot oil on the top surface so as to harden the top before turning. I guess some restaurants also pan fry them. ← jo-mel: We didn't deep fry the egg foo yung. The western style was always done on the grill, and the Cantonese style was done in the wok.

I'm impressed! You make ja gwai for congee! I tried it once and decided it was much better and easier to buy them ready made. 1.5 hours is enough for congee if you are in a hurry - and you have stock on hand. I have used store bought stock - Campbell's Chicken stock - and it turns out well. My s-i-l on the other hand, uses her rice cooker and puts the congee on at night before she goes to bed.

With the omeletes, as Ben Sook prefers to call 'em, we'd stir-fry up an order of "chop suey" - shredded cabbage, onion, celery, mushrooms, bean sprouts, then add it (no liquid) to 3 eggs with a tsp. of cornstarch beaten into it. This helped the omeletes hold its shape when we put the mixture onto the grill. The shallow Chinese soup ladle used was the perfect size for each of the 5 patties for each order. The gravy was made with the flour roux because it held up better than the cornstarch thickened method, which would turn watery if it sits for any length of time. The gravy was kept hot in a double boiler on the stove. We didn't have the luxury of making gravy for each order that came in.

I made a roux with flour and oil from the deep fryer - the one used for cooking breaded meats. To this, I added stock, water, seasonings and soya sauce for colour. Always made a big potful in the morning, for the egg foo yung or boneless almond chicken. This stuff was good. Customers were never able to duplicate it 'cos they didn't have the same oil as I did. I didn't mean to say there was anything wrong with the bean sprouty pucks. I love eggs and bean sprouts!

Gravy is not part of this dish in my experience. I called this Cantonese Egg Foo Yung on our menu. Sometimes I add diced BBQ pork and baby shrimps. Then it was the "Deluxe" one: add $2.00. Brown gravy was typically served with BarbaraY's "bean sprouty hockey pucks!"

What he means is, " I don't know the characters!!" and, neither do I. However, Ah Leung is well on his way to fulfilling your request, Susan.

Oh, I know the alcohol boils off; it's the flavour I was thinking about... Perhaps you can rename it as Drunken congee!

If I am being questioned, I just say, " Po-Po said so." I don't really think about what my body needs, I just feel it when I need to make a specific tong. Must be all the years of "indoctrination" through the generations. Po-Po is 97.5 and healthy as could be, so the "old ways" must work!

1 cup of wine??!! (Dejah staggers back to bed)

It's even better with diced lap cheung, diced onions and peas! And, we like to eat it dipped in sweet hot chili sauce.

And it doesn't matter that I myself am a granny, MY Mom has been bouncing my "yin and yang" around for the last week. One more week of Po-Po sitting and I should be young and healthy like Gastro, tepee, I_Call_the_Duck.......................... Just pulled out a book from my shelves: The Chinese System of Using Foods to Stay Young by Henry C. Lu., Sterling Publishing Co., Inc. New York ISBN 0-0869-9460-6, 1996. It's never been opened because I have a "living book" close to home. It discusses Chinese food remedies, deficiency and excess diseases, energy Tonic foods, blood tonic foods, Yin Tonic foods, Yang tonic foods. There are chapters on foods for eleminating toxic heat, damp heat, sputum. The final sections deal with getting to know your system and how to correct your weaknesses.

These were available around Dec. - plump and juicy. I sit and peel them for my grandson as we watch TV - brings back fond memories of MY Po-Po doing the same thing for me in Hong Kong, as we ride the trams on a warm evening. Right now, we have dragon eyes (loong gnan). I don't eat as many of these as I do lychees. Neither causes any disharmony to my body.

Please send ASAP FedEx so I don't have to make it myself for Po-Po. Sorry, Tepee. He's already calling me Dai Ga Jeah, so you must be...niece...or, I suppose you COULD be Mui Mui. But then, you'd always get the drumsticks!

Not at all. A bit of ketchup is what I use all the time. And I am authentically Chinese. ← Funny thing, a while back, I was making tomato/beef for supper at Po-Po's. I was about to add some ketsup as she had shown me years ago. This time, she stopped me and said "No, No. Don't add ketsup!". I swear she changes her mind each time she catches me cooking...just to keep me off balance. Now, I just use vinegar and sugar. Next time, she may tell me to add ketsup.

Yes. Ah Leung, Silow: Great job! I think I'll attempt this next weekend as a surprise for Po-Po. I just picked up a new jar of nam yu in anticipation of this pictorial. We can get small chickens, but usually 2-3 lbs. I'll need to do 3 for my family... Mizducky: Cornish hens would work, but as Ah Leung said," Adjust your cooking time".

jo-mel, I DO remember that discussion, but can't remember in what thread! Wasn't it just store bought frozen bread dough that was used? I don't remember it being frozen bun dough from Chinese store though.

That's on par with what we pay here, and that's in Canadian $s, in Winnipeg, a smaller than Toronto and less exotic locale than Malaysia, on the Canadian prairies! I'm curious about the covering on the shrimp. Is that a white/cream sauce?

This is one of our family favourites. Have never used tomato sauce; I just use vinegar and sugar and chicken stock. I find the tomatoes themsleves give enough of a tomato flavour. When I make it for Po-Po, I slip the skins off the tomatoes. Rice is really all you'd need for this dish. I always cook extra rice as we seem to eat mor rice to soak up the sauce! Sometimes, I cook the eggs like an omelet, then cut it into strips.

Ahem! Ben Sook: Glad you said "tendency to cloud" as mine was never clouded

We used ketsup for colour only in the sweet'n'sour sauce. Our base consisted of vinegar, sugar, ketsup (small amount) and "meat juice" from simmering deep fried pork ribs. Our sweet 'n' sour spareribs were always put through egg wash then coated (squeezed individually by hand)with cracker crumbs. These were deep-fried and kept in the cooler. We would simmer the lunch/supper hour's supply of sweet'n'sour ribs in water, sugar and vinegar until the ribs were tender. The ribs were strained then kept warm in the steam table until needed. The liquid from the above process was kept in big pails in the cooler. When we make the sweet'n'sour sauce (in large quantities), we would fill at least half the stock pot with this "stock" ( a transparent amber colour), top it with hot water, add more vinegar and sugar, add enough ketsup for a bit of red (NEVER Xmas red), then adjust the sweet and sour elements of the sauce. Once this came to a boil, we would thicken it with a cornstarch slurry until " a trail is momentarily visible when the ladle is pulled across the sauce". I rarely make this at home because it would involve making the ribs, but I have improvised with chicken stock, vinegar and sugar. It's workable, but I do miss the "deep-fried" flavour. This was what set us apart from all the OTHER Chinese restaurants.

What's wrong with staying with honey? The recipe is for honey-garlic pork chops!

These are a pain to make from scratch. The ammonia powder may be difficult to find and you really need a huge wok/deep fryer to fry them properly.So much easier to buy them. Do you have them in Melbourne? I tried to make them in my restaurant kitchen acouple of times. They puffed up, but they got hard quicker than the stor bought ones. The store-bought ones do freeze well if you can only find them once in a while. I wrap them up well then reheat, wrapped in foil, in the oven. Gotta have 'em with congee. Some people do eat 'em dipped in sweet condensed milk. I haven't tried that altho' as a child, I used to slather the sweet sticky milk on bread.