use real butter

When I saw my grandma at Elena’s house a few weekends ago, she made some interesting Chinese dishes. I was familiar with all of the ingredients except for one. She called it a Chinese potato (or a Japanese potato). I thought, “What on Earth could a Chinese potato be?” Well, she showed me, and prepped it, and I ate it – it’s delicious!

On our drive home, we passed through Super H Mart where I used that matching function in my brain – the one that says, “this image in your head is the same as that image before you now”. I found the potatoes! They were labeled as Japanese potatoes. Upon some quick research, I found that these are in fact called Okinawan Sweet Potatoes.

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.