Lobster Noodles (龍蝦麵, Lung4 Haa1 Min6)

Happy New Year! For the first dish of the New Year, here’s a lobster noodle dish. The traditional recipe puts the cooked lobster pieces with the shell over a bed of cooked noodles using a chicken stock based sauce. This recipe is differs from the traditional in three major techniques, the first being stir frying the ingredients like a chow mein dish, the second being using shelled lobster meat, and the third being a sauce made from lobster stock to further emphasize the lobster flavor. The stock is made by boiling the lobster shells after removing the meat. Any lobster stock not used in this recipe can be used in other dishes.

I found that using kitchen shears is the best way to remove the meat from the lobster shells, especially the small legs that contain that hard to get at lobster meat. If a whole lobster is too much of a challenge, you can substitute lobster tails. Since I’d rather eat lobster without having to pick out the shells, I remove the meat from the shells before cooking. The cooked lobster shells provide a deep red color to the traditional dish, but I’d rather eat the lobster than look at it.

Enjoy!

Chili Paste with Fermented Soy Bean Beef Tendon (湖南豆豉辣椒牛筋, Wu4 Naam4 Dau6 Si6 Laat6 Ziu1 Ngau4 Gan1)

This recipe was updated on 16 Oct 2014. Some instructions and ingredient quantities were changed.

Beef tendon is usually eaten in a stew with beef outside flank, which can be found in the Beef Flank and Tendon Stew (燜牛筋牛腩, Man¹ Ngau⁴ Gan¹ Ngau⁴ Naam⁵) recipe, but beef tendon can be the star of the dish all by itself. Beef tendon is tough and requires long slow cooking, at which time it becomes soft and gelatinous, so making this dish is a two-step process. The first step is to soften the beef tendon through slow cooking, and the second step is to stir fry the beef tendon with vegetables. I use a slow cooker in the first step since I can just cook the beef tendon unattended. The beef tendon itself is nearly tasteless, so the other ingredients give the dish its flavor, with the beef tendon supplying the texture to the dish.

Enjoy!

Hot Bean Sauce Cashew Beef (辣豆辦腰果牛肉, Laat6 Dau6 Faan6 Jiu1 Gwo2 Ngau4 Juk6)

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

 

Everything in this dish, except for the beef, came from a can or bottle. So if you have a can and bottle opener, you can make this quick cooking dish. Bamboo shoots are a staple of Chinese cooking. They can be purchased bottled, canned, preserved, and fresh, and also as strips, as slices, or as whole shoots. For this dish, I used canned bamboo shoot slices, but you can easily buy them fresh at your local Asian market. The cashew nuts give an added crunch and the hot bean sauce gives the dish its spicy flavor.

Enjoy!

Steamed Chili Lemongrass Black Bean Chicken (鮮辣椒檸檬葉豆豉蒸鷄, Sin1 Laat6 Ziu1 Ning4 Mung4 Jip6 Dau6 Si6 Zing1 Gai1)

This recipe was updated on 24 May 2015. Some instructions were changed.

Steamed lemon chicken with black bean sauce is a recipe my Mom gave me when I first moved out of the house. I still have the 3x5 card (you remember those!) she gave me with that recipe many years ago. This variation of that quick cooking recipe uses lemongrass in place of lemons, with the addition of chili sauce to give the dish some spice. Since lemongrass is used instead of lemon, the dish has a hint of lemon rather than the stronger flavor a lemon supplies. The zucchini pieces are arranged along the edge of the plate to enhance the dish’s presentation.

Enjoy!

Asian-Style Carnitas

This Asian spiced inspired slow cooker recipe has its origins from the Mexican Pulled Pork (Carnitas) recipe, which was adapted from the Mexican Pulled Pork recipe at America’s Test Kitchen. Their original premise was to develop a recipe that did involve lard or deep frying to produce the carnitas’ crispy outside. Their solution, after oven-braising the pork in a Dutch oven (this recipe uses the slow cooker instead), was to use the broiler after coating the pork with a reduction of the remaining liquid and fat. The method works great and I’ve modified their technique to use the barbeque grill instead of the broiler to get a smokier flavor incorporated into the pork. The resulting carnitas are soft on the inside and a crispy brown on the outside, with that distinctive smoked flavor from the grill. The condiments are also Asian inspired with spicy Sriracha sauce adding a distinctive spicy hot kick to the dish.

Enjoy!

Dungeness Crab Hong Kong Noodles (北美大肉蟹雲吞麵, Bak1 Mei5 Daai6 Juk6 Haai5 Wan4 Tan1 Min6)

This recipe was updated on 30 Aug 2016. The Cantonese for Dungeness crab was added to the title, and some instructions and ingredient quantities were changed.

Dungeness crab is now in season, which is a treat in my part of the world. My local Asian market had cooked crab leg clusters on sale and I couldn’t resist buying them. Usually only whole cooked and uncooked crabs are available, but in this case the only work I had to do was to remove the meat from the crab leg shells. I searched for a recipe using the crab meat and adapted the recipe from the Dungeness Crab with Cellophane Noodles recipe at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch website. This is a quick cooking dish and using Hong Kong noodles, in place of cellophane noodles, which works well with the crab.

Enjoy!

Mom’s Chinese Chicken Salad (手絲鷄沙律, Sau2 Si1 Gai1 Saa1 Leot6)

This recipe was updated on 15 Aug 2015. Some equipment was added and hyperlinks fixed.

My Mom would make her Chinese chicken salad for family gatherings, and since I have a very large family, there is no such thing as making just a little Chinese chicken salad. She would roast two chickens and hand shred the meat. Hand-shredding (手絲, sau² si¹) the chickens was an important step, since the Chinese believe that hand-shredding adds flavor to the dish (just be sure your hands are washed and clean!). All the other ingredients also require time to cut, chop, and crush in order to get to the finished dish. Note that making this recipe is a two day process.

I just recently asked my Mom for the recipe (which is found later in the post). The first time I made the dish, it didn’t turn out right. I used chicken parts and increased the amount of dressing. All wrong; since you need the gelatin from a whole chicken to flavor the dish, and just a small amount of dressing is required since the salad is almost “dry” when compared to the “wet” dressing used in most salads.

My second try was more successful. This version of the recipe is slightly different from my Mom’s original, with minor changes to the salad and dressing ingredients and quantities, and the taste was close to my Mom’s too. However, the quantity of salad hasn’t changed, so there’s still no such thing as just a little Chinese chicken salad.

Enjoy!