Lemon Chicken!

When I was in college, the Chinese delivery guy knew the code to my dorm.  I lived on Chinese delivery for my first three years of college, until a sorority sister found a caterpillar in her lo mein and that was it for me until there was another place to order from, because yuck.

I order Chinese occasionally and lemon chicken is one of my favorites.  This recipe from Ken Hom is much better than delivery unless you're in the mood for some battered and fried chicken.  This chicken isn't crunchy because there's no batter.  The sauce is much more citrus-y than some delivery places that make a cloying, overly sweet lemon sauce.  I doubled the sauce so that it would flavor my rice.  However, the recipe below is a single batch of the sauce. The recipe is relatively simple but it does require a bit of physical work because you have to drain your wok and wipe it down.  So if you have a wok with short handles, oven mitts are a good thing to have around.

Stir Fried Pork with Garlic Scapes

A few weeks ago, my husband and I visited my in-laws.  They took us to the West Side Market and I bought some garlic scapes on a whim.  I'd never cooked them before, but my mother in law said they were pretty awesome.  She suggested that they would taste good with pork.  I looked all over the internet for a tasty sounding pork and garlic scape recipe and stumbled across this one from Tigers and Strawberries, one of my favorite cooking blogs.  I'm sad that it hasn't been updated in a while, I've tried so many of her recipes!  I modified this one a little because I didn't have time to go to the grocery store and made it with what I had already.  So, no pressed tofu or dried mushrooms.  But it still worked out really well, and the garlic scapes really are quite tasty.  They have the consistency of Chinese long beans unless they're blanched.  I wanted a bit of a crunch, so I didn't bother.  They taste like garlic, but lighter and crunchy.

This dish is pretty quick to make if you marinate the pork and then chop everything while it's sitting in the fridge.

My frog chopstick rest is fabulous. 

Paper-Wrapped Chicken

This dish is probably in my top five list of most labor intensive dishes.  It looks cool, but it took a long time to assemble the packets, and I had help!  But, it was a fun step outside of my comfort zone.  Wait, what?  I'm supposed to wrap chicken in wax paper and then deep fry it in my wok?!  Uh...

Having never attempted anything like this before, I suspected that my neat little packets of chicken and veggies would turn into a peanut oil flavored mess wrapped in soggy wax paper. While some of the packets did get some oil in, most of them were fine! The marinated chicken was tender, the vegetables were flavorful and still had a little crunch to them, and the addition of some prosciutto to the packets was a nice way to add some saltiness.

Here they are before I fried them.  Packets filled with chicken, prosciutto, red chili, ginger, and cilantro.

Hot and Sour Soup!

A while back, I made some hot and sour soup from Williams Sonoma's Soup.  It was "meh."  Kind of bland.  It seemed like it was trying to capture the flavor of hot and sour soup without authentic ingredients.  The broth was very thin, and the "hot" and "sour" aspects were very, very faint.

Then, I tried Ken Hom's recipe.  This is an entirely different animal.  The broth has the right consistency.  The flavors are punchy, the mushrooms provide a great texture, and the egg is done right.  This soup tastes like what I've eaten at my favorite Chinese restaurants.  It doesn't take very long to make.

I was so happy that this looked like the real thing!

Dinner FAIL (Dan Dan Noodles)

I love dan dan noodles.  So, when I saw Martin Yan's recipe in my copy of Feast, I was eager to try it out.  However, I made one critical mistake.  I saw "sesame paste" in the ingredient list and figured hey, tahini is sesame paste, right? Wrong.  Well, yes, tahini is sesame paste.  But, it's not the same thing as East Asian sesame paste, as I was about to discover upon eating my rather unappetizing looking creation.  The sauce smelled quite good when it was sitting harmlessly in a bowl.  Sesame, soy sauce, and  hint of spice.  But, as soon as I cooked in the work with the chicken, it became a gooey, sticky mess.  It was even harder to toss it with the noodles.  But I soldiered on, determined to enjoy my noodles.  After taking a few bites, I found myself trying to like it, but the rational part of my mind realized that this was a massive dinner fail.  The tahini was too creamy, it felt like I had taken my noodles and smothered them in bleu cheese dressing.  The sesame taste was overpowering.  The texture was weird. And it just looked nasty. 

This does not look like the pictures on Google image search...

General Tso's Chicken

My husband and I are fighting the sick.  You know what's awesome when you're feeling crappy?  Chinese food!  Obviously, Chinese delivery or take out, because who wants to cook while sick?  I made this dish a few days ago, but it seems appropriate to post about now, since I had Chinese for lunch.  I think only college students do Chinese food twice in one day, so my post from tonight's dinner will probably be Easy Soup That Requires Minimal Effort.     

Appetite for China never fails to provide awesome Chinese recipes!  This recipe for General Tso's tastes like the real thing (well, as "real" as I've ever had, which isn't saying a lot).  The original recipe called for chicken thighs, which I'll use next time, but for this batch I used chicken breast and it worked fine. 

This is much better than grocery store buffet General Tso's because even though it's fried, the batter is light and the chicken pieces aren't gristly or fatty. I doubled the sauce (which is reflected in the recipe below), and used chili garlic sauce instead of chili paste, which I couldn't get.  The extra sauce is great on rice! The tomato paste makes it tangy, the sugar adds a little sweetness, but I added some extra chilis for a kick. Not only is this good, it's easy.  I don't make a lot of fried crispy food, but I'll definitely keep this recipe around for when I do!  I served it with some steamed broccoli like in Chinese take out. 

Mapo Ramen

Who didn't live on ramen in college?  You could eat ten meals for a dollar, and most of the time it was better than what they were serving in the cafeteria.  My 18 year old self didn't care that I was eating my monthly salt intake in one convenient, microwavable Styrofoam cup.  Technically, my first "cooking" happened while I made ramen in my dorm room during my freshman year of college.  I invented "gourmet ramen," which was a Styrofoam of instant ramen with one packet each of soy sauce and hot mustard from the previous night's Chinese delivery dinner. I think once I went so far as to get some scallions from the salad bar to put on my ramen after I nuked it. 

This ramen is different.  No super salty flavor pack or Styrofoam is involved. Oh, and it also tastes really good.  I've posted before about how much I love mapo tofu.  The same blog that created the awesome mapo tofu recipe I use added one for mapo ramen.  The thing I love about this dish is that it's a soup flavored like the spicy mapo tofu sauce I love so much.  Plus, it has noodles, and you can't go wrong with noodles.  This is enough food for a meal in itself. 

Mapo Tofu

Mapo tofu is a staple dish in my house; I've been making it since I found the recipe for it on Appetite for China.  It's really easy to buy some ground pork and freeze it in 6 oz portions.  Three of the ingredients (black bean paste, chili bean paste, and Sichuan peppercorns) require specialty shops, but they don't go bad for a long time, so one you've gotten them, you're fine.  I can never find fermented black beans, so I buy black bean paste from my local Korean supermarket.  I buy the chili bean paste there as well.  I get the Sichuan peppercorns from Penzeys.  The sauce is a great mix of spicy and savory, and the Sichuan peppercorn provides an interesting tingle on the tongue.  That said, don't overdo it with the peppercorns or your mouth will feel strange.  I don't think this dish is terribly wine friendly, so I drink almond milk with it.

Jade Chicken. Or, Why Fried Mint is Awesome

The first Asian cookbook I bought was Martin Yan's Quick and Easy.  Stir fry was one of the first cooking methods I attempted because it's quick and doesn't involve tons of prep work.  Initially, I failed to heat the oil hot enough, which resulted in below average stir fry.  Then, I read Yan's introduction in Quick and Easy and learned how to properly heat the oil to a high enough temperature.  Since I got a round bottomed wok, my stir fries are infinitely better.  If you have a gas stove, round bottomed woks are awesome. 

This recipe for Jade Chicken is one of the first stir fry dishes I ever made.  I still make it pretty often.  It's simple and the mixture of crispy fried mint and mint that was stirred into the sauce is unexpected and different.  The crispy fried mint is my favorite, and I usually make extra to put on top of the chicken.  The broccoli side dish is broccoli stir fried with ginger and Chinese cooking wine.  I love it because it takes 5 minutes to make.  Really.  5 minutes.  I make rice in my rice cooker, it's idiot proof and definitely one of my MVP kitchen appliances.  I'm not a huge fan of plain white rice, so I put a little rice vinegar in mine after I dish it out.

Sichuan Wontons - These are Seriously Awesome!

Last night I made Pasta a la Stuff in a hurry and didn't feel like posting about it.  Instead, I'll post about something I made a few weeks ago that was awesome!  Dumplings and wontons are some of my favorite things to eat, but they're so time consuming!  Generally I like to make a big batch and then freeze some so that I can have them more than one night.  There's a restaurant near my office that serves "spicy Chinese ravioli" as an appetizer and it has some of the best dumpling sauce I've ever had.  It's a spicy, tangy soy sauce with sliced green onions in it.  The "ravioli" are served swimming in the sauce, which is part of the reason I love it so much.  The sauce on these wontons comes close, but I want to tweak it and see if I can get it closer to the sauce I've had in the restaurant.  I found this recipe for Sichuan wontons on one of my favorite food blogs, Appetite for China.  Everything I've made from there has been amazing. 

Despite being labor intensive, these are easy to make.  Dave and I made them while watching TV.  Instead of eating them as an appetizer, these were a meal!  I was afraid it wouldn't be enough food so I made a side of Random Noodles (barely in the picture) that turned out to be totally unnecessary. These wontons are excellent, and the freeze and reheat well.  A few days after I made them, I reheated some of the frozen ones and they were just fine, I just cooked them a little longer.