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.
I LOVE Niçoise Salads (Salads Niçoise?)—a brilliant combination of lettuce, tomatoes, olives, canned tuna, eggs, green beans, and potatoes. I love the big blocks of color and all the different textures. It’s everything I want in a big dinner salad: variety, a hardy protein of some kind, hard boiled eggs cooked until the yolks are
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This Easy Roasted Cauliflower Stir-fry is inspired by a dish that we order at many restaurants around Beijing. When we first arrived here, we immediately set to trying as many restaurants as we could. Many of the Hunan, Sichuan, and “jack-of-all-trades” restaurants (homestyle cooking with no exclusive regional cuisine) feature this “dry pot” (gan guo) dish of
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If you frequent any good dim sum restaurants, you’re probably familiar with this chicken pan-fried noodles dish, called “Gai See Chow Mein” in Cantonese. We always order Gai See Chow Mein when I meet my sisters and all of our kids for Sunday Dim sum. But we only order it after we’ve gone through all
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A few weeks ago, I was spending a rare afternoon moment channel surfing in front of the TV. We have 900 Chinese channels here in Beijing, and 10 English ones, so…this is what channel surfing at our place usually looks like: CNN: Still talking about the same thing they were talking about two days ago. Discovery Channel:
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With Mother’s Day coming up in a few days (mark your calendars, forgetful fools! May 11th), we had to post a Mother’s Day Brunch recipe. I remember when we would make breakfast in bed for our mom growing up. We’d get up early, and I would scour the house for something resembling a breakfast tray. Kaitlin
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In the field of evolutionary psychology, researchers have found that conflict among siblings is often the result of a basic drive for each sibling to carve out their own niche within the family. To put it in other terms, a family member with no niche is evolutionarily useless. This is part of the reason why
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During the workweek, I actually have a pretty flexible schedule. My job involves a lot of work that can be done online remotely (read: me sitting on the couch in my pajamas all day, tapping furiously at the keyboard for eight straight hours), plus a lot of running around in the city and meeting people
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Cold dishes are a common appetizer in China, especially in Beijing. All menus have a variety of these cold dishes just as sure as you’ll find mozzarella sticks, wings, and potato skins at a Friday’s. While having a weekday lunch at a regular place I frequent, I decided to order a shredded cabbage dish to get
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We first tried this Sichuan spicy three pepper chicken dish when we first discovered Sichuan cuisine at a restaurant in a NJ strip mall. The place is called China Chalet (it has an antler chandelier and everything), and despite the fact that the name conjures images of hot chocolate and blonde-haired ski girls, they used to
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I’m a nostalgic person. I like black and white photographs. Sepia is even better. I like old, cracked things. I watch way too much American Pickers for my own good. And I keep piles of strange and sentimental junk in boxes in my closet (I have a large shoebox full of letters that I wrote
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Dim Sum. One of those all-is-right-with-the-world meals, perfect for a weekend morning (also there’s totally this smokin’ hot seating host at the local place we go to in NJ, so there’s that. We suspect he’s the owner’s son, and I’ll probably be married to him at some point. Ha.). Every time our cousins visit from
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Our family has never really been big on Easter. We usually have a big summer July 4th or Labor Day BBQ for family and friends; we pull out all the stops for Thanksgiving, whether we’re in the US or in Beijing; when Hanukkah rolls around, we can’t resist all the matzo ball soup recipes and potato
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It’s a relatively rare occurrence when the sheer delight and originality of a new recipe totally and completely makes your day. Today is that day, my friends. Okay, so at first glance this cake does kind of look like jalapeño cornbread or something with all those rand-o green specks in it. The cognitive dissonance caused
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This Savory Soy Milk Soup with Fried Dough, or Dou Jiang You Tiao, is a popular breakfast/brunch item in China. It’s the simplest thing you’ll ever make, after a quick trip to the Chinese grocery store. It’s basically a soy milk soup, curdled slightly with the vinegar, and flavored with scallions, sesame oil, pickled radishes
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As we creep towards middle age, Bill and I try to be healthier and avoid eating too much meat. We’re no health nuts by any stretch of the imagination…we’d eat anything and everything if we didn’t have to worry about the threat of muffin tops. There are countless times when the two of us walk
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So…I’ll admit that I didn’t think that the mulberry was an actual fruit before yesterday–at least not one that we still eat. I figured…eh, it’s probably one of those things that the Native Americans used to snack on and dye their clothes with (because these suckers dyed my fingers purple for days), or that the
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Hong Shao Kao Fu, (红烧烤麸) is a Shanghainese vegetarian cold appetizer. Kao fu is a form of wheat gluten, often sold dried, that tastes kind of like tofu. What a lot of people don’t know about Chinese food is the abundance of cold dishes often served before the main meal. This is one of those
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Peas and carrots. The stuff of old-school cafeteria lunch lines, bizarre All That sketches, and Forrest Gump’s propensity for metaphor and simile. Yes, it may seem like a somewhat tired combination, bordering on the cliché. But hark, what light from yonder window breaks!? It is the east, and peas and carrots are the sun! I like
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