5 Simple Recipes for Chinese New Year

Happy Chinese New Year and welcome to the year of the horse! Why don't we all enjoy some easy Chinese food this weekend to celebrate the new year? Here are five extremely simple recipes to get started with.

Bang Bang Chicken: This noodles and chicken dish can be made ahead and is sure to appeal to anyone.

"Fish-Fragrent" Aubergines: This is a vegetarian side dish. The name is due to the spice combination that is often used on fish. The aubergines (or "eggplant" to you?) are nice and vibrant; not at all bland as they can sometimes be.

Best Food Writing 2013

Our Kitchen Reader book in November was Best Food Writing 2013. This is the first time I have bought one of these anthologies (there have been thirteen!) and it was brilliant. It is made up of such a diverse selection of short pieces - they were perfect for reading on the bus or just before bed.

Pork and Shiitake Mushrooms in Lettuce Cups

Using my hands to eat seems to make the meal more fun. Don't you think? There is something about picking up the food that makes it so much more enjoyable. Except perhaps on a date, when I inevitably spill sauce down my wrists and into my sleeves. Or at a fancy restaurant when my sharp elbows pointing out at the neighbouring table make me feel conspicuously out of place. But at home I can eat with my fingers and let the sauce drip where it may.

Warm Bean and Courgette Salad with Mint

I read a lot of food blogs. Precisely 278 food blogs. I use Google Reader to do this - it aggregates all the new posts and if you've never tried it before, you should! Start by adding Simply Cooked and a few other blogs to your Reader and away you go! (You'll love it, I promise.)

Here's the thing. There is a big, gaping hole in my list of food blogs. I want, but can't seem to find, more food blogs that concentrate on vegetables. I can't get over my love to all things veggie, and I want to find more people who feel the same. I want to drool over pictures of beautiful salads. I want to find intriguing combinations of crisp and green things. I want to feel inspired to make more of my vegetables and inspired to buy more new-to-me items.

Bean Sprout Salad

Bean sprouts - not the sexiest of vegetables. In fact I find them kind of unpleasant. But I learned a new method of preparing them and I was mighty impressed. Blanch them - a brief dip in boiling water made them silky! I was amazed at how much more palatable, enjoyable, even, the sprouts became.

Beef Stir Fry with Black Bean Sauce

Happy Chinese New Year! It's the biggest festival of the year this week in Hong Kong and everywhere is decorated and filled with people celebrating. Red is the colour of choice everywhere. Buildings are decorated with lights and cartoon-ish animals as well.

I'm not celebrating this week, though. I had two small procedures on Saturday to remove a mole from my face and a large lesion from my foot. I'm immobilised on the couch for at least a week. So it's probably a good thing that we have a week's holidays from work. The stitches on my cheek are making it hard for me to eat (and smile!, as you can see below). So it's mostly soup at the moment.

Mongolian Beef with Red Pepper and Chinese Cabbage

My parents host a Chinese student in their home in Canada; he moved there to attend high school and learn English for university. This is the second Chinese student they have hosted, and this time food has been an issue. All teenagers are picky eaters, but especially this one who is far from home. In an effort to help him, my mother and I have been getting Chinese cooking hints from Kylie Kwong's book, Simple Chinese Cooking. (It was one of my Christmas presents from my cousin. Cookbooks are my favourite presents!) My mother and I each have a copy and we are exchanging notes about what we try.

This dish took only 35 minutes from start to finish - and that includes 30 minutes of marinading time! Next time I'll also add very thinly sliced carrots; you could use any vegetables. Just slice them thinly and throw them all in together. I reckon my mother's picky eater would love this recipe because of the thick, tasty sauce that seeps down into the rice (or noodles).

The Daring Cooks - Recipes with Tea

I have been a proud Daring Cook for several years and it is my absolute pleasure to host the group this month! This month I challenged the Daring Cooks to make a savoury recipe with tea.

I have always enjoyed learning new skills and trying new recipes with the Daring Cooks. They are always so inventive, so I gave them free rein to make one of my three recipes (below) or cook any other recipe with tea. They were able to choose to use black, green, or herbal tea. And there were so many great ideas! I am very grateful for the chance to host the Cooks and thrilled to enjoy what they came up with.

ingredient spotlight: kumquats

Please welcome the fruit with arguably the strangest name: the kumquat. I bought them by the bag-full in the Chinese wet market nearby. I get my weekly fruit and vegetables from a wrinkly lady who knows her produce but can't communicate with me at all besides showing me numbers on her calculator. I make it a policy to try something new to me each time I go there, and I'm usually pleasantly surprised with the results.

bang bang chicken

This recipe was the star of the show at my Chinese New Year dinner. Backstage in the kitchen, Bang Bang Chicken is an affable companion: easy-going in that it can be ready long before dinner since it doesn't need to be hot, and prompt in that it can be ready quickly. It's street food (from the Szechuan region of China)--hence the simplicity of the preparation. I can imagine shovelling this into my mouth on street corners--but it will be equally at home on your much more refined dinner table.

Chinese hot and sour soup

Happy year of the rabbit! In honour of the lunar New Year I am trying out some dishes from my Chinese cookbook. I was ecstatic to receive a basic Chinese cookery book for Christmas; I have sticky flagged about a dozen recipes that I think I can recreate. Meanwhile, I readied my "lucky money" packets for giving out later this week. These red envelopes say "blessed" (or "lucky") on the front and we add a monetary gift for those who serve us; our door staff and the dry cleaning ladies are my main conferrees. The Chinese character for "blessed" is made up of three parts: one man, in the garden, with God; and inside the envelope there is a little note about it in English and Chinese.


I feel very blessed to be living in Hong Kong and I'm hopeful about the year ahead. I intend to learn more about Chinese home cooking and Asian ingredients, and to develop this blog, sharing my adventures with you as I go.

Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper--and "fish-fragrant" aubergines

I have a confession to make. I have lived in Hong Kong for seven months, and I have not yet come to love Cantonese food. I do enjoy Hong Kong as a place to live, and I am starting to feel comfortable here as we make friends, start to fit in at work, and become more settled. But the cuisine has been a more difficult matter.

The simple Cantonese dishes I really like: such as steamed prawns with garlic, or green vegetables lightly dressed with soy sauce. But quite a lot of the main dishes are too slimy for me. I have tried chicken feet, for example, for bragging rights, of course. After popping the foot into my mouth and eating off the sauce and cartilage, I spit out the bones like any Hong Konger. I ate a serving, but did I like them? No, much too strange to be eating those slimy and gristly bits by choice. Will this feeling of aversion ever change?

please help! what is this Chinese condiment?

This random jar has been sitting in my fridge for several months now. I cautiously dip in and out of it occasionally. What is it? All that Chinese that I can't read! Can you please help me?

It's a slightly odd story of how I got this jar of mystery stuff. I didn't buy it at my local store as a try-me ingredient. Oh, no. It was destined for greater things than my refrigerator, this jar, but never made it there. The story goes like this.

happy Chinese new year - ginger noodle soup

I wish I could say that I have a large Chinese food repertoire. In fact, the opposite it true. I doubt I know how to cook even one authentic Chinese dish. But I like Chinese flavours, and I enjoyed when Jeff, Mum and Dad's Chinese boarder, cooked for us over Christmas.

But I can offer this noodle soup for this weekend's festivities. It's one of my favourite soups--I've been making it for ten years since I ripped it out of one of Mum's magazines. It's not authentic Chinese, but it is tasty, easy, and warming for a winter celebration.

Ginger Noodle Soup
serves 4

500 g ground pork or ground beef
1 onion chopped
3 cloves garlic
1/3 c (75 mL) hoisin sauce
2 T chopped ginger root
2 T soy sauce
4 c (1 L) stock or water
1 carrot, shredded
1/2 c sliced mushrooms
150 g noodles
1/2 c (125 mL) bean sprouts

In a large pot, brown meat for 5 to 7 minutes and then add onion, garlic, hoisin sauce, ginger, and soy sauce. Cook for a further 2 minutes.
Add the stock or water and bring to a boil. Add the carrot and mushrooms. Reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Add the noodles and cook for 4 more minutes (or longer if directed on the packet). Garnish with bean sprouts.