These red-braised ribs are fall-off-the-bone tender and pretty easy to make. The hardest part is cutting the slab into individual ribs – my mom always used a cleaver. The second hardest part is having the patience to wait 90 minutes as the braising slowly breaks down all the connective tissue of the ribs, filling your…
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Steamed Chinese Mushroom Chicken
Steamed Chinese Mushroom Chicken was one of my favorite dishes growing up. Steaming the chicken in the sauce keeps it super tender and lets it absorb all the great flavors. The Chinese mushrooms add a great woodiness and bit of chewiness. And the Chinese sausage gives some pop and sweetness. It’s also easy to make,…
Spicy Eggplant with Pork
Spicy Asian eggplant is a pretty common dish at Chinese restaurants. This is my re-creation of it, with pork added, because what’s good without pig is even better with it. This can be done more simply by skipping the salting, cornstarch coating, and frying of the eggplant – just sautéing it with the pork instead….
Japanese Breakfast Bowl
Apparently Japanese Breakfast Bowls are becoming a thing in LA restaurants these days. They’re basically rice, with some fish and some veggies. I love dinner food for breakfast, so I’ve been making something akin to that at home for a long time! My version is super easy because it’s mostly already prepared ingredients from the…
Carrot Coconut Curry Pasta
We were doing a pasta party, and all of the standard sauce bases were covered – tomato, vodka, bolognese. So I wanted to experiment with something different. When I was recovering from knee surgery, my cousin had made me a big batch of carrot coconut curry soup, and I remembered thinking those flavors might be…
Sticky Rice Stuffed Chicken
When I was a kid, my grandma often made sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves. I loved it, but she lived across the country so when I couldn’t get it from her, it would always be one of the items I ordered at dim sum. There was something kind of magical about peeling open the…
Spicy Peanut Noodles
This was my aunt’s go-to dish for parties. I think it’s an Americanized version of a peanut noodle dish that probably originally called for egg noodles. But she always used spaghetti, which is so convenient because I always keep a package of dry spaghetti around. It’s a simple, make-ahead dish that people will rave about….
Pesto
Pesto is ideal for a Guessipe, because it’s pretty flexible. While pesto is traditionally made with basil, you can substitute with parsley, cilantro, carrot greens, radish greens, beet greens, and probably others! You can also use walnuts, pistachios, hazelnuts, sesame seeds, or pumpkin seeds instead of pine nuts. In this Guessipe I used walnuts and…
Jook
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…
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…
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…