a culinary genealogy
Below, view all our posts in chronological order, starting with the most recent. To browse recipes by category, course, or collection, visit our Recipe Index. Also be sure to check out our How-To section and Chinese Ingredients Glossary.
This spicy Sichuan Okra Salad was inspired by a restaurant dish we tried at Sichuan Mountain House in Manhattan. You don’t necessarily think of okra when you think of Chinese cuisine, but this dish puts okra’s delicate flavor and unique texture on full display! Recipe Inspiration This past summer, Kaitlin and Sarah were in Manhattan’s
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Beef with string beans is a simple, delicious one pan dinner to serve with steamed rice. It’s also a great meal prep option—you can marinate the meat and mix the sauce in advance (either the night before or in the morning), and then whip up the dish when you come home! Searing Green Beans Unlike
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The Mid-Autumn Festival, after Lunar New Year, is the second most important Chinese holiday of the year. It’s a time to get together with family, eat, worship the moon, and celebrate the fall harvest! In this post, we’ll talk about how to celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival with friends and family! When is the Mid-Autumn Festival? The Mid-Autumn
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It’s mooncake time again: the Mid-Autumn Festival! Lotus Mooncakes with Salted Egg Yolks are so popular that many readers requested a recipe after seeing my Savory Mooncake post. To my understanding, this filling combination is the top choice for most Cantonese folks––Bill included––when it comes to mooncakes. I originally posted this recipe in September of 2016,
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Cantonese Bitter Melon Soup with Pork Bones is a great way to eat end-of-summer bitter melon. Bitter Melon is a superfood—one of the healthiest vegetables (fruits?) you can eat! Pork mellows out its strong flavor, and as we head into fall, this is the perfect transitional soup. This is our second bitter melon recipe this
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You wouldn’t think so, but poaching is one of the easiest and most rewarding ways to prepare chicken breast. The result is juicy, tender chicken that both preserves the pure flavor of the meat and serves as an excellent blank canvas for spicy chili oil or clean ginger scallion oil (pictured here). In this post,
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After 2020, there’s a huge backlog of delayed nuptials set to happen over the next two years. I’m looking ahead to 2 weddings, and Sarah already has 3 dates saved in her calendar! Not to mention Sarah got married back in June! So we thought it was a good time to break down an important
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Hi Woks of Life readers, It’s been a hectic summer to say the least. We’ve been keeping up with the blog, finishing up the manuscript for our upcoming cookbook (out Fall 2022!), and we’re now in the midst of weekly 3-day cookbook photo shoots. (Yes, we’re doing the food photos for the book ourselves, which
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Red Bean Mochi is a great way to use up leftover red bean paste you might have in the freezer from making our other red bean treats, like Chinese bakery red bean bread, mooncakes, or red bean buns (forever my childhood love). Japanese vs. Chinese Mochi Chinese mochi is not as sweet as Japanese mochi.
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Back in early June (when the outlook for the summer was a little bit brighter and more carefree), I had a long weekend in Chicago to visit one of my best friends. While we’re back in more uncertain times, I still want to report back on the sights and the foods, whether it’ll help you
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This 20-Minute Chicken Pho recipe will have you slurping a bowl of noodles in record time. It’s fast, easy, refreshing, and most of all—tasty. Note: This recipe was originally published in May 2017. We have since updated it with metric measurements. Enjoy! FAST PHO I’ve made no secret of my love for pho. Exhibit A:
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This recipe for stir-fried cucumbers with bean threads and wood ears is a tasty Chinese vegetarian dish that you can serve as part of a larger meal, or as a meal in and of itself with a side of steamed rice. It’s all about texture—crunchy, chewy, crispy—all mixed together! Have Lots of Cucumbers? In our
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Pasta alla Norma is a Sicilian dish of fried eggplant and pasta in a tomato sauce, usually served with ricotta salata (a drier, salted version of ricotta). It’s one of my favorite dishes to make with summer eggplant and tomatoes when we have an abundance of them in the garden! Cooking from the Garden Carrying
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Stir-fried bitter melon with eggs is a classic Chinese dish. It’s the kind of no-fuss recipe you whip up quickly on a weeknight without having to defrost anything or chop a million things. Truly my kind of recipe. The bitterness of the melon (also known as bitter gourd) is balanced by the richness of the
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In the same way that Western cuisine often makes use of lemon and lime zest, many Chinese dishes benefit from the addition of dried mandarin orange peel (chénpí, 陳皮) and other citrus fruit rinds (guǒpí, 果皮). In this article, we’ll talk about dried mandarin orange peel in particular (also sometimes referred to as dried tangerine
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This stir-fry of Eggplant with Chicken and Thai Basil involves many of my favorite things to eat, and it’s a quick and easy meal to boot. The fragrant combination of aromatics, including Thai basil, wakes up your taste buds. Add a little eggplant and chicken (or omit the meat to make this vegetarian), and you have
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This spicy garlic shiitake mushrooms with glass noodles is another quick summer dish that you can whip up without too much time at the stove. It’s vegetarian (as long as you sub in vegetarian oyster sauce), easy to make, and only has 10 ingredients! Garlic & Glass Noodles: The Perfect Combination Consider this recipe yet
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Korean Fried Cauliflower is a special, indulgent treat, and the recipe is entirely plant-based / vegan! Big, crunchy chunks of cauliflower are tossed in the same delicious soy garlic glaze we use in our popular Korean Fried Chicken recipe. It takes a few extra steps to fry the cauliflower, but it’s well worth the results.
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