Jook is one of my favorite Thanksgiving family traditions. It is a hearty rice soup, which my family makes using the turkey carcass. We intentionally leave a lot of meat on the bone when carving the turkey, expressly for this purpose. As soon as the turkey is carved, we start the jook cooking, so that…
Tag: Chinese
Fermented Bean Curd Spareribs
Fermented bean curd is a wonderful seasoning you can buy jars of at the Asian market. It has a salty, almost meaty flavor, which is so good that in a pinch I’ve been known to just mash up a cube of fermented bean curd and eat it over rice. So if you mash it over…
Eggs on Rice with Oyster Sauce
Weekend brunch in my family was a big deal. My dad was the brunch cook, and my mom, brother, and I would take turns getting to decide what was for brunch each weekend. When it was my turn, I almost always chose eggs on rice with oyster sauce. This may sound weird, but trust me…
Chengdu Taste Restaurant Review
Gold Dig #11 Chengdu Taste is in the San Gabriel Valley, the real Chinatown of LA (in my humble opinion). The outside looks pretty much like every Chinese restaurant in the area – kinda rundown, no frills, hopefully because all the focus is on the food! They do have one of the fancier menu covers…
Crab in Black Bean Sauce
Whenever my grandma made this dish, we called it Lobster Sauce. Which is something of a misnomer because it is actually a pork-based sauce that the seafood is cooked in. And the seafood she used was rarely lobster – usually shrimp or crab. I’m sure there was something lost in translation. Whatever you want to…
Steamed Pork with Salted Duck Egg
Steamed pork just sounds blah. But it is actually one of my favorite childhood dishes, which I think just needs a more exciting name. Like being named after a general, or maybe a province. As it stands, steamed pork tends to be a dish of Chinese home cooking. It’s rarely found in restaurants (I posit…
Salted Black Bean Spareribs
Salted Black Bean Spareribs were one of my childhood favorites. The spareribs are cut Chinese-style into bite size pieces, which lets the marrow free to seep into the sauce. My grandma made these often. She stewed the spareribs until the marrow, cartilage, and connective tissue broke down into unctuous saucy goodness and the meat was…
Wonton
One of the first cooking memories I have is making Wonton with my family. I think it was the origin of my ongoing search for more opportunities to build community around food. My mom would make a big bowl of the filling, and then we would all sit around the table wrapping up little pockets…