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.
With the Spring Festival/Chinese New Year celebrations coming to a close, we’ve been reminiscing a bit about our time in China. While our celebration lasted only a day here in the U.S., it was at least a weeklong affair back in China, where the Spring Festival is far and away the most important holiday of the year.
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For readers who’ve been to or lived in some parts of China, a big dish of “big plate chicken” (大盘鸡, da pan ji) is like coming home. It’s one of those dishes that has caught on like wildfire in larger Chinese cities, and many restaurants have added it to their menus. This Chinese chicken stew
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Soy Sauce Chicken or “See Yao Gai” is a quintessential Cantonese favorite, found hanging under heat lamps in many Chinatown restaurant windows. You’ll find it near the poached chickens, roast ducks, and roast pork. All have their merits, but a Soy Sauce Chicken done right is tough to beat. It’s Judy’s favorite food to pick up when in Chinatown,
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You may have seen these light-as-air Chinese swiss rolls in a Chinese bakery near you. Not to be mistaken with traditional Swiss rolls, we wanted to make the lighter, Asian-style Chinese Swiss roll recipe. It’s composed of a very light and fluffy sponge cake that’s only slightly sweet, and a thin layer of sweetened whipped cream. Bakeries
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Back in good old 2014, my parents and sister posted a recipe for foolproof pizza dough from the Beijing homestead. There you will find a perfectly lovely recipe for a Wild Mushroom & Garlic White Pizza and funny reflections on our obsession with this favoritest of foods. More on this in a sec. Well the
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Ever since this little pup came into our lives, we’ve taken to writing about the subject on this here blog. If you need to catch up, check out our first post on the matter here. Today, we’re going to talk about how we went about the process of picking a puppy from a litter and
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Buddha’s delight, or luo han zhai 罗汉斋 (Mandarin), or lo han jai (Cantonese), is a vegetarian dish well-known in Chinese and Buddhist cuisine. The dish is traditionally consumed by Buddhist monks (who are vegetarians), but it has also grown in popularity throughout the world as a common dish available as a vegetarian or healthy option in Chinese restaurants. The
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A Chinese New Year is not a New Year without fish, and you MUST have two of them: one for New Year’s Eve and one for Chinese New Year’s Day. That’s why, on the eve of Chinese New Year, we’re posting this Chinese Braised Fish (red cooked fish), or hong shao yu recipe for all
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This savory turnip cake (sometimes called radish) lo bak go is a very traditional dish often served at dim sum houses, and when I was a kid, it always showed up on the table on Chinese New Year’s Day. As a result, it’s been etched in my mind as a wonderfully delicious tradition. Having sampled versions
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Vegan char siu bao or cha siu bao (i.e. vegan roast pork buns). Does that even make any sense? Well, yes and no. Obviously, there is NO pork in these buns. But they taste remarkably similar to the traditional pork cha siu bao that many of us know and love. So, if you’re looking for
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Pea Tips or pea leaves are gaining popularity as more people are informed of their sweet, delicious existence and search for them on Chinese restaurant menus. We’ve already covered a recipe for these, but we wanted to do a redux version with new photos. Pea tips are the tender leaves of a pea plant and they
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As we mentioned in our Chinese New Year Menu post (2015), Braised Pork Belly with Arrowhead Root or cí gū mèn nan ròu in Mandarin 慈菇焖腩肉 (the dish’s name really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?) is a must-have dish in our house for Chinese New Year. In Cantonese dialect, Bill’s family has always called
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The Year of the Goat begins on February 19th this year. In China, Chinese New Year is celebrated with travel, travel, and more travel. Usually, this is due to the fact everyone working in the big cities travel back to their home towns and villages to reunite with their families, eat good food, including traditional and authentic
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This Coconut Curry Chicken recipe is beyond easy. You can literally start cooking before the prep work even starts. I don’t know why it took us this long to publish our coconut curry chicken recipe. It’s one of my absolute favorite meals. Curried chicken is a quick, crowd-pleasing one-pot dinner that’s great for a weeknight. Not
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When I perfected the recipe for fried calamari, it was a total no-brainer to make this Cantonese Salt and Pepper Squid. Prepared in a similar manner to Cantonese Salt & Pepper Pork Chops, the fried pieces of calamari are tossed in a mixture of crunchy stir-fried garlic, ginger, and hot green peppers. Traditionally, the squid
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This butternut squash lasagna is the perfect winter food. It’s warm, cheesy, and comforting…awesome for curling up on the couch in front of the TV with your dinner. The way I look at it, most of your run-of-the-mill lasagna is pretty summery–tomatoes, basil…maybe some eggplant or zucchini. THIS butternut squash lasagna recipe features ingredients that
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If you’re not sure why we’re doing this post, or who this adorable pup is, click here to catch up. (Don’t worry, you didn’t miss much!) We’ll be sharing our experiences as new puppy parents soon, but for now, we’ve got pictures. Hence, Barley’s first snow – her first playtime session in the white stuff!
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Shumai or Siu Mai wasn’t necessarily always our first choice at Sunday dim sum. It was usually dominated by steamed pork ribs, chive dumplings, sticky rice, and congee. But in the end, we always had a little room on the table for some traditional shumai, and it would end up on the table in one way or
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