Seitch

I may be wrong but I think the English name is giant water bug.

Hooray for Dejah!! I don't exactly know when we all started to use oyster sauce in every dish, but my Gawd it's a freaking epidemic. I swear there are subliminal messages everywhere put up by Lee Kum Kee to get us hooked. Until she passed away several years ago, I used to eat with my mother at least once a week and enjoyed her cooking. At her house and back in the village we always treated oyster sauce as a luxury item for special occasions like birthdays, New Years, banquets, etc. and ONLY used for dipping poached pork or white cut chicken, etc. NEVER, NEVER used as a flavouring ingredient in cooking. (the only time I remember having oyster sauce in the small restaurants near the old village when I returned in latter years was on gai lan). Indiscriminate usage of oyster sauce would be considered economically profligate, and worse, a muddy obfuscation of the flavour of a dish, making several dishes at the same dinner have the same taste. My Elder Cousin who had about a thousand Chinese, "western", and pastry recipes committed to memory because he was semi-literate, calls oyster sauce over usage "dishonest" and the sign of a poor cook. ← Those are interesting experiences with oyster sauce usage, Ben. My family experience with oyster sauce is that when we were kids we'd use oyster sauce, LKK premium, to mix into our rice and we'd use quite a bit too. We all gradually grew out of that practice though. Does anyone know where to get oyster essence? It's the oyster flavoring used to make the oyster sauce. I remember our neighbor got a big 10 gallon can of the stuff and he gave us several bottles. It had very good flavor without all the sugar that's normally in regular oyster sauce.

No problem Sir! Thanks for all your pictorials and recipes. That's what in-laws are for.

With taro cakes, you control the size of the taro cubes. Usually the cubes are about 1/4" cubes. Just like cooking the daikon only with less water. Taro is hard and even when fully cooked, added to the slurry and then recooked into cakes there should be discernable cubes of taro in the finished cake. I don't think you should work about losing taro in the finished cake. If this happens, then adjust the size of the taro cubes. If you substitute potatoes for taro you'll get potato cakes and those are also very good.

The one instruction that stands out most in my mind regarding making radish cake is that the amount of water to flour is key. Stay away from wheat flour and sticky rice flour. Use only the regular rice flour. What happens when you cook sticky rice flour? You get nian gao or simulated mochi. Radish cake should not be sticky but neither should it be hard and easily cubeable like that stuff they serve at the dim sum houses. Think about those little, sweetened, round, white rice cakes that are steamed in little shallow bowls. Sometimes they're harder and sometimes they're more resilant and the only reason for this is the water to flour ratio, as the only ingredients used are pulverized soaked long grain rice, water and sugar. The consistency of the water/flour slurry once all ingredients have been added should definitely be on the runny side. Think about how unsweetened condensed milk looks like when you pour it from the can. The look should be like that, but the actual consistency a little thicker. Just thick enough to cover the back of a spoon and when you run your finger along the back of the spoon, the cleaned trail stays. Mix one package of long grain rice flour with cold water until the flour disolves completely. You want it a little thicker at this point because you'll be adding the daikon and the daikon cooking liquid later. The daikon should be cut into thin sticks, maybe 3/16" by 3/16" by 2.5". Cook them with water until they're cooked through and no longer crunchy by boiling but not with too much water. You want maybe 2/3 daikon to 1/3 water left. Keep in mind that once the radish is cooked the dimensions will no longer hold. The idea is to keep enough texture to taste the radish in the finished cake. As for the meat, we would use ground pork stir fried with chopped Chinese sausage, a few chopped shallots, chopped re-hydrated dried shrimp all stir fried together till the pork is cooked. Allow the daikon mixture to cool down from boiling and add to the intial slurry of water and rice flour. Mix in the stir fried ingredients and add salt to taste. Also add a little sugar 1/2 teaspoon. Make sure the consistency is as described in the paragraph above. Adjust with more rice flour and water if needed. Put the mixture in a greased 2" high pan and steam until cooked, approx. 45 min to an hour. The texture should be firm enough to slice while still warm but you'll get cleaner looking slices once it cools. Experiment with the amount of water and flour until you achieve the consistency you're looking for. Also experiement with the amount of daikon used. I prefer my radish cake with more radish and on the softer side. Sorry my instructions are so vague but given your extensive cooking experience I'm sure you'll be able to create a radish cake to your liking.

You can try this vegetable and see if you like it but the flavor turns me off. I'd describe it as herby and dirt like. A particularly noxious way of enjoying the flavor is to let the plant grow tall and woody and then digging up the roots to use in soup. All supposed to be very good for you but very bad tasting to me.

Definitely, yau fan tastes best when the ingredients are cooked together starting with the uncooked rice. That's how my family makes it.

Hmmm...maybe not enough salt was used. The salted eggs made at home should not be stinky at all.

Thanks Seitch. I will just follow your instructions and experiment with some. I don't use salty eggs too often. But I really had it with these markets/manufacturers carrying bad products. Once I take the eggs out of the brine, how long do you think I can keep the salty eggs? A few months? Possible? Any longer? Or they have to be consumed right away or else they turn bad? ← You're welcome! Put them in the refrigerator and they'll last for months. The salt is a great preservative. Just be glad that the eggs in the market were just bad and not artificially concocted versions that are supposedly sold by unscrupulous individuals in China.

It's not hard at all to make salted eggs. Basically you just use a large non reactive container such as a 10 gallon plastic tub and fill with a couple of eggs, add plenter of water and dissolve table salt till the eggs float, then add 4-5 dozen eggs or so, add a plate to weight down the eggs while leaving a couple inches of water over the plate. Wait for 3-4 weeks and crack open an egg to check if it's ready. If the yolk is not hard enough then wait a few more days and check again till they're ready. Some people add tea leaves in the belief that'll help achieve darker colored egg yolks but I don't believe it makes a difference.

Wow. I just started reading this blog on tuesday. Sadly it seems the author commited suicide a few days ago... ← What made you say the above statement? ← Unfortunately it's true. http://chinalife.typepad.com/ - read the comments and here in the first post and comments. http://luolingling.blogspot.com/

As I understand it, one removes the hard bits such as the legs, heads and the hard carapace, leaving the soft belly portion. This is chopped up with pork and steamed sorta like the pork patty that is sometimes cooked with salt fish. The taste for this dish is an acquired one.

Those are water beetles.

I generally use an entire package of chrysanthemum flowers that I buy from Ten Ren Teas in a large pot with 2.5 qurts or so of water. I also usually add a handful or two of jin yin hua (honey suckle) which is available in Chinese apothecary shops. The jin yin hua is also cooling to the body as is the chrysanthemum. This I boil for about 40 mins on a low flame. Strain out the solids and add rock sugar to taste.

The Lan Chi brand, which was highly recommended to me by my cousin, I've found to be really salty. I think the saltiness overwhelms dominates any other flavors. I'd also have to agree that the 'old lady' is sorta old looking to me. I'd call her ah-mo.

Yes, Yank Sing is definitely my fave hot sauce. Great flavor without too many hard chili seeds. The bits of radish, black beans and garlic are also nice. The price is a bit higher but not excessively so. However, I would not refuse this hot sauce either. It comes a close 2nd to Yank Sing. The flavor of the sichuan peppercorns is prominent. The hard chili seeds can be a bit distracting though.

Actually, camphor trees are grown for decorative purposes in the US. Provided that that your local climate will support the tree and that space is available it should be easy to grow your own camphor. In California, camphor trees are often planted by cities for shade.

I would definitely shop around until I found a traditional beaten iron wok wit the type of handle you are comfortable with and which will also fit well on your burner. Traditional woks are not stainless steel. [edit] They are carbon steel, which will rust. Cast iron is probably not a good idea not only because of weight but brittleness as well.

I think the price of this dumpling at the restaurant I frequent is US $4.50.

Whether the skin is pierced seems more to the luck of the draw. The times I've had this the skin is usually not broken. Sometimes it's pretty fragile though.

Probably meant young pea shoots.

I've never had a problem from eating lychees. I do prefer longans though because the flavor is non acidic and it's a supposedly balanced fruit as opposed to yang.

Maybe there's different kinds of dried bamboo shoots. The dried and reconstituted ones that I've had definitely had a pungent smell to them. Pungent to the point where if someone didn't know where the smell was coming from they'd be wary of the dish.

Some lotus roots are crunchy and some are starchy. Does anyone know how to tell whether a given root is one or the other without actually buying a few and cooking them? I prefer crunchy myself.

Does anyone have a recipe for suan tsai? I also enjoy it with my niu rou mian. ← Chopped pickled mustard green Mince Garlic Sesame oil Salt Vinegar Sliced hot chilli peppers Combine mustard green, mince garlic and chilli peppers and stir fry it in a pan. Dash of salt and couple teaspoons of vinegar. And finally drizzle the tsuan tsai with sesame oil. Make sure to rinse off the pickle brine of the mustard green prior chopping. ← Hey AzianBrewer! Thanks for the recipe.