Cookbook Club – All Under Heaven; Land of Fish and Rice

For January’s Cookbook Club, we celebrated Chinese New Year with two cookbooks – All Under Heaven by Carolyn Phillips and Land of Fish and Rice by Fuchsia Dunlop. I chose the Gailan with Oyster Sauce. Go to my Cookbook Club site to see the whole Chinese New Year feast. For now – my dish!

I always order gailan (AKA Chinese broccoli) when I go to dim sum. Ya gotta have some greens to balance out all that pork and shrimp! Amazingly, I’d never actually made gailan myself. I was always under the impression that it was just blanched and then drizzled with oyster sauce. This recipe called for something more than that, so my interest was piqued. Plus gailan is a traditional Chinese New Year dish.

According to the cookbook, I was going to learn something called “steam-frying”, which I’d never heard of before. You heat up oil in a wok, throw in the gailan while it’s still wet from washing, and toss it around so it gets coated with oil. Then put on the lid and let it steam just until it turns bright green. Done – take it off and put it on a platter!

Then rice wine, oyster sauce, sugar, and sesame oil get heated in the wok until boiling. Pour the sauce onto the gailan and serve!

I was pretty pleased with how this dish turned out. The steam-frying gave the gailan a beautiful bright green color, while leaving it crisp for a nice pop when you bit into it. The sauce had more depth than the plain oyster sauce drizzle I’m used to – the wine and sesame oil gave it robustness, and the sugar a touch of sweetness. I happily saved the bit of leftover sauce and used it to season my jook (turkey and rice soup).