Dejah

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.

Forget clean-up jo-mel. With your extensive knowledge of Chinese food, and teaching Chinese cooking classes, I think we'd need you on the menu planning team. Perhaps we should start a new thread....plan the restaurant from base up...then menus...daily specials, pictorials to go with that... and even recipes... With what hzrt's been showing us, there seems to be real interest in home style cooking rather than banquet fare. What cha think? Guys and Dolls? Would be fun!

Hey! With your love of food, knowledge, and skills, anything is possible! Let's see what we can do here: Wesza can bankroll and advise, as he is a food and restaurant consultant... You can cook and boss the kitchen, and I, well, I would love to work the front of the house 'cos I've had my run in the kitchen... Tepee can be our master baker: mooncakes for Moon festival, bday cakes, all things sweet... torakris can be our Japanese "fuser"... Pan our flutist... Suzi? Are ya in? Gastro? Ben Sook will want to be the food taster... Who else want to be in this venture? Virtual Chinese restaurant?

hzrt! Does your wife realize how lucky she is! And, does she realize how you are flirting with our taste buds? You are doing a great job. keep it up I always fried our pork chops on the grill. Used sliced pork butt for the mix of fat and lean. After frying, we'd make the sauce with water, lots of local honey (bought the stuff in large pails), chopped garlic AND garlic powder. This was made in a large 24" wok...served for the buffet only. We made honey garlic spareribs per order. These were first boiled in the honey garlic water mix...drained and cooled, egg washed, breaded individually in cracker meal, then deep fried. These were prep. every couple of days and refridgerated. When we need the order, we'd quickly heat them up in the deep fryer, make up the sauce and toss them in for a quick coating. Sesame seeds were sprinkled on as a final touch. The honey garlic flavour is right through to the bone!

hzrt: I can't read ANY chinese other than my name. Just finished grade 2 when I came to Canada. It would be wonderful if you could just translate the names of the dishes in Maria Lee's website. Knowing what they are can lead me to try and cook some. Tomorrow, however, will be Caribbean food for me...I'm taking a cooking class! What should I leave - slowly cooking - Chinese - for the hubby and daughter?

I agree with you, Pan. The western world was certainly more familiar with Cantonese/southern Chinese food than northern Chinese. This was due to the immigrants who were from that area. Didn't Peking duck only gain notoriety when Nixon visited China? When I say gai choi has a strong flavour, I meant that the taste is stronger than, for example, bak choi or suey choi.

How many jars of fu yu, nam yu, and ham yu do you use in a month, hzrt? Looks like you are trying to educate the world about these ingrdients! I love mustard greens, ham yu and garlic, but would never have thought to stir-fry them together! I have lived such a sheltered life! Three very strong flavours together - did they complement eachother? I can't imagine any of them being "buried". I usually see 2 different kinds of mustard greens. The ones you used, are the ones I get from my "aunties", small mustard green. I can see these being stir-fried. The larger one with the big stalks have a more pungent taste. I love using these in soup, with pork bones, sliced pork, and a big hunk of ginger. Ginger is a must in making this soup. Po-Po said if you leave ginger out, the gai choi soup will taste "sang", or fishy. And then, here is hzrt, who puts ham yu with guy choi!

Have never used pineapple juice in my sweet 'n' sour sauce. Ours always had vinegar as one of the base ingredients. We did add pineapple chunks if the request if for pineapple sweet and sour spareribs. I think our sauce had a nice balance of sweet and sour taste...at least my customers all said so and loved it.

The aroma of my chicken and mushrooms must have reached all the way to Sacramento! Daughter just finished off Tues's leftovers yesterday for a snack. White fungus pungent? Really? I would think the black mushrooms would be pungent and the white odourless. This is the first time I have seen the white in this dish. Must be a HK thing. I usually cut my black mushrooms into strips, add ginger and lapcheung. Seasoning is only salt, sugar, MSG and perhaps a little lite soya sauce. Your choice of seasonings and added ingredients makes for a more robust dish. I must make it this way next time!

Maybe it was all a dream...as hzrt said "This would be like a dream comes true. The Shark Fin soup (the real one) and H/S soup prices differ by ten fold."

Hmmm, have these people tasted xiaolongbaos? These are of Shanghai origin... I can't imagine anyone can take a broad sweep over one region's cuisine and say that IT is the worst in the country!

Great pictures, Tepee But remember this?

Oh thanks! Just what I need to see while blurry eyed and hungry!