Happy Christmas, New Year, Birthday and Chinese New Year!
Sorry for the delay in posts. More coming soon.
scenes from winter 2011/2012
Reply
Category Archives: chinese food
Pineapple Cake Cookie Thingy
It’s Birthday Week. Woot! I asked the husband to tell my in-laws to refrain from making me my traditional pie this year. While a slice would be great, we both agree that an entire pie is a bit overkill, especially considering our efforts to reduce sugar intake (which is hard to believe, considering this current post and the one I just wrote as well).
It didn’t occur to me to mention this to anyone else. So imagine my surprise when a birthday package came in the mail from my parents, carrying one of my favorites:
These Pineapple Cake Cookies (I don’t really know what they are called), a Taiwanese treat, are lovely. A buttery shortbread surrounds a sweet, chewy, dense pineapple center. When I was younger my parents would buy these in small plastic containers with 10 or 12 of them per package. I could eat half that package in one sitting. I still can, I’m sure. The ones that arrived in my birthday care package were quite a bit more fancy. They are from a bakery in my parents’ San Gabriel neighborhood, and 2 cake-like cookies are freshly sealed in a smaller package. Perfect to share with the toddler, who shares my sweet tooth, and my love for pineapple cake-cookies. Especially perfect that the husband isn’t a fan of them (more for us). A little research on the Web brought up a homemade recipe. I’m not about to try to make them from scratch. The ones from the store are pretty good.
The ones from my Mom’s neighborhood bakery are pretty much divine.
I’ve had to stash the cookies in hiding place to avoid eating several in one sitting. These will hopefully last through the end of the month. At least (let’s hope) through the end of Birthday Week.
Stir fry with a twist
No doubt all that Chinese cookbook reading and eating inspired Sunday’s dinner: chicken and green bean stir fry. I did try to be a little daring, and added a whole bunch of orange zest and peel for taste. The result was a sort of tangy orange-ginger chicken & green bean thingy.
It wasn’t bad. Maybe a little too much oil on the beans. I’m so used to steaming and am out of touch with stir frying. But I love the crunchiness of the beans that you can’t match with the steam.
Ideally would have been great with some white or even brown rice. But we skipped the grain and I did a big salad instead.
Myra Waldo’s Chinese Cookbook
Maybe it was the wonton making, or the Facing East visit, or the UCONN winning (Yes!) but I’ve been nostalgic for homecooked Chinese food lately. It could also be that I’ve taken white rice (well, almost all rice, grains, breads, etc) out of my regular diet and think of it as “special occasion” foods. For these reasons, what a treat it was to find this gem at Twice Sold Tales, which is closing its U-District store and was having a 70% off sale:
Yes, Myra Waldo, food and travel writer, wrote this tasty cookbook of Chinese cuisine in 1968. She also wrote about the flavors of Spain and Africa. It was lovely reading about how to make fried chicken; pineapple fried chicken; steamed fried chicken; and the like. The majority of recipes contain a combination of soy sauce, dry sherry and corn starch. A few use ketchup. And it seems cider vinegar is an integral part of Chinese cooking as well.
Pork Chop Suey is also in here, with an author’s note that, indeed, Chop Suey is not actually a Chinese dish, but a “Chinese-American” dish.
The book, naturally falls open to the “Special Egg Foo Yung” recipe. I think you know what that means. Some lucky family got to enjoy Myra Waldo’s recipe of not just any Egg Foo Yung, but her “Special” Egg Foo Yung. Here is another classic that made me smile:
Yes, apparently we Chinese like fried fruit. I wish I knew.
Despite the chuckles it gave me (and a recipe for hot-and-sour soup, a real true favorite of mine), I was genuinely excited to see a recipe for “Chinese Bread”, which I presume to be the steamed buns you use with Peking Duck, or with which you use in BBQ pork buns and this even the Taiwanese Pork Burger I raved about earlier. There are no photos in this book, so I can’t say for certain. I seriously thought about making them, but then remembered the Asian market I discovered on the same trip to the U-District as the one where I found this thrilling cookbook, and decided I should save the time and just buy them at a store that’s about 3 miles from my house. Whenever it is I get around to enjoying bread again, that is.
Facing East on the Eastside
It’s nice to take a break from SBD once in a while. Today was break day.
One of the benefits of working in downtown Bellevue … trying different restaurants at lunch (when time permits, of course). A few blocks from the office sits Facing East, a small Tawainese restaurant that offers some tempting small plates. Yelp is all over this place. We headed there early to beat the lunch-time rush. Good idea. Not shown are the sweet potato flour pancake with oyster, egg and vegetables; nor the spiced pork over noodles (what my dining companions enjoyed). We all had a taste of the Taiwanese Pork Burger (amazingly delicious); I enjoyed the Stuffed Fishball Soup and then asked them to pack a dessert to go, Sweet Red Bean Soup with Mochi Balls. Smiling and satisfied.
Taiwanese Pork Burger: delicious pork served in a steamed bun, with pickled radishes, cilantro and a spicy sauce.
Fish balls stuffed with pork, in a clear broth seasoned with fried onions. Haven’t had fish balls in a long time. Reminds me of growing up in a Chinese household.
Sweet red bean soup with mochi balls. This reminded me of the type of dessert you would have during a wedding banquet meal. So good.
Next time my parents come to visit the Northwest, we are SO going here!
“Winning” Wontons
One of my favorite things that I learned from my dad was how to make wontons. We’d sit there watching basketball and making wontons. Tough to do these days because it does take a while to prep and make. I prepped while the husband took the toddler out on errands. Then made while she napped, and listened to the game on the radio in the background (Michigan vs. Duke, I think. They’re all running into each other). I even ran out of wrappers and literally ran to the store to get more.
I made two packages of wontons worth, enough for dinner tonight, and 3-4 future dinners. Or nice gifts for friends & family (they are so impressed when really they’re pretty easy to make). Once the manual labor is done it’s a cinch to throw the frozen wontons into some boiling water to make an easy meal. I season the water with soy, sesame oil, some ginger root and scallions. Not exactly SBD-friendly (the wrappers aren’t, but everything else is legit), but I was pretty good the rest of the day/weekend that I approved this breaking of the rules.
I added a quick vegetable stir fry to complete tonight’s meal.
I cooked two dinners in a row! When was the last time THAT happened?
Din Tai Fung
Work lunch to celebrate the move to our new offices. We moved down the street in downtown Bellevue, to Lincoln Square. On the second floor you’ll find a world famous dumpling place, Din Tai Fung. Popular in Korea, Hong Kong, Indonesia and the like. Really great tasting food.
I had a terrific time breaking all of those South Beach Diet rules, trying the pork shu-mai, dumplings of all sorts of meats, spare ribs, fried rice. I even tasted one lo mein noodle. A classic hot & sour soup was one of my favorite dishes (haven’t had it in forever), but really, everything was delicious.
Our menu also included pickled cucumbers, stir-fried green beans; wonton soup; soup dumplings (they called them ‘juicy dumplings’), basically more dumplings than I can remember. I ordered a Boba Milk Tea as well, something I haven’t done in years. Hey, special occasion, right?
The dessert was a simple, delicious red bean dumpling.
Fantastic way to kick off a new office in a new building.
Birthdays
There was a spell in my life when I wasn’t much into birthdays. I didn’t have birthday parties every year. Just kinda went with the flow, though I do remember a super-fun time I had when I turned 21. It included seeing “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” at the UofC Law School, then heading to a bar to legally drink. Which we did quite a bit of.
But, meeting, and then marrying, the husband has changed that quite a bit. It’s not a birth-DAY, but a birth-WEEK, with ongoing celebrations big and small. Want a pint? Why not, it’s your birthday. A Home Theater magazine? Sure it’s your birthday. It’s great for me, because when the husband’s birthday comes up, it’s sort of a like a second celebration for me … meals out, shopping, fun all around. More than once I thought to myself, I should get a cupcake, it’s my birthday. Wait a minute, it’s not my birthday. At any rate, these days I love celebrating birthdays.
Need I remind you, it’s birthday pie time! Y’all remember my birthday pie, right? Well, now, we have the husband’s. Banana cream pie, made by the mother-in-law, from, if I haven’t already told you, a recipe clipped from “Better Home & Gardens” from the 60s. Seriously.
banana cream birthday pie
Love it. We have pie for brakfast, lunch, and, if we’re not tired of it, a little for dinner. Yay, pie!
For part two of the husband’s birthday celebration, we headed down to Chinatown for some Dim Sum. Didn’t plan it, sort of serendipitously, but it seemed like the right thing to do. Rather than frequent a place we’d been to before, we tried something new, Duk Li DIm Sum.
The place was tiny, so no rolling carts to deliver treats to your table. Instead the waitress gave us a paper menu and we marked down what we wanted. Here is a taste …
Steamed turnip cake. Usually these are pan fried, and sorta greasy. This steamed version was much more appealing. Still, it's one of those weird looking things. The husband asked, "what's in it?" and I answered honestly, "I'm not entirely sure".
Spring rolls. Typical. Except, they were cold. I don't think they were supposed to be cold, but they were. A bit disappointing, and I wouldn't not have ordered them had I known (kinda funny, only because there were a few other dishes that were burning hot. We bit into these and were like, Oh. It's cold.)
Sticky rice dumplings. Wasn't sure what these were when I ordered then, but I ended up loving them. and not just because they were obviously deep-fried. "Sticky rice" is a made from a glutonous rice flour, a familiar ingredient in Chinese (and Japanese) cooking that is unique in flavor and texture. Love it.
Shrimp Rice Roll. I didn't know that this is what' they are called, but it's some typical dim sum for us. Tasty.
There are a few more pics of our Dim Sum lunch in my flickr photostream. Click on any of the pics above to hit the point in the photostream.
This final one isn’t from our Dim Sum outing, but very well could have been. I picked up a Sesame Ball from Mee Sum Pastry, now open in the University Distribut (the original shop is in Pike Place Market). I had been wanting one of these since I went out to Dim Sum in July with my sister and her family. So, here now, a month later, I finally get my just desserts.
Sesame ball with red bean paste in the center.
Happy Birthday to Me! I mean, the husband!
BBQ in the ‘Quah
Last week we ventured out of our comfort zone and went over to the Eastside to visit Joanne & Pete. The live in the Issaquah Highlands, what I like to call The ‘Quah. As we’re driving up the hills to get to their house we pass by tons of cookie cutter homes, townhomes, condos and small shops that make up this development and I’m thinking to myself, yeah, maybe when we have kids and tire of the city and decide to move to the ‘burbs, maybe this could be a place I could live in. At the same time the husband blurts out, “Man, I could NEVER live here.”
Anyway, we had a fun afternoon of doggie play date plus BBQ. I won’t get into the details of the crazy antics Max performed (note to self … do NOT leave dogs out near the barbie, but more importantly do not leave food out in the open near the grill, with the dogs locked outside. Bad idea!).
The kids, Bode and Max, tired from playing, and wanting to come inside for eating, drinking and more playing.
The husband and I brought over his famous Asian Noodle Shrimp Salad (cold noodles, mixed with peanut oil, tomatoes, snow peas and other natural flavors). Small tangent here … I love this dish, a perfect summer dish. It is a recipe his mom handed down to him years and years (and years) ago. This time I made it. Now. I’ve been Asian all my live (oh really, you ask)… Yes. And not once do I recall my Chinese family every making a dish like this. Seriously. Is my memory just that bad? I remember chow mein type dishes in general, and maybe a peanut noodle dish and lots and lots of soy sauce. It is really very yummy and so easy to make, though. But, I digress.
Asian Noodle Shrimp Salad
Joanne outdid herself with very tasty turkey burgers (couldn’t even tell it was turkey, we all said, which, really, for a turkey burger, is the best compliment). Side salads and chips. For dessert Joanne whipped out these cool “dessert pizza pies”: Sugar cookies with a lime-cream cheese frosting, topped with fresh kiwi, strawberries and blueberries. Yum.
Dessert pizza pies
It’s now our time to host J&P for dinner back in the city. We’ve gotta get ourselves a grill first.
Dim Sum and then some
My six-day love affair with refined sugars and carbs is over. I felt so ill yesterday I have no doubt it’s due to the loads of carbs I’ve ingested the past few days (especially considering how I had limited my intake for so many weeks previous). So bad that I didn’t work out, which led to a vicious circle of minimal movement due to feeling ill, then eating something to feel better, then feeling bad and wanting to curl up in the fetal position.
So, vacation or not, the carb train has made its last stop and it’s not coming back. Goodbye, angel food cake. Farewell, onion bagel. So long, penne marinara with a slide of sourdough bread on the side. Sweet dreams, sweet coconut bun. Adieu, my delicious, soft, crusty loaf of walnut bread from Essential. Hello, high-fiber cereal, low-fat yogurt, eggs and salsa and salad, salad, salad. Didja miss me?
But before we leave, how about one more flashback (cue sappy music, like that episode of “Family Ties” when Alex fails a final exam because he spends the hour flashing back to all the wonderful times he had with his girlfriend … do you remember the song … What did you think, I would do at this moment, When you’re standing before me, With tears in your eyes? …”)
Anyhow, here’s a wonderful memory of my vacation … Dim Sum at House of Hong in the International District with the sis and family:
Sticky rice filled with pork, chinese sausage and other goodies, steamed in banana leaves. Mmmmm …
Barbecue pork. Served with hot mustard or ketchup, yes, ketchup.
Turnip cake. A favorite dim sum dish for me, though I’m not sure the rest of the table was as enthused about it. The ultimate indulgence. A starchy vegetable, mixed with bits of meat and fried to perfection.
Humbow with the sweet, red barbecue pork filling.
Shrimp dumplings. The kids loved these things.
Shumai.
Another dim sum favorite … little egg custard pies. Yeah, baby!
Goodbye, sweet little egg custard pies …