use real butter

Recipe: soy sauce chicken

Hrm, some recent developments might require that I curtail the posting frequency. Not sure. We’ll see how it goes in the next few weeks.

A few folks have inquired about the lunch I had in this entry, so I figured I should write it up seeing as it is a great dish in cold weather months.

Chinese noodle soups in my mind are as versatile as sandwiches. You can put whatever you want in them. I think of it in terms of a few major components: the noodles, the broth, the fixins. Noodles can be bean thread (aka glass noodles), soba, somen, iron man, ramen, rice noodles, and the list goes on. The broth is whatever you want it to be. The fixins can be vegetables, meat, leftover stir-fry, delicious spicy chili radishes (my fav!)…

We’ll start with one of my standards: soy sauce chicken. It’s just chicken drumsticks simmered for a few hours, but what you get is chicken and a lovely aromatic broth.

Recipe: chinese vegetarian chicken

*Edit*: Oh, I see that I can enter this into Coffee & Vanilla’s Vegetarian Awareness Month Event! October 1st was World Vegetarian Day. Here’s the banner and go join if you can:

I love tofu. Love it raw, love it dried, fried, shredded, diced, pressed, in soups, in sheets, in stir-fries, in braises… Back in the day, when I mentioned tofu to white people, they would make a face and say, “yech!” But as granolas and vegetarians grew in numbers, so did tofu’s popularity. I’m not vegetarian. I love animals and I love to eat them. That doesn’t mean that I don’t like vegetarian food. One of my favorite haunts in Monterey Park was a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant (Happy Family – anyone know where it went? It’s now an empty lot). Asian vegetarian food is really Effingham delicious.

Whenever I visit my Grandma in California, she insists on sending me home with several times the volume of my duffel bag in food. Let’s see, she’ll hand me a few pounds of fruit, several packages of Chinese snacks, lots of dried goods, and a “loaf” of her homemade Chinese vegetarian chicken. I love that stuff. She taught me how to make it a few years ago, but I never tried until yesterday.

Vegetarian chicken?! That’s the translation of su ji. From what I’ve gathered, Buddhist monks were masters of preparing tofu in many delicious ways. They are vegetarian. I don’t think they eat garlic either because it is the root of the plant, thus destroying the plant. Emperors used to dig this style of food and would have the monks prepare meals for them. Well, you don’t just prepare any old slop for the Emperor. They made dishes that mimicked chicken, fish, squid, duck… out of tofu. The monks even went so far as to insert tiny slivers of bamboo to resemble fish bones. I learned about all of this when my parents dragged me to a Buddhist temple in LA for my mom’s college reunion.

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: sautéed kong xing tsai

I’ve always loved greens ever since I was a kid. That’s mostly because my mom made a point of preparing plenty of vegetables for dinner. Growing up in southern Virginia, the norm for vegetables was mushy, puke-green slop. Not at my house! Mom sautéed most vegetables and preserved their bright, beautiful greens, textures, and nutrients. No wonder my sister and I loved spinach, broccoli, and a whole host of Asian vegetables. One leafy green in particular was my favorite. The Chinese name is kong xing tsai. We had it on occasion at “authentic” Chinese restaurants or whenever a Chinese friend would bring a bag of it over from their garden.

Sometimes I’m slow on the uptake. It dawned upon me a few months ago that kong xing tsai literally translates into “hollow heart vegetable”. When I was rejoicing at my discovery of the Super H Mart in Denver on Sunday, I came across bags and bags of kong xing tsai in the produce section. An impulse buy, it most certainly was. I didn’t know how to prepare it, but I could call my mom and ask. I just hadn’t eaten the vegetable nor seen it in years.