Far East Plaza Restaurant Review

Gold Dig #44 Similar to Grand Central Market, Far East Plaza brings a bunch of eateries together in a Chinatown shopping center. The plaza as a whole is on Jonathan Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants list. While I’m conflicted about the notion of including a grouping of restaurants that vary in food type and quality onto…

Cambodian Kaw

My Cambodian friend introduced me to this dish of pork belly and eggs in a soy and caramelized sugar sauce, and it’s been a favorite of mine ever since. He gave me his mom’s recipe, but just like my family’s recipes (and I’m beginning to think all Asian families) it was more of a half-complete…

Pork Bok Choy Boats

Everybody loves a lettuce wrap. But what’s even better? A bok choy boat! Lettuce is bland and tends to be just a flimsy vehicle for delivering the filling into your face. Baby bok choy has a nice flavor and crunch, which complements the filling nicely and serves as a sturdier scoop. It also presents nicely, so…

B-day Bites

Through the Cookbook Club, I have made some incredible friends. I am so grateful to have them in my life. And a nice bonus to having a bunch of chef friends… they can put together a pretty mean birthday feast 🙂 This was a meal full of all of my favorite things – seafood, grilled…

BBQ Pork Pita Pizza

I put this BBQ Pork Pita Pizza together using leftover bits of this and that rummaged from my fridge. It turned out so good that I have since endeavored to end up with Chinese BBQ pork and pita leftovers whenever possible so that I can whip up this tasty snack. It’s a little spicy and…

Coffee Braised Pork

When you slow-cook pork in a delicious braising liquid, two awesome things happen – the pork becomes so tender it literally falls apart, and the meat absorbs all the juiciness and flavor of the liquid. When that liquid is coffee… it’s magical. If you dry rub pork with coffee grounds then braise it,  you’re basically…

Spicy Sausage & Mushroom Tomato Sauce Pasta

I adored this spicy sausage and mushroom tomato sauce pasta when I was a kid. My mom always made it with spaghetti noodles, and half the fun was watching my brother eat it. He would suck each individual noodle through his lips, and then eat the sausage and mushrooms later. By the end of the…

Red-Braised Ribs

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…

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….

Sunday Supper

A group of our food-loving friends got together for a Sunday Supper potluck, and it was quite the fall feast. Warming comfort food was abundant and wine was flowing! I made jook (go here for my Guessipe), which is a hearty soup made with turkey and rice, then dressed to taste by the eater. This…

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…

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…