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.

A totally decadent Chinese dish which, I believe, is a Cantonese creation from Hong Kong, although I'm still researching to confirm its exact origins. My first taste of this unctuous concoction was almost 20 years ago at the Hong Kong Flower Lounge in Millbrae, a Northern California restaurant noted for its dim sum and other staples of Cantonese cuisine. They called it 'Walnut Prawns' on their menu, but it's also known as 'Honey Walnut Shrimp.'

This is a delicious home-style Chinese tofu dish which I adapted from a recipe by the amazing foodie family at www.woksoflife.com . Their dish is called Chicken & Soft Tofu Casserole  https://thewoksoflife.com/chicken-soft-tofu-casserole/ . The main changes I made was to double their recipe, use an assortment of fresh mushrooms (including fresh shiitakes, oyster mushrooms and king trumpet mushrooms) rather than dried shiitakes, and add extra oyster sauce and sesame oil. I als

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

Lettuce is not typically cooked in Western cuisines but leave it to the Chinese to do just that. My grandmother had on a few occasions while living here in the U.S., made romaine lettuce sautéed with garlic, and it was delicious! Tender crisp is the best way to describe the texture. I adapted this version from Woks of Life  https://thewoksoflife.com/cooked-lettuce-with-oyster-sauce-garlic/ , adjusting by adding just a little sugar to balance the sauce to my preference.

I took a cue from the Taiwanese dish Sha Cha BBQ Beef with Noodles and decided to make a variation of it using chicken instead since this was the only meat I had in the frig. I opted to serve the sautéed chicken with steamed rice rather than tossed with noodles. Sha Cha BBQ sauce is a savory and mildly spicy Taiwanese sauce that's made from dried shrimp, brill fish, chiles, soybean oil, shallots and garlic. It's the traditional condiment used for hot pot (we always mix ours w

Taiwanese congee or rice porridge is usually cooked plain (just rice and water) or with some diced sweet potato, but another traditional version called "Giam Mue" (translated as "salty" rice porridge) includes savory ingredients like shiitake mushrooms, tiny dried shrimp, celery, fried shallots, and ginger. My mom makes a delicious version, but since I don't have her exact recipe, this is my take on it. I've gone off the rez a bit by adding ground pork but, hey, everything's

I'm not all that familiar with Hakka cuisine, but I came across this recipe in Tsung-Yun Wang's Home-Style Taiwanese Cooking . This dish is very similar to the "Eggplant in Garlic Sauce" found on the menus of many a Chinese restaurant here in SoCal (not the spicy Szechuan version). I've come across very similar recipes that refer to this as "Taiwan-Style" Eggplant with Basil, perhaps because the Hakka are the 2nd largest ethnic group (comprising about 15% of the population) i

A staple in the Taiwanese household - and it certainly was in ours as this was mom's go-to soup for lunch, back in the day. The ingredients are few and simple, but very flavorful and nutritious. Mom used a pork stock made from pork ribs as the soup base, but I like to combine a pork-based stock with some chicken base to round out the flavors. Daikon radish and dried shiitakes are readily available in Asian markets and even many supermarkets these days. Hondashi is a Japanese