Some of you may be familiar with a Cantonese dish called yuk bang, which roughly translates into "pork pie." It's pretty much the Chinese version of meat loaf. But while meat loaf can be found on menus in both Southern and hipster diners, yuk bang is hardly ever served outside home. To call it rustic would be an overly generous. You mix ground pork with pickled mustard plant, splash on a bit of soy sauce, then press your ball of pork into a metal plate and steam it. As simple and unphotogenic as pork pie is, it tastes amazing mixed with white rice. 

In the absence of pickled mustard plant, and for leftovers that I wouldn't feel weird bringing to work, I turn to these minced pork and shiitake noodles.

If you have ever been to Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, or Japan, you may be familiar with a dish of minced pork ladled over a bowl of boiled noodles. It's pure comfort food whenever you're exhausted and need nourishment, stat. Like, when traveling on foot in a subtropical Asian city, or even after staring at a computer screen all morning.

The simplest preparation involves just minced pork, onions or shallots, scallions, all simmered in sake or Chinese rice wine.  I throw in finely chopped shiitake mushrooms for extra flavor (lately, using these ugly shiitakes.)  You can really use any kind of noodles, but I prefer soba for their ability to not become saturated by sauces.

Also check out this radio segment from the Feb. 17th episode of The Takeaway (produced by WNYC, Public Radio International, and BBC World Service). I chatted with actor B.D. Wong about Chinese New Year foods and some picks from my list of 100 Chinese Foods to Try.

I just realized it has been a looong time since I did a recipe round-up on this site. Two and a half years, in fact. It's usually much more fun (for me and the reader) to have new content, but it seems fitting after this much time to gather up some of my favorite foods for Chinese New Year in this post. 

1. Chinese tea eggs - Everyone should make these.  They are one step harder than boiling an egg, taking only 5 minutes of hands-on time (not including boiling time). That marbly experior will impress all your guests who did not grow up eating tea eggs. If you want to get fancy, top them with caviar. 

2. Water chestnut cake - The Chinese eat all sorts of "cakes" for the new year because they symbolize growing taller. Eating them never worked for me. But the idea is still nice.

As much as i love to cook, I never have time to plan weekday lunches. After a frazzled morning at the desk, trying to get just one more bit of work done, I am ravenous by 1 or 2pm. My lame attempts at breakfast (usually Wheatables and fruit gummies) do not suffice.

I storm out of the building in a mad search for anything edible on the street. Unfortunately, other than mediocre $10 sandwiches and faux-Mexican, there is nothing except Safeway and Whole Foods. So I go for supermarket soup. Soup is filling. Soup is warming. Soup is cheap (well, not at Whole Foods). But sooner or later, you get sick of Chunky Chicken Noodle and Spicy Southwestern Bean. I still craved a piping hot bowl of broth-and-protein in the early afternoon, but needed a change.

This week I decided to add a Chinese take-out touch to chicken noodle soup. And make a big batch on Sunday night. While I still like the hot and sour soup I posted two year ago, this one is much, much more filling. And if you are low on Asian pantry staples like canned bamboo shoots and lily buds, you can still make this. I went to the market and bought chicken breast, mushrooms, and scallions, et voilà. 

Before I put together the results of my edamame wiki recipe, I wanted to share a dish appropriate for the joyous cholesterol-clogging spirit of Christmas.

There are few vegetable dishes better than roasted brussels sprouts. Drizzle olive oil over them, add some sea salt and pepper, roast them in the oven until the leaves are brown and barely crunchy, and I'm a happy girl. But for the holidays, any self-respecting dish should make you consider elastic pants, for just a second.

That's where Parmesan and bacon come in. Well, that and keeping all your bacon fat. The new year is still a week away, and there's still time to indulge in a little decadence before then.

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The last few months have been incredibly busy and challenging for me. But in January I resolve to return to my regular posting in full force, and update you on all that has been going on. Thank you all for continuing to read these past two years. Have a very happy holidays.

It took a trip to Japan to realize I've been making edamame wrong all these years.

Well, not necessarily wrong wrong. But not the best way possible.

When I discovered the joys of edamame about 10 or 12 years ago, I would buy bags of the frozen stuff, microwave them, and sprinkle table salt on top. Then I progressed to boiling them in a pot. When I discovered fresh edamame in Chinatown, and replaced Morton with Malden, I thought this was as good as edamame could get. After all, it tasted the same as at all the Japanese restaurants in the US. 

Then I went to Japan. In Tokyo this past summer, I noticed something slightly different about the fuzzy little legume that was as good an accompaniment with omikase-style sushi as it was with beer at 2 a.m. My meals of tempura, sashimi, fugu, and yes, even fugu sashimi were all bookended by a dish of edamame that tasted, well, better. Was it just because my subconscious dictated that the Japanese food had to taste better in Japan?

One night when returning to the guest house, a traveler from the north of Japan was snacking on some edamame in front of the TV. He was watching game show contestants clad in knee pads and mud hurling themselves around an obstacle course. He offered me some edamame. 

When I was living in China, the kitchen was never without rice. Long grain, short grain, jasmine, or brown, a sack or bulk bin bag would slouch in the corner, just waiting to be cooked. I would steam it, fry it, or boil it to a pulp for congee. And one day, out of severe homesickness, I decided to make horchata.

A Chinese friend was over and watched me pull a plastic carton from the fridge, which I had filled the day before with pulvertized rice grains and water to soak overnight.

"What is that?" she asked. I explained that Mexicans make a really nice icy drink out of rice water.

"But that's just like waste water from washing rice," she said."We dump that stuff down the drain."

"Um, true," I paused. "But when you add tons of sugar and vanilla and cinnamon, it's a great drink to go with your tacos." 

"I'll stick with margaritas."

I couldn't convince her to try it, which makes sense. The Chinese think anything raw is for barbarians and marvel at how Westerners down large bowls of salad, so why would they go for milky water from soaking raw rice? Come to think of it, none of the Mexican restaurants in Shanghai (all operated by Chinese-Americans) served horchata either. The only time I encountered the drink in China was at a Mexican-run Mexican restaurant in Beijing, and its clientele was predominantly Mexican embassy workers.

One of the things I like best about Vietnam is the café culture. And by café, I mean any collection of plastic stools on the sidewalk, set up by an entrepreneurial local who mixes drinks for her neighbors. At any time of the day, along the streets of Saigon, Hanoi, Hoi An, etc., the Vietnamese just crouch around wobbly pastel tables and sip their drink of choice. Whether it's cafe sua da, sugarcane juice, aloe vera shake, or passionfruit juice, the icy beverages are practically lifesavers in a sweltering climate. 

If a fruit grows in abundance in Vietnam, you can be sure it is pulsed into a shake. And avocados are everywhere. I grew up associating avocados with salty foods: mashed into guacamole, fanned on chicken sandwiches, sprinkled with sea salt and eaten straight. So a sweet shake was something of a novelty. 

But it makes sense. Because avocado flesh is naturally neither sweet nor salty, it's a tabula rasa for any creamy concoction you want to make.

Since the shake comes out rather thick, and contains both avocados and sweetened condensed milk (not exactly diet foods), I consider it more of a dessert than a light drink. But you can always thin it out with a little more milk and crushed ice.

Recently, while visiting Jacob's grandmother in California, I discovered a torn cookbook in her kitchen drawers. "Oh!" she exclaimed. "You found my bible!"  

Titled "Country Cookin'", the book was published in the 1970s by the Monterey County Cowbelles, otherwise known as the wives of Monterey's ranchers. Surprisingly, only a tenth of the book is devoted to red-meat-centric dishes. Most of the recipes are charmingly anachronistic, like Dove in Wine Sauce and Hot Russian Tea (with Tang!). But what really caught my attention were the handful of Chinese recipes. 

Zooming past the egg foo young and sweet and sour beef, I zeroed in on chop suey. After all, it was the page with the most food stains, the telltale sign of a beloved recipe.

I have been eating water spinach for as long as I can remember chewing food. Few children love vegetables, but even as a toddler I loved these long stalks of water spinach that stayed crunchy even when wilted. Of course, it helped that my parents never called it spinach.

The Chinese for water spinach is 空心菜 (kong xin cai)，which literally means "empty-hearted vegetable." Indeed, the long hollow stalks have the advantage of holding onto all flavorings they are cooked with. Unlike gai lan (Chinese kale) or plain old lettuce, it sops up sauce very well. Often cooks stir-fry it with fermented tofu. But I prefer what Chinese restaurants mean when they say "qing chao", or "clear stir-fry." 

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