Friends and often tell me this is the first recipe they make a beeline for in The Chinese Takeout Cookbook.
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When I teach cooking classes, one of the questions students ask most frequently is what is my favorite dish to cook again and again. Talk about hard questions! I'm constantly testing so many new recipes for this blog and other projects that I don't get to go back to old favorites as often as I should.
But of course, there are recipes I frequently crave and try to work in on nights when I'm not testing out new recipes. One is buttermilk roast chicken, a delicious standby for when friends come by for dinner. Another is chicken adobo and its coconut variation, which I frequently daydream about and could make in my sleep. And yet another is anything kung pao.
Kung pao chicken is such a standby in my kitchen because of both its mouthwatering sauce and its ease of preparation. But from time to time, I also make kung pao shrimp as a variation. The prep time is roughly the same, or even faster if you buy your shrimp already cleaned and deveined.
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Spice up your mussels with this delicious Thai Red Curry and coconut broth.
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This recipes calls for smaller clams such as Manila clams and other cockles. The dish easy to make and packed with tangy, spicy, and briny flavors.
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This shrimp with spicy garlic sauce recipe is super quick and easy. Because this dish is all about the garlicky flavor, nothing beats freshly sautéed garlic.
Read MoreI've been on quite a shellfish kick lately. In the span of a month, I've eaten mussels and clams almost every time I've had dinner out, from French-style mussels steamed in white wine at a local hangout to Chinese clams with black bean sauce at dim sum. Maybe it's because of spring and warmer temps, but restaurants have been putting up seafood specials left and right, and I happily indulge.
Fortunately, living near two good seafood markets means I can decide on whim to have mussels and clams for dinner and just walk down the street to pick them up. A couple of days ago, I decided to do an easy meal of mussels with ginger and shallots, steamed with Chinese rice wine.
Sometimes I cook mussels with Chinese black beans and chili paste, but this time I opted for forgo heavier flavorings in favor of a lighter dish. Chinese rice wine, much like a dry white wine in preparing moules marinière, compliments and shows off the sweet brininess of the fresh mussels. And once you debeard the mussels, the actual cooking time is super quick.
Read MoreHappy Chinese New Year! Over the weekend, I celebrated by guest chef-ing at Ted and Amy Supper Club in Brooklyn. We served a four-course meal for 14 people: shrimp and chive dumplings, watercress and mushroom noodle soup, red-cooked chicken with chestnuts, and for dessert, homemade black sesame ice cream with almond cookie crumble. Even I left in a food coma, and I had spent most of the day running around.
It has been a while since I've featured a dumpling recipe on this site, so on Saturday afternoon, in the midst of preparing for the dinner, I pan-fried some extra dumplings for lunch and snapped a few photos.
The beauty of shrimp dumplings, other than being delicious, is that they take about half the cooking time of the standard pork dumplings, only about 3 minutes in the pan instead of 5 or 6. Chives add a refreshing crispness without overwhelming the delicate flavor of the shrimp, as scallions or leeks might. So if you're a huge dumpling fan, try out this recipe below, for Chinese New Year or just a fun weekend project. The most challenging part is the folding. But once you get comfortable and crank out all 50, you can freeze extras for later. (And if you're in New York, I also offer entire classes on dumpling making.)
Read MoreGreetings from Atlanta! I'm down south for BlogHer Food 2011 and getting ready for two days of panels, talks, and events with plenty of other food bloggers from around the country. I got in a few hours ago, wandered around downtown enjoying the sun, and even managed to find and scarf down some Cajun-Chinese food for lunch. (To be recapped in another post.)
Oh, so you may have noticed the new layout. After 3 1/2 years of blogging on Drupal, I finally made the long-overdue switch to Wordpress. I have a feeling this is going to be change my life. Or at least, be a major headache reducer. As flexible as Drupal can be, and as much as tech-savvy folks rave about it, it was not the easiest CMS to work with if all you want to do is blog and not tweak a lot of code. And I sort of really dislike code. I've been working with Wordpress for only a few days and it already feels way more intuitive...kind of like when I switched from a PC to a Mac in 2005 and never, ever looked back.
(One of the best new additions to the new design is a little Print-Friendly button at the end of each post. Just click on it, and a window sans sidebars will pop up, and you can select which elements you want to keep and delete.)
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