I have the hardest time not ordering scallion pancakes when I go out for Chinese food. They make great appetizers when the entrees happen to take longer than five minutes. They absorb the sauce of your moo shu pork like a sponge. And your vegetarian friends can eat them with abandon. That said, few scallion pancakes beat the homemade version, when they come off the skillet hot and golden brown.

This recipe is long overdue. I put off posting a recipe until I had enough photos to go along with the instructions; like folding dumplings, making scallion pancakes is much more visual than your average stir-fry. I've eaten or seen too many that are too thick, or lack the flaky layers that define Chinese scallion pancakes. Also, they aren't supposedly to be as enormous as a Frisbee.

The good news is that once you get used to rolling out the dough, these will easily become part of your reportoire. There are few ingredients, most of which are pantry staples. And once you coax the dough into little patties, they can be refrigerated or frozen for future use. The one requirement is to put your woks away; use only a nonstick flat bottom skillet for pan-frying.

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Chinese Scallion Pancake

I love owning a bamboo steamer, if for no other reason that to display around the kitchen. It's not only a conversation starter whenever new guests visit but also a handy tool for food photography. (Gotta play up the Asian theme sometimes.) Plus, a set of basket and lid usually costs less than $10 in Chinatown.

Of course, there are times when bamboo steamers are useful for actual cooking. Aside from har gow, siu mai is possibly the most requested dim sum standard in my family, with the reliable crinkly yellow wonton wrappers snugly encasing the pork-dominant filling. I haven't tackled har gow at home yet, possibly because even 95% of all restaurants I visit fail at the texture of the translucent wrapper. But siu mai I can do.

Yes, this is the same dim sum treat that's also spelled shumai, siew mai, and siu mai due to the lack of standard Cantonese Romanization. (In Mandarin it's just shao mai). Wrapping is not so complex. Folding siu mai is even easier than folding wontons and potstickers, which requires sealing. With siu mai you just need to form the wrapper into a cup and press the sides against the filling.

Try it the next time you're craving dim sum but the nearest good restaurant is too far of a drive. Or flight.

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If you're a fan of pickles straight from the jar, you'll love this recipe. If you're a fan of kimchi or other banchan, you'll also love this. 

Chinese restaurants overseas, even those in Chinatown, rarely serve appetizers. But in China, dinners at mid-range or higher end restaurants usually begin with a trail of cold appetizer dishes. You can get peanuts, tofu, turnips, carrots, radishes, mostly with a cold snappy bite to wet your appetite for the hot dishes to come. And if you're hungry and in desperate need of food NOW, it helps to have a bunch of tasty snacks to nibble on. 

The trick to making these cucumbers crisp is to drain the excess water out, by tossing them in salt and letting them sit for 20 minutes. If you don't have fresh red chilis available, you can add a couple teaspoonfuls of jarred chili sauce instead.

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More vegetarian Chinese recipes to try:

Sichuan Cucumber Salad

Shandong-Style Asparagus 

Turnip Cake (Law bok gow) 

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Spicy Pickled Cucumbers

Before my parents retired, they spent at least 15 years each in the food industry, working for hotel restaurants and Chinese bakeries. Every 12- to 14-hour shift would leave them exhausted, and understandably, my father had little desire to step foot in our own kitchen. My mother, on the other hand, sought refuge in front of our home stove. To the relaxing din of Cantonese soap operas, she would try out the "Western" tricks she learned on the job with our straight-from-Chinatown ingredients.

Most Chinese moms are ardent traditionalists with food. Mine is not. On a whim, she would make pizza with Cantonese sausage, steak with hoisin sauce, and sushi with roast pork. The strangest part is that most of the time, the food tasted very good.

So I didn't hesitate when she wanted me to help her with a new appetizer for Chinese New Year dinner. Rather than a traditional dish, she decided we should try something she "learned from Hong Kong TV." 

Most years, our New Year dinner would have some form of taro: claypot chicken and taro, or taro in a version of Buddha's Delight. This year, we used the purplish tuber in taro and pumpkin tofu puffs.

When I lived in the US, I was addicted to hummus. I would go through a tub a week, eating it with pita, raw vegetables, and (secret's out!) even plain rice if the cupboards were empty. I would make long treks from West Harlem to Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn just for hummus and pita from Sahadi's. Not surprisingly, I went through major withdrawal while living in China. Not even the Western import stores had the mass-produced tubs I took for granted at Whole Foods or even Safeway. And since Beijing's Middle Eastern population is tiny, with the majority working at embassies, not opening restaurants, I could forget about any sort of mezze platters or shawarmas whenever the mood stuck.

So I was ecstatic to finally find tahini at Sanyuanli, the local market that rivals the import stores in diversity, without the exhorbitant prices. The guy who runs the stall sells fresh sesame oil and sesame paste, but unlike his rivals around town, was smart enough to realize realize, hey, the foreigners all want this thing called tahini. Thomas Friedman would be proud.

I was first introduced to Indian Chinese food a few years ago in Hong Kong, at a restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui whose name now escapes me. My first thought was, "This is Chinese food?" My second thought was, "How ironic." The cuisine of China, brought over to India by Chinese immigrants many generations ago and given an Indian make-over, is now in the 21st century being brought to a special administrative region of China by Indian immigrants.

Chinese food developed in India the way it does around the world: by immigrants using techniques from home to cook their new world ingredients. They begin by feeding themselves, then perhaps open a restaurant to earn a living, thus adapting the food even more to suit local palettes.

Indian-Chinese cuisine incorporates not only Chinese ingredients like soy sauce and and ginger, but also cumin, turmeric, and hot chilis. Neither beef nor pork, the de facto meat of China, are used, because of India's large Hindu and Muslim populations. That leaves chicken, lamb, and vegetables as the mainstays. 

I meant for this to be my dinner appetizer, but I spooned so much into my bowl that it became a meal.

Hot and sour soup didn't appear in my childhood of Cantonese home dinners. It did, however, appear in my Chinese-American childhood, as a Sichuan/Northern Chinese dish that became bastardized for the greasy take-out joints of suburban America. I have had one too many versions that were so thick and rubbery I could stretch them with my hands like Silly Putty. Here is some advice to the aforementioned Chinese restaurants in the US: Cornstarch is never a main ingredient; just use sparingly.    

(From upper left: Wood ear, lily buds, fresh bamboo, shiitake mushrooms. Bowl: fresh firm tofu.)

In the US, hot and sour soup also tends to lack the lily buds, shiitake mushrooms, and bamboo shoots that make it a nutrient-rich, even somewhat refined, dish. (This is the Chinese version, not to be confused with Vietnamese, Filipino, or Thai hot and sour soups.) I also like to add wood ear and tofu for texture variation. Today I also used fresh instead of canned bamboo shoots, which I couldn't find when I went food shopping this morning. 

It's the mid-June, meaning asparagus season is coming to a close. I have been seeing less and less of my favorite stalky vegetable at the markets, and what's left tends to be expensive. So I thought I would celebrate the end of the season with a recipe for Shandong-style asparagus. Make this while you still can!

It's true that asparagus isn't used much in Chinese food. I don't recall ever having it at the dinner table growing up, nor at restaurants in Boston's Chinatown. Here in Beijing, whenever asparagus appears on menus it is qingchao-ed (请炒-ed), or lightly stir-fried, with other vegetables.

Shandong province is China's center for asparagus production, so it's no surprise Shandongers showcase the asparagus practically au naturel. And since the dish eaten at room temperature, it makes a perfect appetizer for picnics, grilling dinners, or any other situation when you're wiping the sweat from your brows and spritzing water on your face every 2 minutes to keep cool.

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Shandong-Style Asparagus
Adapted from Saveur

Serves 2 to 4 as an appetizer

1 pound asparagus, trimmed and sliced diagonally into 1 1/2 inch pieces
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
A few drops chilli oil
1 teaspoon toasted white sesame seeds

I have to admit that I have a strong bias towards jiaozi (饺子). Besides Shanghainese soup dumplings (xiaolongbao), my favorite Chinese dumplings are thin-skinned and pan-fried, the kind found mainly in Southern China or New York's $1-for-5 fried dumpling joints. Northern Chinese-style dumplings, which offer more thick doughy skin than filling, just can't compare.

What's better than anything a restaurant or dumpling stall can offer are homemade jiaozi, hot off the skillet. On my last day in Zhongshan my mother and I bought dumpling skins from a lady specializing in doughy things like wrappers and noodles, and spent an hour or two wrapping dumplings for dinner.

Since I have so many photos from that afternoon, I thought I would do a pictoral guide on jiaozi-making. (Often dumpling recipes fail to show the step-by-step process in folding.) Also included is my mother's fool-proof method for getting perfectly crisp pan-fried dumplings without burning them.

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Pan-fried Pork and Cabbage Jiaozi, a Recipe in Pictures
猪肉白菜饺子

Makes 50 to 60

Lightly dust your work surface with flour and keep some extra flour within hand's reach.

Dumpling wrappers: When I lived in the US, I always got my wrappers from Chinatown markets (the round kind, labeled for jiaozi（饺子) instead of for wontons (馄饨).). They are a hassle to make at home, but if you really want to give it a try, check out this post from Noodles and Rice.

For the filling, mix together: 1 lb ground pork, 1 cup shredded Napa cabbage, 2 tablespoons minced shallots, 1 tablespoon cornstarch, 2 teaspoons salt or 1 tablespoon soy sauce, a pinch of ground pepper.

Egg wash: Gently beat 1 or 2 eggs.

(The hands shown are Mom's. They are beautifully rough from decades of lovingly cooked meals.)

I'm interrupting my Shanghai posts to bring you this seaweed egg drop soup. This is one of those dishes I rarely ate at home growing up (for some reason my mother never made it) but would slurp with delight at restaurants. The simple combination of seaweed shreds and egg makes for great, light comfort food. And it's an easy way to load up on iron.

After a long absence (several months or years, I don't recall), seaweed and egg drop soup has made a sudden comeback in my life. It all started at Jia Jia Tang Bao, where I ordered it to go with soup dumplings because the only other soup choice was chicken and duck blood soup. Then I started seeing it, and having it, at various cafés in Beijing. Then I thought, why not make it at home?*

I like mine with a lot of seaweed, more than most restaurants normally use. A little extra iron, vitamin C, magnesium, and other vitamins can't hurt. (But you can always use less seaweed, like 1 ounce instead of 2 for every 3 cups of liquid.) Good homemade stock is also critical, since the resulting broth has very few other flavorings. To make this soup meatier and more substantial, you can also add minced pork or sliced shiitakes. But the basic version is one of the simplest Chinese soups you can make, and with very few ingredients.