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It's past midnight, and I am hungry. If I were still living in Hong Kong, I would have loved to walk downstairs from our flat to some 24 hour shops and have a bowl of wonton ho-fun and a dish of deep-fried fish skin. Yeah, deep-fried fish skin. Very crunchy, like potato chips. Or a Gow Jing Zong (the Cantonese style zongzi wrapped in lotus leaves) would be nice. What do you long for as midnight snacks?

Nice work, Laksa! (both the dish and the pictures) Forget about the fish, would you pass that bottle of XO please?

But do you know what they used to grind the turtle shells? Cleaver? Mortar? Food processor? Press? File? Chain saw? Black powder? TNT? Dynamite?

Turtle shells are very hard. Does anybody know how they are ground to make guilinggao?

Not grass jelly. They are sweet rolls made of black sesame and some binding agent (gelatin?) I believe.

A small tip for you Dejah: when you have finished the first round of drinking all the grass jelly chunks in the can, pour in some chilled water, swirl the can then garble up the last of the chunks. Also, if you eat a lot of grass jelly you should buy the grass jelly itself (not drinks) in a can. You open the can and cut up the grass jelly yourself, top with some sugar or honey and share it with the whole family. You get a lot more grass jelly for your buck that way. Agar Agar doesn't sound like Chinese in origin (Malay? Indonesian?). Not sure what it is. I love grass jelly mixed with ice and sugar syrup. I also love other summar drinks: Waterchestnut drink (Ma Tai Lo [Cantonese]) and a dark green herbal drink called Bunk Dai Wun [Cantonese], wihch literally means a big bowl with a chipped rim.

I just went to a Chinese banquet Sunday night. The chef used Lap Yuk and fresh scallops, thinly sliced, to cook a fried rice dish. The taste was wonderful. The slightly salty, sweet and chewy Lap Yuk made an excellent contrast to the soft and relatively bland scallop.

A lot of people may not associate melons with stir-fried vegetables, but they are especially preferred over green-leaf vegetables when cooked with dried ingredients such as black mushrooms, lily buds, bean curd sheets, wood ears, fat choy, and such to make a "buddha's feast". I like stir-frying melons as much as other green-leaf vegetables. Particularly: winter melons, hairy melons, bitter melons, luffa and such. With bitter melons, I cook them with either "garlic and fermented black beans" or "garlic and foo yu". Both taste good. With winter melons and hairy melons, I like to start with a little cooking oil, throw in some garlic and dried shrimps (soaked in water for 15 minutes, drained) and salt, dash in 1 tsp of vinegar, put in the melons (cut in cubes), and water (or chicken broth). Note that melons take up a lot of water when they cook, so be generous with the quantity. Drip in some oyster sauce and a bit of sugar. Cook for 15 to 20 minutes with lid on, medium to slow heat, until melons are softened. Then near the end, throw in some mung bean threads (presoaked in water for 30 minutes) so that they will soak up the extra liquid. Cook for 3 to 5 more minutes, done.

Ong Choy leaves take much less time to cook than stems. When you cook them (leaves and stems) together, usually the leaves get overcooked and become too soft. Here is a trick I often use: separate the leaves of Ong Choy from stems. For the stems, blanch them, but not leaves. To cook Ong Choy, I only do one of the 2 styles: 1. Oil, garlic, 2 - 3 tsp of Chinese shrimp paste, 1/2 jalapeno (sliced) 2. Oil, garlic, 2 - 3 cubes of fermented tofu (Foo Yu), 1/2 jalapeno (sliced) When the oil is hot, throw in the garlic, shrimp paste (or Foo Yu), jalapeno, stir for a few seconds, then put in the blanched stems and fresh leaves. The leaves will cook very quickly. No extra salt needed because both shrimp paste and Foo Yu are very salty by themselves. The jalapeno (or chili peppers) really makes a big difference in cooking Ong Choy. It's just not the same without them.

ShenYang: I was in ShenYang in January of 87, just once. ShenYang is a industrial city with many heavy machinery plants. Not much to tour and look at except the old Qing capital (before they settled in BeiJing). Air quality is terrible... comparable to Detroit. I remember there was a major street near the train station where at night, all kinds of food vendors set up their kiosks selling their food. I bought some Braised Beef (dry). They sold them by whole pieces. I bought some (in 0F weather) and brought them back to my hotel and sliced them up and ate as snacks around midnight... hmmm, best thing in the world... along with some Snow Flake beer (sorry, no Tseng Tao that time)... The hotel didn't provide refrigerators, so I kept my bottles of beer just outside my window and let the real snow flakes chilled my Snow Flake beer! Also, there was (hopefully it's still there) a big old hotel (forgot the name, ShenYang Hotel maybe), the one and only that had old Russian architecture, about 1 mile from the train station... I was very impressed with the hotel decoration. Ate at their restaurant on the ground floor. Very impressed with the food (Chinese, northern style). Also ate a lamb hot pot at 0F weather in a small mom-and-pop restaurant (4 tables only) randomly chosen while walking on the street. Very nice.

Guilin is famous for thin rice noodles (in soup). They are very close to Vietnamnese Pho. (I think it's because of the geographical proximity). Noodle soup vendors are everywhere along major streets, but some of them did not look as clean and tidy.

Failure is the mother of all sucesses. Not be afraid to try new things and learn from your mistakes is my motto.

Another small tip for you about fried rice and eggs. Don't pour the beaten eggs onto the rice itself. This will cause the rice to soak up moisture from the eggs and thus make it very soggy. You may cook the eggs separately and throw back in to the rice (cutting in strips or just scramble the eggs as you cook them). Or, if you are an expert or just being lazy (I am the latter kind ) , you may create a "hole" (empty space) in your pan/wok of fried rice then you pour in the beaten eggs in the middle. Keep scrambling. After the eggs are hardened, you simply use the spatular to mix them with the rice. This way there is no need to cook the eggs in a separate process.

In most Chinese restaurants' stir-fry dishes with garlic, the garlic is only bathed in hot oil for just a few seconds. I supposed if you like the smokey taste you can certainly brown it more. But turning it black is dangerously close to eating carbon... not good for health. In some Vietnamness dishes, they like to brown shallots. That tastes very good as shallots are much sweeter.

Bravo again! Looks like you get the essence of Chinese cooking. Garlic: Browning slightly is okay, but letting garlic turn dark brown should be avoided. Garlic turns bitter when over carmelized. When it turns black, all you would taste is the bitter taste of carbon. The best is let garlic bath in hot oil only for a few seconds, then you need to add the vege or meat or whatever. This way you will catch the garlic flavor which is being evaporated by burning hot oil. Jalapeno: non-traditional Chinese? Not quite. We do use red chili peppers in many dishes (just small amount) to stimulate the tast buds. In the U.S., small red chili peppers are not as common as jalapeno or serano peppers (well, at least in Southern CA). But they would do the job just the same. I miss the little red color though.

Bravo! All knowledge are results of our ancestors' trial and error efforts.

It is more of a paste. You can use more oil if you like.

Any chili hot sauce lover out there? I love hot sauce of all kinds, and I have tried many of them (especially Asian styles). I found that Tobasco (and all its imitators) is a bit too sour to my liking. I tried using Chinese chili bean sauce as a condiment, and it is overly salty. Tried the Guilin chili sauce. It tastes good but again too salty as a condiment. Tried Sambal Oelek... like Tobasco, too much vinegar in it. I like some of the sweet hot sauce paste, but only use it with Cheung Fun. I found many other Vietnamnese hot sauces, like Sambal Oelek, to be too sour for my taste (but they sure are hot, which I like). From all the hot sauces that I have tried, I found one that is on the top of my taste test: Yank Sing Chili Pepper Sauce and Yank Sing XO Chili Pepper Sauce I knew their hot sauce from more than 20 years ago when they were just a small neighborhood restaurant at Boardway and Stockton in San Francisco. (Now they are a big corporation) I believe they used to (maybe still do) serve their own chili sauce (for free) to their customers. I used to walk in to their restaurant just to buy a jar of their hot sauce. The demand for their chili sauce has been so great that they expanded their business and nowadays you can find their hot sauce in most Asian grocery markets. It seems to achieve a perfect balance of taste and heat. It doesn't have a trace of vinegar that I can taste. I tried to reverse engineer their hot sauce but to date do not have any success. Through my trials, I have developed my own chili sauce recipe which I like, though it's far from Yank Sing's. But their hot sauce is priced at US $3.95 for a 6 oz jar, it's a pricy taste to have. (XO sauce is priced at close to US $6.00 per 6 oz). Here is my home-made chili pepper oil recipe for anyone who is interested: CHILI PEPPER SAUCE (Ingredients will yield 2 to 3 large jam jars) - 7-8 cup of cooking oil - 1 pack of dried hot pepper flakes (about 1 to 1.5 lb) - 15 to 20 whole garlic - 2 cup of fermented black beans (rinsed and smashed) - 2 cup of preserved radish - 3/4 cup of hoisin sauce - 1 cup of sa cha sauce (basically minced dried shrimp) - 20 tsp of cayenne pepper powder - 5 tsp of ground white pepper - 5 tsp of sugar - 5 tsp of white vinegar - 5 tsp of five spice powder - 10 tsp of salt 1. Separate and peel all the garlic. Use a food processor, chop the garlic to fine fragments. 2. Use the food processor to grind the preserved radish to fine fragments. 3. Use a wok/pan, heat up the cooking oil (maybe 10 minutes). Add chopped garlic, cook until brown (5 minutes or more). Add preserved radish, pepper flakes, black beans, hoisin sauce, sa cha sauce, cayenne pepper powder, white pepper, sugar, vinegar, five spice powder and salt. Cook another 10 minutes or so, keep stirring. Notes: 1. The chili hot oil should be kept in the refrigerator. 2. Optionally you may add dried scallop to the chili oil (XO sauce). Soak the dried scallop in water overnight, then use the food processor to mince the scallop before putting in the hot chili oil. 3. Optionally you may add dried shrimp to the chili oil (imitation XO sauce). Soak the dried shrimp in water for 30 minutes, then use the food processor to mince the dried shrimp before putting in the hot chili oil. 4. Optionally you may use fresh red chilis, finely chopped, to add more heat to the chili oil. [edited to rename it Chili Pepper Sauce from Chili Pepper Oil]

One time I left my hoisin sauce out in the pantry after opened, molds started to appear after a week. The molds might have landed from the spoon, or just plainly airborne. I would never know. If you keep your opened hoisin sauce outside the frig, it is only a matter of time (weeks, or even days) that it turns moldy. Unopened sauces in jars can be kept for years.

Chinese cooking can be, and has been, documented by many different authors and the results can be reproduced very reliably tomorrow, next week, 10 years from now or even hundreds of years from now. I think the issue is you kept comparing what's documented in cookbooks (and per what you said you followed trying to make some dishes) to what you experienced in neighborhood restaurants and found discrepancies. Because you don't even find any remote similarities, you concluded that Chinese food cannot be reproduced in a reliable way. That's a very problematic logic. I am an engineer myself and I appreciate the value of scientific approaches. If you want to follow something by the book, you can. You just cannot pick your target sample randomly and try to match it with your instruction documents.

Project: here are my comments: New York has a high population of first-generation Chinese immigrants. Chinese food in New York should be fine compared to many other cities in the U.S. Just wondering: to get a more balanced view of what Chinese cooking is all about - do you have any Chinese friend who cooks? Perhaps a visit to your friend and see how he/she prepares a regular meal would give you some insight into what Chinese cooking is rather than only observing from restaurant cooking or on TV programs. I think one reason why you see the food cooked in Chinese restaurants is different from that you find in cookbooks is because Chinese food has many varieties of dishes. No one book can cover so many entries. Besides, everybody has his/her “style” of cooking. I think your approach to cooking Chinese food is too scientific. You are looking for an instruction manual to tell you in scientific measurements exactly what the ingredients are, and the precise steps of the cooking process down to the seconds, so you can reproduce the same dish with the same taste every time. But the problem is: you have found too many instruction manuals. Not only that, you don’t even know what the end product is supposed to look like (or taste like). Well, cooking is not that scientific. Like Ben said, it’s more like an art. Besides the ingredients, what’s very important in Chinese cooking, or heck in any cooking, is timing and sequences. If your timing or sequence is off, the result can be very different. I think you shouldn’t see cooking at home is a competition against the neighborhood chefs. In that view, you may never want to cook at home. Cooking should be seen as more than a survival skill. It should be something one actually enjoys in the process, more than just the outcome. If you try to apply the American/French/Italian/German cooking techniques (all considered “western” by the way) and force them on Chinese food, I think the result is doomed to fail. Every style of cooking should be taken at its own merits in its own realm. It is rather like hearing Waltz music and try to dance Tango. You can never achieve “harmony” that way.

Here is the list of sauces I found from my past experience that I need to keep refrigerated: - hoisin sauce (goes moldy quickly after opened without being frig'ed) - chee hou sauce - oyster sauce - chili paste (especially chili bean paste) - hot sauce - depends, most of them don't, some of them do - black pepper sauce - Thai basil paste As for other sauces, especially soy, black bean sauce, fish sauce, you can safely leave them out in room temperature. Also safe are plum sauce, sa cha sauce, curry paste, vinegar, cooking wine, brown bean sauce. I found it hard to generalize. Trial and error is probably the only learning path. Or if you list them out specifically, I can tell you if I would put it in the frig or not.

Generally cookbooks are closer to the authenticity of Chinese dishes. As for restaurants... If you are eating at restaurants in China, then you would find what they do is fairly close to the cookbooks. But if you are eating at Chinese restaurants outside of China (and it sounds like you are in Aussie), then everything is a fair game. The local cooks would gear towards what's acceptable in local tastes. Watching some TV cooking programs on Chinese food is also a good start. "Yan Can Cook" is dedicated to Chinese cooking. A few others like "Ming's Quest", "East Meets West" and occassionally in "Emeril", "Food 911" and others. I think when you said "I don't get Chinese food", you may have a strong preconception of what Chinese food is from your neighborhood Chinese restaurants. When you tried to follow recipes from cookbooks or advices from this board you couldn't attain what you expected to see, and thus just get frustrated. If you have a China Town close by (again, didn't know where you live, hard to tell)... Go there and find a restaurant that is crowded with Chinese eaters. Order something from them and see how they come out. Those would be more likely authentic Chinese cooking.

project: (hopefully you are still reading this) Reading your posting on cooking stir-fry with chicken and string beans is like reading a PhD dissertation. Cooking doesn't have to be so complicated and so technical. The essence is that you should stick to a particular style (or sauce) each time you cook. Beginners in cooking often make the mistake of throwing all the sauces/seasoning they could think of and end up with a strange-tasting dish. Velveting the chicken meat (marinated with egg white, or a bit of salt and white pepper too) in oil is the basic. No need to use too much oil. Then as for seasoning the dish, you can simply cook the string beans with a bit of salt and it will taste good. If you want to jazz things up, here is what I do regularly. I don't use any soy or wine or sugar or pepper flakes or hoisin cooking string beans. Do you have a jar of "sa cha" sauce? These are grounded dried shrimps basically. Very flavorful. They go exceptionally well with string beans. A lot of restaurants use it to flavor string beans. (Portion for 1 lb of chicken) Use a pan, high heat, 1 T of cooking oil, add garlic (2 cloves, finely chopped), 1/2 tsp salt, onion (1 small one, wedged), jarapeno (1/2, thinly sliced), 2-3 tsp Sa Cha sauce, stir-fry for a minute or 2. Then add on string beans (fresh ones are the best), and some water or (better) 1/4 cup chicken broth. Cook for 10 minutes with lid on, or until string beans turn soft. Add back velveted chicken meat and stir for 2 minutes more and you are done. I like my string beans dry and typically don't use extra liquid or corn starch. Your 8 oz string beans to 3 to 4 lb of chicken ratio is far too extreme. Chinese stir-fry uses more vegetables than meats. Typically something like 1/2 lb of meat to 1 lb of vege. Your way of making it seems more western style, where meat is the feature and vege are complimentary. Chinese dishes are typically not over saucey. I suspect that your attempts to make some very saucey dish with string beans and kept adding soy sauce, hoisin or other ingredients just worsen the dish. Soy sauce is very salty by its nature. When you used them by the "cup" measurements in stir-fry dishes, I kept thinking "ouch"!

Ben: I think Nam Yu and Foo Yu are both soy bean based. You are right in that the coating of Nam Yu is made with Fermented Red Rice. ( 红曲米 ) The core of Nam Yu is still soy bean.