Eating Chinese New Year Desserts with The Sporkful

February 19, 2015 Diana Kuan

Happy Chinese New Year!

Unlike years past when I've gone home to Boston, I'll be ringing in the Year of the Sheep (or is it ram, or goat?) here in New York. For most of next couple weeks I will be teaching and catering dinner parties and fitting in a dim sum outing here and there. But last week, I started the eating part a bit early at the WNYC offices in Tribeca with Dan Pashman, host of The Sporkful, in a mini-collaboration project.

For this week's episode (which includes some great soundbites from Eddie Huang about Fresh off the Boat) and the Notorious MSG) Dan also tries a few Chinese desserts for the first time.

While Dan was familiar with many of the traditional New Year's dishes like dumplings and noodles, Chinese desserts were brand new to him, as was the entire concept of dessert soups. So on a snowy afternoon in Tribeca, we tried a few of these desserts from Golden Fung Wong Bakery and Deluxe Food Market.

Here's Dan cutting into the nian gao, the traditional Chinese New Year cake you give to family, friends, relatives, anyone you remotely like.

Nian gao is made from glutinous rice and brown sugar. It's steamed and sometimes topped with extras such as sesame seeds and jujubes. Granted, we didn't have the time or the equipment to pan-fry slices of the nian gao with egg, as the Cantonese usually finish it off, but it was still great as-is. It was the hit of the afternoon. Dan really liked the texture; though it's pretty chewy, the light brown sugary sweetness will have you hooked. And because it's so compact, it also travels well. "A great snack for a plane ride," he noted.

We also ate these laughing sesame balls, which are tiny little fried snacks cut in a way that makes it seem like there's a laughing mouth. Also very addictive...and adorable.

On the other hand, the tang yuan, glutinous rice balls in a sweet soup, were way too hard (now we know not to get tang yuan from Deluxe Food Market), but the sweet soup and the boiled peanuts in them were pretty tasty. Also lackluster was the water chestnut cake, which also had the wrong texture and color and didn't contain any crunchy water chestnut bits (for a better version, feel free to visit my mom's recipe!)

I did, however, take home quite a big piece of the leftover nian gao and some laughing sesame balls and polished them off in a single afternoon. And will likely pick up more for afternoon snacking purposes during Chinese New Year.

Listen to this week's The Sporkful for Dan's Chinese eats around LA, the Notorious MSG's take on the perfect dumplings, and more!

Chinese Barbecue Spareribs

November 25, 2014 Diana Kuan

Chinese BBQ Spareribs | Appetite for China

Happy Thanksgiving week!

It's been a while since I've posted, I know. Growing a design business and teaching on the side have both consumed most of my time this year, and unfortunately lately blogging has fallen by the wayside. My resolution for 2015 will be to blog more regularly again, but until then, I will try my best to update at least once in a while with more recipes and other content.

Today I want to share with you an oldie but goodie, a recipe from my cookbook that has also been one of the most popular at The Brooklyn Kitchen, one of the cooking schools in NY where I teach. Once a month I teach Chinese Takeout Favorites, a popular class based on The Chinese Takeout Cookbook. I always, always look forward to teaching that class, mainly because of the ribs, which we get from The Meat Hook located right inside The Brooklyn Kitchen.

Pair really good quality pork spareribs (from free-range, heritage breed piggies) with a deceptively easy recipe and you have the stuff of day dreams. (Once, class was cancelled due to a power outage and I was seriously bummed for two days.)

So. How to make these ribs? You really just need a good working oven, preferably one with a broiler, and a couple hours of marinating time. To get a nice deep reddish color, instead of food coloring like some Chinese restaurants use, I mix together dark soy sauce, hoisin sauce, rice wine, honey, sesame oil, ketchup, garlic, and five spice powder. (Ketchup provides a nice tangy flavor with the color, and despite what some folks would like to believe, actually has Chinese origins, and the modern tomato version from the West has been pretty integrated into Chinese cooking for the past 100 or so years.)

Mango Pudding

July 24, 2014 Diana Kuan

Cold food. That's pretty much all that has been on my mind this past week. While July is a great time of the year in the Northeast for buying and eating fresh fruit, trying to turn those fruits into any sort of baked goods is another story. Really, just the mere thought of turning on the stove or oven makes me break out into a sweat.

(Like many New Yorkers, I don't have central AC and my one wonky unit is only able to cool down the apartment after sundown, i.e. after 8:30pm.)

So for my meals lately, I've had to been creative with cooking things that don't actually involve cooking, if you define cooking as something that involves the application of heat. But there is great fruit dessert you can make for which the only hot thing needed is the hot water that comes out of your tap.

The last time I posted a dessert on this blog might be over a year an a half ago, so this is long overdue. This is a dessert that comes straight out of my cookbook and one that I've taught many times in dim sum classes over the years.

While Chinese cuisines aren't known for desserts, there are a few gems, mostly originating in Cantonese cooking. In the 1950s and 1960s, when Hong Kong's agricultural industry was just taking off, the island territory was importing a lot of evaporated milk as a stable dairy source, along with other canned products. In later years, as Hong Kong quickly modernized, canned products went from necessities to nostalgic cultural mainstays. Even today, with such a wide variety of homegrown food and rare imported products available, Hong Kongers still love their Spam, Horlicks, and Ovaltine.

My favorite dessert that comes out of this HK love affair with canned products is mango pudding. It's cold, creamy, yet very light, with the intense flavor and aroma of super ripe mangoes. Think of it as a Chinese panna cotta. These days, many places in HK and the US alike get creative and use other tropical fruits, such as passionfruit pudding, lychee pudding, and even durian pudding (tolerable for up to two bites). But mango is still the classic go-to flavor.

Kung Pao Sweet Potatoes

June 7, 2014 Diana Kuan

Hi again!

I know, I know. It's been a while since a posted a new recipe. Between running Plate & Pencil, teaching, and putting on Tangra Spring, I've been a little short on time, to put it mildly. Sadly, things like creating new recipes can sometimes go on the back burner.

Also, this winter sure was long wasn't it? I think the lack of sunshine, the frigid April that felt like March, and rainy May that felt like April made most of us feel a little less inspired in the kitchen. Sometimes all I wanted was soup, spaghetti, pizza, soup, spaghetti, pizza, rinse, repeat. Anything that could be made or purchased in 10 minutes or less.

(Okay, there were also many days of making dumplings en mass, to store up for the week ahead.)

Luckily, creating new recipes for Tangra Spring, the Indian-Chinese vegetarian dinner series I co-chef with Chitra from ABCD's of Cooking, brought the fun back into cooking again. We had yet another great night cooking for our guests, aided by some fantastic local produce from Good Eggs, like radishes, ramps, and bok choy microgreens.

And these sweet potatoes.

Tangra Spring! Chinese-Indian Pop-Up Dinner Returns May 22nd

May 13, 2014 Diana Kuan

Tangra | Chinese-Indian Pop-Up Dinner in Brooklyn

If you've been following this blog for a while you may have heard about Tangra, the seasonal Indian-Chinese supper club I formed with Chitra Agrawal of The ABCDs of Cooking. Well, after a long winter, we're finally doing a spring dinner on Thursday, May 22nd.

Tangra was started last summer as a celebration of Indian-Chinese cooking. The names comes from a neighborhood in Calcutta where a Indian-Chinese hybrid cuisine first originated, but for this seasonal dinner series we've pulled out all the creative punches to create a spectacular, unique multi-course menu using local-to-NY produce.

For Tangra Spring, we're returning to Court Tree Collective on Court Street, a new arts and cultural space in Carroll Gardens. We also have a brand new menu, but also with the return of "the best dumplings ever", as coined by several attendees of our past events (see pics from our summer event.)

If you're in NY on May 22nd, come join us! (Definitely an only-in-NY experience, to be sure!) The tickets sold out quickly for our Summer and Fall 2013 dinners, so here's the link to nab yours. Ticket price includes a spectacular multi-course meal, drinks, and gratuity.

Hope you can join us on May 22nd!

Tickets!