Vegetarian

Gobi Manchurian - Indian-Chinese Cauliflower Fritters

dianakuan — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:23:34 +0000

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.

Tomato Egg Drop Soup

dianakuan — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:42:47 +0000

Life is slowly returning to normal. With the Olympics in town, I couldn't not be surrounded by sports fever. I attended 11 events in total, mostly through friends of friends with last minute tickets. Conversations around me all centered around tickets: who has them, who's willing to sell them, and why the heck they're all "sold out" but the venues are still half empty. The past two weeks have been fun, but also exhausting...too many early morning events, crowds galore, hour-long waits for security check, bad stadium food, and late night carousing (the last, though, was no fault of the Games themselves.)

I'm continuing with the healthy recipes to combat the massive amounts of fried food I have been eating. Last week I posted Sichuan-Style Snow Peas, a light stir-fry. Today's tomato egg drop soup is even healthier if you consider the lack of cooking oil. It's also incredibly simple, which no special technique other than the swirling in of the egg whites to create the egg strands. Just pour slowly and stir at the same time.

Related recipe:
Seaweed Egg Drop Soup

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Tomato Egg Drop Soup

Serves 4

Sichuan Dried-Fried Green Beans

dianakuan — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 07:13:47 +0000

Dried-fried green beans is one of my favorite side dishes to order in Sichuan restaurants. In contrast to crisp haricot verts or mushy microwaved diner-style beans, Sichuan-style green beans are blistered and well-cooked without being bland. With Sichuan peppercorns and dried chillis adding spice and smokiness to the flavor profile, this dish becomes positively addictive.

However, no matter how many times I tried to recreate the dish at home, I ended up either burning the green beans before they got cooked, or dumping some water in order to save the beans, the latter which defeats the purpose of dry-frying. For help, I finally emailed Kian from Red Cook. He said that his method is using a ton of oil and constantly stirring the beans to get them cooked without burning. Almost like deep-frying. No wonder the green beans in restaurants taste so good.

My good-enough-for-publishing recipe in this post can be considered vegetarian, depending on whether you consider dried shrimp meat. (Or maybe I'm just turning incredibly Chinese: "Oh, you don't eat meat? Don't worry...it's just chicken.") Some versions use minced pork in addition to dried shrimp, and some avoid both. For dried shrimp, make sure to get the kind that's bigger, pinkish, and more expensive, not the cheap itty bitty gray ones.

Pea and Shiitake Dumplings

dianakuan — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 04:05:01 +0000

When Jacob and I lived in New York, we were frequent patrons of the "$1 for 5" fried dumpling places in Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Those quick meals of crisp pork dumplings satisfied both sudden hunger pangs and skinny wallets. Then we discovered the dumpling joints also had bags of frozen dumplings for sale, even cheaper at $7 for 50, and multitudes better than the factory brands at Chinese supermarkets. So every month, Jacob would ride his bike 150+ blocks down to lower Manhattan and come back with about 15 pounds of frozen dumplings in his messenger bag.

I didn't subsist completely on Chinatown dumplings, but they were definitely handy when working full-time, freelancing on the side, and too tired to cook.

Now that I'm in Beijing, southern-style dumplings are almost non-existent. Northern-style jiaozi are wrapped in a thick doughy skins, and the dinky amount of filling per dumpling usually makes me feel somewhat cheated. (Exceptions, of course, exist.) There are die-hard Beijing jiaozi afficionados out there, but I'm not one of them. I craved--no, needed--dumplings whose skins didn't overwhelm the savory morsels of meat and vegetables inside.

Sweet Chili-Glazed Tofu

dianakuan — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 02:12:57 +0000

In the dead of summer in Sichuan province, folks regularly eat incredibly spicy, stomach-burning hot pot with the belief that sweating profusely will cool you off. It makes sense, then, that some of the world's spiciest cuisines (Mexican, Indian, Malaysian, etc.) hail from the hottest climates.

I cook and eat spicy food year-round, even if I have to pour myself an enormous iced drink and blast the fan to enjoy it. My latest dish from two nights ago is a simple but very addictive Sweet Chili-Glazed Tofu. If you're a fan of mapo tofu, like 99.5% of people who have ever eaten Sichuan food, this is another good tofu recipe to try. More tongue-tickling spicy than ma la, with a sweet kick and subtle fruity aroma from cider vinegar, this quickish stir-fry makes an easy one-bowl dinner. With lettuce wraps instead of rice, it also becomes a good backyard cookout appetizer.

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Other spicy tofu recipes:

Mapo Tofu
Kung Pao Tofu
Hunan-style Braised Fried Tofu
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Sweet Chili-Glazed Tofu

Serves 2

Vegetable Fried Rice

dianakuan — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:26:13 +0000

I like to think of this as the Punky Brewster of fried rice dishes. While seafood and pork versions would easily get upstaged by lots of vegetables, vegetarian versions are as colorful as your market's produce section allows. Today I brought home green beans, purple cabbage, and red and yellow bell peppers to go with my blackish shiitake mushrooms. To my knowledge there are no blue vegetables in existence, or I would have gotten them too.

My recipe eschews the scramble egg that is so many other fried rices. It doesn't seem needed, with so many textures already, but you can certainly throw some in for protein. As for the vegetables, the only important factor is that they are chopped small to cook quickly. This is a good way to use up not only leftover rice, but also whatever produce is close to being tossed out.

As for the rice, I always use cold rice for stir-frying because it has the right stiffness. But if you don't have leftovers and absolutely must make this (I'm touched), try cooking your fresh rice with a little less water.

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Vegetable Fried Rice

Serves 2

Chinese Hot and Sour Soup

dianakuan — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:02:37 +0000

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.

Mango Vegetable Curry

dianakuan — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:10:30 +0000

The easiest way to make a thick stewy dish into a summery répas is by adding tropical fruit. Or so I told myself yesterday, when I was craving curry but wasn't too keen on the standing in front of a hot stove for the better part of an hour. The mangoes on the fridge were radiating their very ripened, last-day-for-eating aroma. Into the curry they went.

Yes, I did gluttonously attacked the pits after the flesh was chopped up. And yet much of the juice still found its way to the floor and all over the counter. Mango-soaked kitchen rags may be a side effect of this curry, if you choose to make it with the ripest fruit possible.

I have seen and eaten mango curries that contained chicken, pork, and lamb, but not vegetables. And why not, when this curry can accomodate whatever assortment you bring back from the market, as long as you cook starches and carrots first, and leave the green stuff until the end. The vegetable selection below was based on whim and color and texture variety.

I did need a glass of ice water to cool off after cooking, but the curry was worth the extra rise in body temperature.

Shandong-Style Asparagus

dianakuan — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:01:27 +0000

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

Baked Eggs with Saffron and Cumin

dianakuan — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:26:02 +0000

I had three things on my agenda today, after getting up at 6:30am to disembark an overnight train from Shanghai:

1. Nap
2. Shower
3. Cook

There is an unexplainable euphoria of cooking again in one's own kitchen after a 3-week absence. Sure, I've gotten to cook while away, but it's not the same when it's someone else's domain. I don't know where to find certain spices and condiments, don't know if there are certain spices and condiments. At some places, like my parent's, there are 3 kinds of soy sauce and 5 types of vinegar, but no olive oil. Other kitchens are fully Western, with the exception of some chopsticks for take-out sushi. But as a culinary mongrel, I love to cook with Italian seasonings as much as fermented soy products. Lacking certain ingredients make me feel rather empty inside.

So as much as I like cooking anywhere I can, the anal-retentive cook in me loves grasping the handle of my own wok, or knowing exactly where the cumin is in my cabinet clutter.