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Recipe: candied orange peels

For many years we rented because we were in grad school, because post-docs are so short-term, because we lived in Southern California… All those years I cooked and produced vegetable and fruit scraps and bemoaned the fact that I didn’t have a compost pile of my own, in a yard of my own, to put on a garden of my own. Now that we’ve been in our own house for 2 years, I’ve been rejoicing in my own compost pile (well, compost bin – otherwise the winds would have my potato peels strewn across the next county) which sits in my own yard. I don’t have my own garden yet, but one day I will figure out what to grow in our 2-week growing season…

So it’s great that I have a composting system because I can reduce the amount of trash we take to the dump by half! Even so, I would prefer not to have to throw things away if possible. Since I was juicing oranges recently, a flash of brilliance hit me smack in the forehead and I decided to make candied orange peels. Mind you, I don’t dig on candied orange peels myself. I mean, I can stomach maybe one, or two – but that’s enough for the year. Jeremy on the other hand… he’ll sit there and eat one after another.

It’s a fairly simple process (but not a quick one) to make candied orange peels, but I never had a desire. In my pastry course, we did a massive candied orange peel campaign one night in a frenzy of garnishes and decorations. I loved that class, but it was fast-paced and because we divvied up the duties, I wasn’t able to get my hands on everything. All I ended up doing was peeling a dozen oranges and taking a ton of notes.

use almost every bit of the orange

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Recipe: hot and sour soup

I have a tiny, old recipe book that my mom’s house mother (in grad school) printed in 1974. Several years later, Mrs. Li sent a couple of copies to my mom who in turn passed them along to me and Kris. I love this book. The binding is half-missing and the pages are stained, but it contains 100 authentic Chinese recipes. I tend to be a visual person and I am a total whore for cookbooks plastered with glossy pictures, but this modest book is a simple black and white with a few line drawings to illustrate the more complex steps. Next to my parents and my grandma, this book has taught me how to cook some traditional Chinese favorites. Imagine my delight the first time I tried the hot and sour soup recipe. The kind you get in Chinese restaurants is typically heavy on the cornstarch and very light on the goodies – not so with this version.

you can find tiger lily buds in asian markets

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Recipe: chinese dumplings and potstickers

[warning: a long post]

Do you know what that one recipe was that started you on your cooking passion? I have cooked since I was a kid, but I didn’t get serious until I was a sophomore in college and I felt this cultural obligation to make dumplings from scratch to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Dumplings have lodged themselves in my head as my link to Chinese cooking and culture, but even better than that – mastering dumplings gave me the confidence to go forward and try other recipes and techniques.

for the pork filling

I posted Making Chinese Dumplings with Jen on my website several years ago (it now lives here). People have written asking about fillings, thanking me for my recipe, asking me to post more versions… The endeavor to make Chinese dumplings isn’t like pouring a can of soda – it’s quite involved and taking the photos adds considerably more time. Seeing as my days of free time may be near an end, I decided Making Chinese Dumplings with Jen could use an upgrade and an added variation. Besides, that old version was created in graduate school, a time of simultaneously happy and extremely bad, miserable, loathsome, angry, depressing, unhappy associations for me.

there is an ungodly amount of chopping involved

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