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.
After making this Ratatouille Brunch Bake for Mother’s Day last month, I knew I had to make some equivalently awesome breakfasty-brunchy item–preferably with a bit more manly-manness– for Father’s Day this morning. These Huevos Rancheros Nachos are what I came up with. If you’ve never had nachos with a runny egg on top, you need to.
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Finally, the long awaited Xi’an travel post! We posted our Xi’an street food post a few weeks ago, but it’s taken us a while to get to this one. Priorities, I guess. Xi’an was a great place to visit. From Terra Cotta Warriors to awesome eats on Muslim Street, it’s perfect for a weekend trip.
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Some of my only memories from our first trip to Beijing (I was five years old at the time) were of standing in front of a roadside grill joint, waiting for a few of these amazing yangrou chuan or grilled lamb skewers. Beijing was a different place back then—a lot more of the old and less
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Before we start, I’d like to give you a glimpse into the future. In the future, you’re lifting the cover off of a pan and seeing the plump, happy, soft Chinese pork buns that you’ve just made with your own two hands. You did it, and it wasn’t that difficult at all. It was, in
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This simple stir fried garlic baby bok choy dish is the way we tend to prepare baby bok choy almost every week. It’s so quick, easy, and healthy. Summer—and with it, grill season—is fast approaching, and I like this garlic baby bok choy as an alternative to just a regular salad as a vegetable side.
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Edible pea pods are a delicious crunchy vegetable great for a side or even a main dish and this chicken with snow peas stir-fry is no exception! Snow peas are more commonly associated with Chinese cuisine and in my opinion are a bit more tender than sugar snap peas. Both of these edible pea pod
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Having been in Turkey for just one day (read more about it here!), I obviously can’t say that I’ve experienced even a fraction of the breadth and variety of Turkish cuisine. Having stayed mostly in the Old City when I was in Istanbul, i.e. Tourist Central, I didn’t see much beyond a lot of doner kebab restaurants,
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As ABC (American Born Chinese) kids living in a predominantly Caucasian town, Sarah and I have always had clashes of East meets West. There was always the cliched “ching chong” ridiculousness from classmates and the questions of “do you eat lo mein every night?” Then there was the downright offensive: being asked if we can
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They just don’t make ‘em like they used to. Or so I thought. These ci fan gao, or “rice hash browns,” as Sarah likes to call them, were part of my childhood—a beloved street food that I bought for just a few cents at a time in Shanghai. It was always a huge treat, because
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On our recent trip to Xi’an, we were reminded of and introduced to China’s rich varieties of Islamic cuisine—specifically the cooking of the Uyghur people. Chuan(r), or kebabs usually made with lamb, for example, might just be one of the most popular street foods in Beijing (maybe second only to jian bing – see Kaitlin’s quick
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I’ve become rather cynical when it comes to traveling in China. You can only be shoved onto a packed bus or shamelessly cut in a ticket line so many times before you want to just call the whole thing off and go home to your blissfully empty apartment. So when my parents were planning a trip to Xi’An,
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Chocolate chip cookies. I can wax poetic on the iconic status of this hallowed treat, contemplate the abundant research conducted on ratios of white sugar to brown sugar, the merits of cake flour vs. all-purpose, and the infamous “to chill or not to chill?” mystery, and perhaps even ruminate on the special place the chocolate
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Updates, everyone! 1. I’m back in the US for a couple weeks, which means my greatest concerns at the moment include: a) when is the plumber going to get here to fix the leak in the tub? b) When is that $19.99 oil change coupon going to come in the mail? and c) Jake. Shedding
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When I was in college, and free food was often the operative lure to entice students to come to any and every campus event, we would sidestep the usual pizza route and order these vegetarian (and totally awesome) corn & goat cheese empanadas from a place just off campus. These corn and goat cheese empanadas
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Our Beijing ayi (ayi literally means “aunt,” but it’s a familiar term given by young kids to any older lady, or to ladies working in childcare, cooking, or cleaning professions) comes to our house once a week to help us maintain a clean apartment (our crazy cooking experiments don’t leave the kitchen in a good
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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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