Chicken with Dried Shrimp (蝦米鷄, Haa1 Mai5 Gai1)

This recipe was updated on 21 Apr 2015. Some instructions and ingredient quantities were changed.

Aside from the dried shrimp, this is a pretty standard chicken stir fry dish. Mushrooms are a common ingredient to include in this dish, but substituting dried shrimp gives the dish a different taste. Like mushrooms, dried shrimp tastes good with chicken and produces a different texture in the dish. Dried shrimp can be purchased at your local Asian market, usually in the refrigerator section.

Enjoy!

Chum Salmon and Snow Peas with Wood Ear Fungus (木耳荷蘭豆鮭魚, Muk6 Ji5 Ho4 Laan4 Dau6 Gwai1 Jyu4)

This recipe was updated on 25 May 2015. Some instructions were changed.

Here’s a quick cooking salmon dish with minimal preparation time. Chum salmon was available at my local Asian market, but you can substitute regular salmon if you can’t find the chum. The seasoning is very simple, in fact my usual cornstarch thickener isn’t used in the sauce so that the salmon is the dominant taste. The crunch in this dish comes from the snow peas and, to a smaller degree, the wood ear fungus.

Enjoy!

Basil Mussel Sausage Aglio e Olio

The basis of this dish is extra virgin olive oil and garlic. Whenever I’ve made this dish in the past, I would thinly slice garlic cloves to get the desired quantity (which is more than most recipes call for since I like garlic). At my local Korean market, minced garlic (mixed with a small amount of water) is available in containers up to 5 lbs. (2.3 kg), which is a lot of minced garlic! So I bought a 1 lb. (454 g.) container and used a small portion of that garlic for this recipe together with frozen mussel meat. Most recipes use fresh mussels in the shell to make this dish and the broth from cooking the mussels become part of the sauce. So to emulate that process, I thawed the mussels in white wine and then used the mussel infused wine in the sauce.

You can save some time by cooking the pasta while the other ingredients are prepared. I never do this since prep time always seems to exceed pasta cooking time for me, but for those of you that are speedier, you can use parallel processing to make this dish. Finally I used a wok to make this dish (which certainly isn’t a traditional Italian method!), but you can certainly use a pan.

Enjoy!

Chicken and Mustard Green Chow Mein (芥菜鷄炒麵, Gaai3 Coi3 Gai1 Caau2 Min6)

This recipe was updated on 29 May 2015. Some instructions and ingredient quantities were changed.

Mustard greens must be in season since they’ve been on sale at my local Asian market. Chicken and mustard greens is a combination that goes well together. Mustard greens not only add a crunchy texture to this dish, but also a distinctive taste to this noodle dish.

Enjoy!