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Agreed with other posters that "Orange Chicken" seems to be a U.S. adaptation of the Chinese dish ( 陈皮鸡 ) "chun pee ji" (??). Way too sweet and over-battered. The name 陈皮 "chun pee" literally means "old skin", or dried peel. It doesn't say peel of which fruit but it's well known that it's the peel of tangerines, not oranges. It is ironic that this dish is called orange chicken while it should have been called tangerine chicken. It is further ironic that most Chinese takeouts do not put any dried tangerine peel to make this dish. I think some just squeezes in a bit of orange juice or throw in a bit of orange zests and call it Chinese orange chicken.

My wife bought a bunch of salmon filets because they are on sale and she loves them. But it makes me scratching my head: Salmon is not a traditional meat ingredient for Chinese cooking. I tried steaming salmons the Cantonese way: with black bean/ginger, or just steamed plain then pour boiling oil on top with ginger and scallion and light soy sauce, and I tried cooking salmons with sweet and sour sauce ( 糖醋鱼 ). None of my attempts is satisfactory. I know in Japanese cuisine, the grilled eels with soy sauce is very good. I am tempted to try that recipe by substituting eels with salmons. My wife doesn't eat raw fish, so the idea of using salmons for sushi or sashimi is out. Has anyone used salmon in your Asian style cooking? Any suggestions on how to cook these salmons in Asian style?

My kind of zong ingredients too. I see that this is your first post and you just joined today. Welcome aboard Gastro. I am a new comer myself and I love this forum already.

JM: In Cantonese style: stir-fry Asparagus with beef in black bean sauce. Also good is to slice them up and put them in a soup (e.g. chicken broth based) with egg-white. We also do crab-meat with Asparagus: blanch the asparagus first, then cook the crab-meat together with egg white and pour the mixture on top of the asparagus. I am sure with your experience you can fill in the blanks in these recipes.

Most dim sum restaurants in Hong Kong and in the U.S. serve Lo Bak Gou slightly fried. Though a few restaurants offer the strictly steamed version. When serving steamed Lo Bak Gou, they make the cake softer, with less rice flour.

Yeah, add to the list: What's Egg Fu Young? What's Kung Pao chicken? What's Pong-Pong chicken? What's YuXiang RouXi? These names sound so foreign (perhaps quite funny) to non-Chinese speaking eaters... Ants Climbing on Tree... Phoenix claws... Cloud ears...

I believe Cantonese spring rolls use wheat-flour wrapper. The difference between spring-roll wrapper and wonton wrapper is that wonton wrapper uses eggs (thus the yellow color). The Vietnamnese spring rolls use rice paper wrapper. When I make egg rolls, I make sure that the fillings are dry and cold. If the fillings are juicy, it will make the spring rolls very soggy when deep-fried. I make sure that the skin will turn out crispy and shinny for better presentation effects. As for the condiment, I use soy sauce and hot chili sauce, perhaps hot mustard as well. The ingredients for the fillings: shredded pork (or chicken), shredded bamboo shoots, black mushrooms (thinly sliced). I have no idea why some likes to dip the rolled-up spring rolls into a batter before deep-frying. To me it seems so unnecessary.

I make Lo Bak Gou and Wu Tau Gou regularly. I call Lo Bak Gou "Turnip cake" as this name is used in most of the recipes. I always made turnip cake with the kind of turnips in the first picture. I am not sure if using radishes (in the second picture) to make turnip cake would taste good. You probably need a lot of them since they are so small. They probably are much more expensive too. I looked at the recipe of Lo Bak Gou posted at About.com. I tried that method once (mixing raw turnips with rice flour, and then steam the mixture). The result was no good. The cake turned out very powder-like and I could not taste the turnip's sweetness. I have since learned the "keys" of making good turnip cake: Key 1: You have to cook the turnips first before mixing it with rice flour. The way I make it: peel the turnips, then shred the turnips with a food processor. Cook the shredded turnip with some water until soft (about 20 to 30 minutes) over medium heat. Drain away the excess water to a bowl. Add white pepper and salt and sugar to taste. Use the excess water to dissolve the rice flour and corn starch (2-3 tsp), create a medium-thick batter. Pour the batter back in the pot with the turnip, continue to apply heat and stir until the batter/turnip mixture just start to boil. Add in the dried shrimps/black mushrooms/lap cheong/whatever you want to add flavor to the turnip cake. (Note that you should lightly fry the dried shrimp, black mushrooms, lap cheong before hand.) Transfer the mixture to a rectangular cake pan. Steam this mixture for about 30 minutes. The turnip cake should then harden. You may store this in the refrigerator up to a few weeks. When ready to serve, cut the turnip cake into 1/2 inch pieces and lightly fry over slow heat for 10 to 15 minute to slightly brown the skin. Serve with soy sauce. Key 2: the ratio of turnip to rice flour. Too little rice flour, the cake will be very soft and fall apart easily. Too much rice flour, the cake will be hard and you cannot taste the turnip. My experience showed that the ratio of turnip to rice flour should be around 5 to 1 by weight. I used 2 to 3 lb of turnip, and 8 oz of rice flour. This amount will yield about 15 to 20 pieces of turnip cakes the size that you see in dim sum restaurants. How much water you use to dissolve the rice flour is also a key to making good turnip cakes. Too much water, the cake will not harden. Too little water, the cake will be too hard. You have to feel it. The batter mixture from turnip/rice-flour/water should be kind of like pan-cake batter -- just liquid enough to flow slowly. The recipes give you some idea to start, but you have to adjust. The recipe for Toro Cake is almost interchangeable with the one for Turnip Cake. Just be careful that toro soaks up water quickly while cooking. You need to keep stirring the toro while cooking, and add water if needed, so it won't stick to the bottom of the pot.

Jo-mel: Lu is the ancient name for modern-day ShangDong. Chinese tradition has it that many ancient names for provinces, or just simply "regions", are only single-character in length (unlike the modern-day naming consisting of 2 or even 3 characters). While used as the name of a place, then such word should not be taken for it's literal meaning.

The quote statements are not quite correct. The term "dumpling" for translating Cantonese food items is used very broadly. Dumpling can be used to describe wonton, or shui gao (similar to the jiaozi in Mandarin). It that case, they are boiled. Dumpling can be used to describe siu mei, har gow and such as dim sum dishes. In that case, they are steamed or fried (e.g. fried wonton). As for fillings, they can be pork, beef, shrimp, chicken and in recent years scallops and even lobsters, depending on what "dumpling" one is referring to.

When cooking clam dishes, why cook the raw clams directly in the sauce? I saw Ming Tsai (East meets West) did the same thing in his show cooking clams with black been sauce. Like many restaurant chefs, when I cook raw clams I always preboil them in water first. It serves a couple of purposes: (1) The chalky taste that typically comes with any shellfish (clams, mussels, etc.) would be drained with the preboiled water. (2) Often times you may find "bad" clams, which are empty clam shells holding mud inside. If you don't preboil the clams and pick out the bad ones and cook them directly in your sauce from raw, you risk getting dirty mud directly into your sauce and ruin all your work.

This is very interesting. Is this a ceremonial thing that they let you break up the bread. When you said "break up" did you mean the bread is torn by hand into pieces and tossed into a bowl? Any meaning to this procedure? Would you provide more details please (I have never seen anything like it)? I know in Hong Kong there is a Bagger's Chicken dish: the chicken is wrapped in lotus leaves, then covered with wet clay and baked. When the chicken is cooked, the clay casting (now dry and hard) will be wheeled on a cart to the table. The guest of honor will be asked to use a mallet to crack up the clay. Then the waiter will pry away the rest of the clay, remove the lotus leaves and take the chicken out for serving. What are the Chinese characters for Yan rou Pao mo?

Dried scallop is considered a delicacy and has an expensive price tag to prove it too. In Cantonese cooking, dried scallops are used to make soup or portridge, steamed eggs, or spread cooked dried scallops on top of cooked vegetables (especially bean sprout leaves) and melons. Dried scallop is also the main ingredient in making the increasingly popular XO chili sauce. As an main entre, I cook whole dried scallops and whole galics in a sauce that is primarily oyster-sauce based, over slow fire for over one hour.

As said by some other readers before, foo yu is good as a chicken marinade or condiment for roast chickens and plain rice and jook. Also good is to use it to stir-fry certain vegetables. I use it to stir-fry bitter melons and "budda's feasts" (vegetable combination with fu jook, cellophane noodles and such). I don't think I am alone on this, but I sometimes use foo yu instead of butter to spread on my toasts or plain bread. I figured if the Frenches can love eating blue cheese by itself, I can eat foo yu just as it is. If you are into grilling or barbecuing chickens, in addition to using foo yu as a marinade you can also use it to make your basting mixture: some foo yu, some honey/sugar, some soy sauce. Use it to bast your grilled chicken.

I think this saying is rediculous. I can improve my perceived social status just as easily as holding my chopsticks a little higher? Where you hold your chopsticks is all a matter of personal preference and skill-level. I see most people hold their chopsticks in the mid to high end. Children and non-Chinese who are beginners in using chopsticks tend to hold them in the lower end because they have not trained their finger muscles adequate enough to grab on to food. I like to hold my chopsticks at the high end for greatest leverage in picking up the biggest pieces of meats the farthest away from me on the dinner table. When eating dumplings, if you cannot hold the dumpling firmly enough with your chopsticks to pick it up, the next best way to do it is try to hold your chopsticks firmly with a 1/2-inch gap between them, then use them as a "fork lift" to lift up the dumpling. Yes yes, you can poke into the dumplings/dim sum if you like. And if you do that, why use one pair of chopsticks? Just use one chopstick would do.

When one does translations from Chinese (especially Cantonese) to English, one needs to look at the possibilities of special terms (which are composed of multiple Chinese characters) and cannot just try to translate one Chinese character literally at a time. In common Cantonese usage, and especially in Hong Kong, many terms are direct translations from English by sound only. For example, Taxi becomes "Dic See" and Bus becomes "Ba See", Store becomes "See Daw". In the forementioned article, 芝士士的 really needs to be decomposed into 芝士 (which is Hong Kong-Cantonese for Cheese) and 士的 (which is Hong Kong-Cantonese for Steak). Trying to look up these characters' individual meanings in a Chinese dictionary is a waste of efforts. Agreed, this takes someone who knows the Cantonese dialect (and probably the Hong Kong version of it) to get used to. But to those who do (like myself), it does make sense. However, that restaurant owner may not have thought of the possibility of how such terms would be interpreted from Mandarin or other dialect speakers, or some native English speakers who also learned Chinese. ------ About the oldest Chinese language (I assume it really meant Chinese dialect) in America, if I got my history lessons right shoudn't that be Toysanese rather than Cantonese? They (Toysanese) were the ones who got recruited over to the USA to build the railroads in the 1840's. Granted many of them probably spoke Cantonese as well, but more than likely they spoke Toysanese among themselves. Would it be that Toysanese be considered as Cantonese? If so, that's a big mistake because they are 2 distinct dialects. Cantonese might have become more predominant in later years (this century) as there were more immigrants coming to the USA from Hong Kong. ----- As for the origin of PuPu Platter. I heard in another Internet discussion forum from some Hawaiians that PuPu is a Hawaiian word. (Sorry forgot what they said it meant, somelike like appertizer or snack?) So the translation from 宝宝盘 to PuPu platter might have started in Hawaii's Chinese restaurants. To Hawaiian's natives, this does not have any negative connotation.

I beg your pordon. You are right. I took a second look at the picture again. They do look like choy sum than bok choy. I was misled by the white color to lead to my conclusion. Bok choy's shape is rounder at the bottom.

The one on the left should be Bok Choy ( 白菜 ), not Choy Sum. I am from Hong Kong and at least that's what they are called in Hong Kong.

Is there any reason to boil the joong for 8 and a half hours? When I made mine the first time, I boiled them for 2 hours. I found that the texture of the glutinous rice, mung beans and peanuts were pretty much gone. I reduced the boiling time to 1 and a half hour then I could still taste the difference between glutinuous rice and mung bean. I cannot imagine boiling joong for that long. Wouldn't they turn out to be paste-like? What are the reasons for having to boil them for over 8 hours? Was it that you were boiling them in batches, each batch for 2 to 3 hours?