When I think of orange chicken, it's usually of the Chinese fast food variety with way too much flour/cornstarch coating and a cloyingly sweet sauce. Therefore, it's not exactly a dish I crave for. However, I recently came across a recipe in Bee Yin Low's Easy Chinese Recipes  that looked lightly crisp and was not overly dressed with sauce. In fact, she uses fresh orange juice and omits the dried orange peel, which is hard to come by unless you have an Asian market in your ho

Kung Pao anything is going to be spicy. I've had Kung Pao chicken in some restaurants where there were more chilies than chicken - now that's overkill! My version has some kick to it but is probably more on the medium scale of spicy and is extra saucy. I also like adding sliced fresh jalapenos and button mushrooms, not traditional ingredients, but I think they work really well in this dish. Gil loves the sauce and thinks it tastes even better the next day.

I adapted this recipe from The Woks of Life and it is simply delicious! Where I digressed was in tenderizing the chicken with baking soda before cooking. If you can't find Chinese broccoli, broccolini is an excellent substitute. Great served with steamed white rice to soak up all that delicious sauce!

Hainanese chicken rice, a very popular dish in Singapore and Malaysia, traces its origins to Hainanese immigrants from Southern China. The simplicity of this dish belies the complexity of its flavors: it's essentially chicken and rice cooked in chicken stock, flavored with aromatics like ginger, scallions and garlic, and served with a chili-garlic-ginger dipping sauce on the side. Traditionally, a whole chicken is poached for this dish, with some of the stock reserved to cook

This dish is similar to beef with black pepper sauce, except it's not as laden with black pepper. For this version, I was inspired by the Steak Stir-Fry (Chow Steak Kow) recipe from the Woks of Life's website https://thewoksoflife.com/steak-stir-fry/  . They have amazing recipes on this site!

A classic Chinese dish that pairs extremely well with white rice. Most of the labor is in the prep, i.e., chopping the veggies & slicing the beef. I like to kick this recipe up with a bit of fresh jalapeño or Fresno chili.

A saucy, flavorful dish that's great served with steamed white rice. I adapted this recipe from Weichuan's Chinese Cuisine II . The original recipe called for Chinese broccoli and beef tenderloin or sirloin, but I used regular broccoli and flank steak instead.

By most accounts, this dish is of Cantonese origin. The key ingredients are sliced beef, onion, garlic, ginger, and bell peppers seasoned with soy sauce, oyster sauce, Worcestershire sauce, sesame oil, rice wine, sugar, and a generous amount of cracked black pepper. I took a cue from Bee Yin Low's version in her cookbook Easy Chinese Recipes  and added some Maggi Sauce to the marinade. Delicious served over steamed white rice!

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.

This is a traditional Chinese-style beef stew that's super easy to make and tastes great, especially over steamed white rice. Daikon radish is a typical component, but turnips are a perfectly acceptable substitute (less pungent/bitter-spicy than the daikon). My non-traditional additions are the tomatoes and onion - both I think add an extra touch of sweetness and depth of flavor to this dish.

Some years ago, I had been on a vintage (i.e., used) cookbook buying spree on Amazon, particularly of Chinese cookbooks from circa the 1970s. I adapted this recipe for Cantonese-style curry beef with tomatoes from one of those cookbooks,  Chinese Village Cookbook: A Practical Guide to Cantonese Country Cooking  by Rhoda Yee, published in 1975. Gil told me that when he was a kid in Singapore this was a common dish, sometimes even served with scrambled eggs or noodles. This sau

This popular Cantonese dish is super delicious and very easy to make. The key is quickly stir-frying the ingredients until they are just cooked through to ensure a silky smooth texture in both the egg and shrimp. To ensure that the shrimp are perfectly tender-crisp in texture, I soak the raw shrimp in a little baking soda and ice cold water for 30-60 minutes before marinating and cooking. We are fortunate to have an abundance of fresh organic eggs from our hens to use in any

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

Another traditional Taiwanese dish that I grew up eating. We typically had this for breakfast with rice porridge. However, there's no rule that says you can't eat it with some steamed white rice at any other time of the day. Just sayin'...The radish in this dish is salted dried daikon radish that is readily available in most Asian markets. It typically comes in strips, but you can also buy them pre-chopped. Deeeeeelish!!

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

I first came across this recipe in Fu Pei Mei's 1974  Chinese Cook Book Volume II, which I brought with me when I moved to Southern California from Taiwan to attend UC Irvine back in 1983. I was only 18 at the time and a less than seasoned cook, to put it kindly. I've tried many of her recipes since then, but not this one until just recently. I'm not sure about the origin of this dish, but how can you go wrong with steak and eggs, eh?

I don't remember my mom ever having made this home-style Taiwanese dish, but my grandmother certainly did (not while we were in Taiwan, but back in the mid-80's, when she, my Aunt Sheri and I were all living in LA). Tomato & eggs doesn't sound very Chinese, but the addition of garlic, a touch of soy, sweet chili sauce, ketchup and scallions makes this dish distinctive in the pantheon of egg dishes.

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 adapted this recipe from the February feature of Panda Restaurant's 2002 calendar. We had our 2001 office Christmas party at Panda Inn in Pasadena, and all of us left with a copy of their 2002 Calendar. The recipes in the calendar are selections from Panda's full-service restaurants, not from their fast food chain 'Panda Express," so are more "authentic," if you will... The original recipe is called "Orange Roughy in Ginger Sauce," but I've renamed it because you can also u

This dish is redolent of the flavors of a hot and sour soup and probably something that my grandpa (Ah-Kung) would have enjoyed because of the addition of vinegar, a commonly used ingredient in the cuisine of his native Fujian province. I adapted this recipe from Chinese Cooking: Favorite Home Dishes , a Weichuan cookbook by Chen Hsueh Hsia published in 1993. Very easy to make, super flavorful and great on its own or over steamed white rice.