Appetizers & Snacks

Soy-braised five-spice beef shank with sesame oil is a traditional cold appetizer that's often served at Chinese banquets. It's also great with rice, scallion pancakes (I like this combo for breakfast), in noodles, or as is. Prepared five-spice beef is available sliced, packaged and ready to eat in many Chinese Markets, e.g., 99 Ranch Market, but since there are few to none in my hood, I decided it was high time to make my own.

A ubiquitous fast food sold by street vendors and/or in night markets throughout Taiwan, these fried chicken tenders are soooo amazingly crisp and flavorful! Mom likes to use pork or squid instead of chicken, and I believe there are even some vegetarian versions using mushrooms or potatoes. But the essential ingredients are a marinade of soy, garlic, rice wine, sugar and 5-spice powder for the meat, seafood, or veggies, potato starch for dredging, a salt-pepper seasoning, and

So what the hey is agar-agar? It's a derivative of seaweed and used basically as a vegetarian form of gelatin. In Chinese markets, it's typically sold in 1.5 oz packages and the product looks like long strands of translucent noodles with the consistency of plastic. Sounds delish, eh? Well, actually, it really is when well-seasoned and properly prepared. My grandmother used to make this tasty cold appetizer/salad with agar-agar and chicken. After some experimentation, I came u

A favorite snack/appetizer that both my mom and grandmother excelled at, Pearl Balls are basically meat balls made from ground pork, soy sauce, rice wine, sesame oil, ginger, with a bit of chopped scallions and water chestnuts, coated with glutinous rice and steamed for about 30 minutes. Not all recipes call for this, but I also like to add some chopped shiitake mushrooms to the meatball mixture. The pearly white sheen from the glutinous rice coating is what gives this dish i

I used to hate Thousand-Year-Old Eggs ('Pidan') as a kid. Probably because the only time I would be tasked with eating them was once a year when we were at my Grandma's for Chinese New Year and these darned things would inevitably show up in the appetizer course along with Chinese ham, abalone & mayonnaise, and jellyfish salad - all of which were fantabulous, with the glaring exception of those gnarly looking black eggs. Fast forward about 5-6 years after I came to California