Dejah

Just curious, as I seem to think there are several Asian posters in this forum who have a non-Asianpartner, and Caucasian posters with Asian partners. If you are Chinese, with a caucasian partner, did he or she know about and enjoy Chinese food before they met you? Was Americanized Chinese food their main experience? Did it take time before they tried traditional foods? Do they help in the cooking of same? Gary, were you "experienced" in Chinese cuisine before you met your wife from Shanghai? You've been singled out due to your expertise. Those of you who are Caucasian with Asian spouses/s.o., what are your experiences with traditional Chinese food? My husband is caucasian. He had this first taste of Chinese food when he left home for college. Every prairie town had its Chinese restaurant, all serving the same chop suey of that time. He thought it was great. Then along came me;-). Peasant fare was a totally new experience for him but he loved everything. He does not cook! His parents, a different story. Gramma and Mom only liked rice in rice pudding. Chop suey and sweet 'n' sour was ok...with potatoes , but authentic Chinese...peking duck...steamed chicken... steamed whole fish,... My father-in-law was more adventurous.

So, mudbug, tell us how your bday party turned out. What did you make for dessert?

Incredible blog! I have seen outdoor ovens at living history sites, old forts, etc. But to have one in your backyard! Looking forward to pics of your apple press gathering.

Dejah, looking for something to make by hand instead of fruit, which is a given. Tiny glutinous rice flour dumplings.... please point me to a recipe. Mudbug, For the tang yuen (glutinous rice dumplings): The basic recipe is one lb. of glutinous rice flour to 2 cups of cold water. OF COURSE you won't need that much, so use maybe 1 cup of the rice flour to 1/2 cup or less of cold water. You should be able to roll small pieces of dough between your palms into balls that will hold their shape. When I make the red bean (aduki beans), lotus nut, peanut soup, I just throw in a handful of this, and that. Tonight, I thought I'd try and do some measuring. I have 3/4 cup red beans, 1/2 cup lotus nuts , 1/2 cup blanched peanuts rinsed and soaking in about 8 cups of water overnight. I also have a piece of tangerine peel soaking with the ingredients. This may well make a huge potful! You can do this on Friday night. Saturday morning, bring all of the above to a boil. Add 1 1/2 bars of Chinese brown sugar. Lower the heat to a simmer until all the nuts are soft. The red beans may break up but that's ok. You can add more water if it seems too thick. Just adjust the sweetness accordingly. Make up the rice flour dumplings and add them to the soup when it is ready. Bring to a gentle boil until the dumplings rise to the surface. It is ready to be served. You can buy bags of these dumplings pre-made and dried in some Chinese stores. Instead of dumplings, you can also add "long life noodles" I apologize that I don't have a real recipe for you. I cook like my mom...a handful of this, a bit of that. . .

Delicious presentation! Can you share your recipe for the lamb?

Check out my recipe for wontons in the "Dejah's foodblogging this week" thread in this forum.

Snowangel: "I love this waffle maker. Recovery time is great, there is no power cord to misplace, doesn't take up a lot of space, and it's really reliable. I don't think it would work very well on an electric stove." Snowangel, Thanks for a great blog! Will be interesting top see how you'll divy up your next load of venison. I have a waffle iron exactly like yours. During my blog, I used mine at my s-i-l's on her gas stove. I found it was easier to control on my electric range. Imagine it is whatever we are used to. We dueled with her electric iron, and my waffles won hands down. The electric one made thin crispy waffles, but mine had deep indentations (all the better to hold that syrup), crispy on the outside, but pillow soft on the insides. Great with bacon and fresh peaches! We get our peaches from British Columbia. The freestones have been wonderful. As you said: Juice running down your arm"! Your marble counter top. . . It must be great for making pastry.

From my trip to Winnipeg, I picked up dragon fruit, rambutan, dragon eyes, star fruit, and a can of tamarind drink. The colour of the dragon fruit was so gorgeous! I hated to cut into it. It was amazing how the skin peeled back on each slice. The texture was a real surprise. I thought it would be soft like a kiwi as it looked like a "white kiwi" with all the little black specks. But it was firmer. It was sweet and yet not sweet. Perhaps it wasn't ripe enough? How do you tell? It was pretty expensive . . . $2.99 per lb Canadian. But my mom loved it so it was worth the price. The rambutans were fun to have. My grandson thought they were aliens. My son cut one in half, ate the insides, then used the "shells" to cover his eyes. That grossed the grandson out! They were sweet, but I found them too much work to eat. The star fruit, according to my mom, was of the "sour tree". It was about 6" in length and the segments were large. This was an indicator of the kind of trees they came from. Didn't have much taste, but the texture was nice. My mom used to have a sweet how gaw and a sour how gaw tree in her garden in China. She used the sour tree ones as a pickled fruit. Again, she enjoyed it more than we did. The dragon eyes were the favorite, sweet, juicy and easy to get into. They are available locally. Haven't opened the tamarind drink yet. Thanks Yetti for introducing this thread. With information in hand, I finally got to taste these beautiful and unusual fruits!

That's a lovely dining table. Could the wood be camphor and teak? I have one quite similar, except mine has a centre pedestal leg, with 4 dragon heads at the bottom. You have a nicer lazy Susan than I do. The table scratches easily, so we had a glass top specially cut for it. A bottle of H&P fell over and it cracked! The table didn't suite our present dining area, so it is still in our house in the country. I just had snake beans stir-fried with fermented tofu for supper. Love that stuff. What will you do with your bean bounty? Everyone here is having bad luck with tomatoes this summer. Excess deer meat? How about venison jerky?

Had a nice browse through Chapters on the weekend. I took a rest in one of their chairs with Grace Youngs's Breath of the Wok. I checked out the section on seasoning a new wok. I may have to stop using my wok for steaming, just so I can achieve that beautiful patina in one of the pictures! I tried to find B. Tropp's Modern Art on Ebay, nothing . . . But I did win the bid for Grace Young's Wisdom for $7.70 US. Looked in good shape "like new". Just what I needed; another Chinese cookbook! Went to a friend's daughter's wedding last night. We gave them a carbon steel wok, a rice cooker and a coiled binder book " 365 Ways to Wok". It had more than just Chinese recipes. It had been sitting on my shelf, never used, and I thought it would show them that there's more than one use for a wok. The bride's father was our karate sensei. She is now a second degree black belt. I hope her husband never complains about her cooking!

Yetti, Great thread! I have seen some of the scary stuff you posted here. Didn't know what they were or what parts were edible. Am going to an Asian market in Winnipeg tomorrow, so will be bringing home some goodies. . . . . . . . but NO DURIAN!, yet. Gotta find me an effective nose plug first!

dong quai is mainly used after childbirth, when you want to build up your blood (bo huet). It is very bitter, as another poster indicated. I have seen bottles with Dong Quai on the label, at our Superstore, on the herbal shelves. This is a powerful herb and should not be taken indescriminately. . . acoording to my Most Knowledgeble Mom.

I am guilty of steaming food in my wok. . . It's fine if I get it cleaned and dried immediately after cooking, but when we have company for supper, then it gets left until later. Having to "cleanse and re-season" my wok many times doesn't seem to affect my wok. In fact, this is the same method we used on our four 24" woks at the restaurant on Sundays. This is when we do an all out thorough cleaning on the whole kitchen. It's wonderful to start the week off with clean shiny woks, steam tables, etc. Cleaning the woks regularly this way avoids any " black specks" coming off onto the food.

It has to be the original figgy for me, and generics need not apply! Nothing beats a Newton with cold glass of milk.

In the cookbook thread, FoodMan mentioned that in a BT book there was a section on how to re-season a rusty wok. Can anyone elaborate on this? For myself, my $15.00 wok of many years has gone through several rusty periods. I usually soak the whole inside of the wok with a mixture of half water and half vinegar for a few hours. When it looks clean, I wash it well with soap and water, heat it until the bottom turns blue then drizzle oil over the entire surface. Once it starts to smoke, I let it cool, then wipe off the excess with paper towel. That seems to do the trick.

To do char sui in my oven, at the restaurant or at home, I take cheap metal poultry skewers ( the ones used to seal up a bird once it is stuffed) and bend them into S hooks. Place a rack on the highest position in your oven. Hang the meat one one end of the S hook, and the other end on the rack. Place another rack on the lowest position with a pan of water as hzrt suggested to keep the meat moist. Hanging the meat this way, you wouldn't have to turn it every 20 minutes. Every jar of LKK Char Sui sauce I have bought have been really sticky and difficult to work with. I end up mixing hoisin and brown bean sauce with some wine and 5 spice powder. Has anyone tried NOH of Hawaii Chinese BBQ Char Sui seasoning mix? It does contain Red colour #3. I have a package here but haven't used it yet. Hmmm....maybe this week. When we made it for the restaurant, I used Hoisin, sugar, cooking wine, and a red food colouring we'd buy in gallon jugs. Wish I had some of that now! You could always tell who did the mix for the day. Used to be able to buy a deep red food colouring made for cake decorating. The ones now all seem pastel. I used to do chicken wings in the same manner. The fat from the skin made the wings a beautiful shiny deep red. It worked well on our appetizer platter.

ACK! You orientals all look alike!

hzrt: Strange. . . I just said to my daughter this afternoon, as I was search through my piles of print-out recipes, for the paper with the Chinese characters for Happy Birthday, Po-Po, that I need to get all these sheets into a binder. These recipes are usually ones I was searching for and have made, at least once. I see you also post in about.com. Did you explain to them how to remember your "name"?

I love cheung fun! They are best served fresh at dim sum restaurants. The texture is smooth, silky . . . soooooooooo good. The char sui ones are the best! Shopping trips to Winnipeg always end up with 2 or 3 packages. Most of my family likes the ones with dried shrimps and scallions. Son2 likes the plain ones drizzled with soya, sesame oil and sweet chili sauce. I have tried to make them from SCRATCH. That means soaking a flour dough ball, squeezing it again and again to extract the gluten?.! An elderly Chinese friend spent a day showing me how to do this. It was a wonderful day of conversation and learning experience. I didn't have the heart to tell her that one can buy the fixings in a package. The couple of times I made cheung fun, I couldn't keep up with the hungry mouths. You have to be careful when shopping for these. Check the ends of the cheung fun, and between the rolls, for any sign of pink or yellow spots. This is mold. Even if it is prior to the "best before" dates, they spoil easily.

I'm not sure if anyone else is the same, but I buy cookbooks for the beautiful pictures (usually close to meal times) and maybe a couple of recipes that appealed to me. I also like to buy books that have English pronunciation AND Chinese characters with the names. Keep thinking that one of these days, I may learn to read the REAL "menus on the wall". How can you folks name all your favourites the way you do in the posts? I had to go and pull out my most worn-looking books to see who the authors were! My first Chinese cookbook purchase was Helen Burke's Chinese Cooking for Pleasure. The names of the dishes sound just like the way I remember them! I don't remember whether I used any specific recipe, but more for guidance and jogging my memory as to how Mom made it. The Time-Life cookbooks were also some of my first acquisitions. That was when we were into the "subscription"mode . . .all those different sets of How-To books bt T-L. Bley Miller's Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook sits prominently in my bookcase ... because it is so damn big! Again, it is mainly used for reference. I just found out that I have several Wei-Chuan cookbooks! The one I read most often is the Chinese dim sum one. The steamed beef balls are very good. Along with the Wei-Chuan book, I use Mary Tsui Ping Yee's Chinese Immigrant Cooking quite a bit, for traditional foods such as: New Mother's Chicken Soup, Dried Bok Choy, Dried Oyster soup, etc. A good book for beginners is The Asian Kitchen: The best of Chinese and Far Eastern cooking by Lilian Wu. Good pictures showing the ingredients, cooking process and the final product. China Moon...Years ago, I bought the book and enjoyed reading it. Then we had the opportunity to go to SF. I had the address of the restaurant in my hand, and was so excited about trying out the dishes at its source! We walked and walked, kept checking the address, and yes, it's true, it no longer existed. The small store front was all boarded up. In fact, most of that street was abandoned. I, as other posters have since learned from Egullet, that Ms Tropp had been ill, and has since died. I think I was there around 1996. I still pull out the book for a read, but have never made any of the recipes. I guess the "original taste" wasn't there to inspire me to try the recipes. Of the +150 cookbooks in my bookcase, I'd say, 75% are Assian cookbooks. Do any of you buy the Australian Women's Weekly Library soft cover books? I have quite a few. They are also interesting additions to a cooking library.

Here is the recipe for sui mai filling. I use the thinest wonton wrappers I can find. Using a cookie cutter, I make them round with scalloped edges. The left over wrapper pieces can be used as noodles in soup. Sui Mai Recipe By Sue-On For 1 lb of ground pork: Add: 1/2 tsp. baking SODA 2 tbsp. cornstarch 1/2 tsp. salt 2 tbsp sugar 1 tbsp. MSG (optional) 2 tbsp. sesame oil 2 tbsp. cold water 2 tsp. lemon juice 1/4 tsp. white pepper. 4 tbsp. finely shredded carrot for colour Mix well. I am assuming everyone knows how to shape these dumplings? If not, let me know and I can do a show 'n' tell.

I had tried that method with potstickers. The potstickers still stick together under their own weight in the freezer over time. Unless I can provide individual separation in the freezer, I rather just freeze the filling and wrap as I go. I haven't frozen wontons already done up in the wrappers, but I do make up large batches of filling and freeze those. If the meat is put into Ziplocks, flattened so that it is only about half an inch thick, then you can break off the amount needed and it will thaw quickly. As for potstickers, I have made these and frozen them individually on a cookie sheet. Once frozen, they are put into freezer bags or containers. I am assuming these are made with home made pastry? I have never had them stick together. . . perhaps it's because they never last THAT long!