Pork and Mixed Mushroom Fish Ball Stew (燉菇魚蛋豬肉, Dan6 Gu1 Jyu4 Daan6 Zyu1 Juk6)

This is actually a very simple to make slow cooker (aka crock pot in the USA) recipe. The dried ingredients just have to be soaked before it’s assembled in the slow cooker. This is also another seafood-meat combination dish that the Chinese love to make. The fish balls are available packaged in your Asian market’s refrigerator or frozen section. Throw in some vegetables, mushrooms, and bean curd sticks, and you can have a slow cooker stew for dinner by doing the preparation work for cooking in the morning.

In the USA, what are called country-style ribs is actually pork butt (which is actually the pork shoulder) cut into 2-inch (5 cm.) wide strips. The “ribs” are available prepackaged at the supermarket either with- or without the bone. I recommend getting the boneless version to make preparation easier. You can, of course, cut your own “ribs” from the pork butt, but why bother when they’re already available pre-cut. The pork also has fat running through the meat, which should not be removed, as the fat adds to the flavor and texture of the stewed pork when cooked in the slow cooker. In fact, pork prepared in this manner without any visible fat would be very dry after cooking.

Enjoy!

Carne Adovada (Red Chile Pork Stew) Enchiladas

As with my other enchilada recipes, Grilled Chilpotles Chili Chicken Green Chile Enchiladas and Mexican Pulled Pork Enchiladas, the enchiladas are made with leftovers from another dish, in this case Carne Adovada (Red Chile Pork Stew). For these enchiladas, I added leftover rice to the enchilada before adding in the Carne Adovada (Red Chile Pork Stew) filling. Serve with shredded cabbage and Pickled Vegetables.

When I made these enchiladas, I could purchase 10-inch (25.4 cm.) flour tortillas. Now I’m unable to get that size and 8-inch (20.3 cm.) flour tortillas are the largest currently available. This means that more (but smaller) enchiladas will fit into a pan or alternatively you can make the same sized enchilada out of two overlapping 8-inch tortillas. I also switched brands of enchilada sauce to Las Palmas. Las Palmas uses chile peppers as the main ingredient, rather than tomato sauce with chile peppers.

Enjoy!

Chicken Cabbage Chow Mein (青椰菜鷄炒麵, Ceng1 Je4 Coi3 Gai1 Caau2 Min6)

 

I’ve been adding cabbage to my chow mein recipes lately, probably because a nearby Chinese noodle restaurant does the same to their dishes. The cabbage adds a nice crunch to the recipe and a good textural contrast to the soft noodles. Depending upon the size of the cabbage, two to four leaves are needed for the dish. Other than the added cabbage, the rest of the ingredients used in this recipe are fairly common in chicken chow mein. This is a “dry” noodle dish and not a dish with a lot of “wet” sauce.

Enjoy!

Black Bean Chili Sauce Sugar Snap Pea Chicken (黑豆辣椒蜜豆鷄, Hak1 Dau6 Laat6 Ziu1 Mat6 Dau6 Gai1)

Black bean sauce and chicken are one of my favorite flavor combinations. In this case I used a prepared black bean sauce with chili oil made by Laoganma. If you don’t want a spicy dish, I would substitute another prepared sauce, Black Bean Garlic Sauce, made by Lee Kum Kee. My other favorite flavor combination with chicken is mushrooms. Straw mushrooms were the choice for this dish, but it could have easily been Shiitake mushrooms. The previous published Black Bean Chili Sauce Snow Pea Chicken (黑豆辣椒荷蘭豆鷄, Hak¹ Dau⁶ Laat⁶ Ziu¹ Ho⁴ Laan⁴ Dau⁶ Gai¹) recipe is very similar to this dish, and is just as tasty.

Enjoy!

Grilled Lemon Porterhouse Pork Chops

The principal marinade ingredient for this dish is lemon juice. Lemons add a nice bit of acidity to the pork chops and together with the herbs and spices, makes for a tasty grilled dish. The amount of salt to use is a personal preference; some people like more salt, others like less, and others prefer none at all. The amount of salt used in this dish will likely taste under-salted to most people, since that’s my personal preference. So feel free to adjust the amount of salt. For those that do not want added salt, more lemon juice can somewhat compensate for this.

The strategy to cook the pork chops is to first grill them to get the grill marks, and then smoke them to finish cooking. The thickness of the pork chops affects the cooking time, so you really want to purchase pork chops that are at least 1-inch (2.5 cm.) thick. If the pork chops are thinner, just adding the grill marks to both sides of the pork would fully cook them, and smoking them further would make the pork tough and dried out. So to be able to both grill and smoke the pork, try to purchase thicker pork chops (the thicker the better!).

Enjoy!

Japanese Chili Green Bean Chicken (日本指天椒青豆角鷄, Jat6 Bun2 Zi2 Tin1 Ziu1 Ceng1 Dau6 Gok3 Gai1)

I recently went to a local Chinese restaurant, whose specialties are dishes cooked with chilies (lots of chilies!). One dish ordered was green string beans with handfuls of red chili peppers and some ground pork. This is a common Chinese dish where you taste the underlying flavor of the chilies more than any heat, together with the green beans and pork. The difference in this restaurant’s preparation was that whole red chilies were used rather than cutting them up into smaller pieces. Just that change made the dish taste different because a whole red chili pepper is eaten with every mouthful. The dish is also served “dry”, with little sauce.

As in the Oyster Sauce Shrimp with Japanese Chilies (蠔油日本指天椒蝦, Hou⁴ Jau⁴ Jat⁶ Bun² Zi² Tin¹ Ziu¹ Haa¹) recipe, dried red Japanese chilies bought at my local Mexican market were used for flavor, rather than heat. If you really like very hot dishes, the dried red chilies found at your local Asian market can be substituted. Unlike the classic restaurant green bean dish previously described, this recipe is served with chicken and sauce, although the dish can also be made “dry”. It’s really up to you if you want a sauce or not. The chilies give the dish its dominant flavor, so they aren’t an optional ingredient. In fact, the more the better!

Enjoy!

Black Bean Chili Sauce Sugar Snap Pea Shrimp Noodles (黑豆辣椒蜜豆蝦麵, Hak1 Dau6 Laat6 Ziu1 Mat6 Dau6 Haa1 Min6)

The crunchiness of the sugar snap peas contrasts nicely with the texture of the shrimp in this slightly spicy black bean chili sauce noodle dish. You would think that stir fried noodle dishes are easy to make (and they are), but the number of ingredients contained in this common dish can be large, making the preparation and cooking these dishes at home a process longer than one would expect. This really isn’t a problem in a restaurant because of the high heat available to heat the wok. In a restaurant, the ingredients are added one after the other to the wok without really affecting the high temperature, resulting in a tasty quick cooking dish. This is not true for a typical home kitchen because the heat source is not as powerful as that found in restaurants. So if the restaurant method was used at home to cook the dish, the first ingredient would stir fry because the temperature would be high, but the subsequent ingredients would steam rather than brown because the temperature would drop with each added ingredient. Hence the need for the home cook to reheat the wok before adding and then removing each ingredient separately in order to stir fry, rather than steam, the ingredients. I’ve used this wok cooking method at home even though I have a special wok burner in my kitchen, which doesn’t approach the heat generated in a restaurant, but is hotter than the typical heat source found in most home kitchens. So if you’re stir frying over a typical kitchen stove burner, the time needed to cook a dish is longer since the time needed to reheat the wok is longer.

Enjoy!