Guo Nian Kuai Le - Part 3 (The Final 2008 Installment)

Chinese cooks in the know may feel somewhat inclined to mock me for posting a recipe for steamed fish. This method of preparing fish is so common in China that any Chinese cook with even a modicum of culinary ability can pull it off. However, given the fact that I have only recently begun to develop/increase my Chinese cooking skills, it seemed prudent to go to someone who has already mastered this technique. Enter Edi. Edi is my good friend and former roommate in Boston. She grew up in Hong Kong. She makes lots of yummy Chinese food... one reason among many to love living with her. I loved it when she would go to Chinatown and buy fresh fish and vegetables because it usually meant that I could enjoy a little of whatever simple, tasty, meal she whipped up. She made this kind of fish often, and although its been a favorite of mine since I lived in Taiwan, I'm a little ashamed to admit that I have never even attempted to prepare fish this way myself.

However, I recognize that it is silly to pay someone else to make something for you when it's ridiculously easy to make yourself. As an added bonus where this fish is concerned, it's the kind of dish that elicits "ohhs" and "ahhs" when presented to your fellow diners. I should be honest and note that it's also the kind of dish that might elicit a few "ughs" from the slightly squeamish or from those less enamored of seafood. Those types don't particularly relish seeing a whole fish plopped down on the table in front of them, but in my opinion, that just makes for more entertaining dining.

Because fish is a quintessential New Year's dish I wanted to be able to share this method with all of you, which left me little choice but to finally tackle it myself (many thanks to Edi for furthering my education by sharing her tricks of the trade). I've always understood that fish is served at Chinese New Year because the character for fish in Chinese sounds the same as the character for "surplus". I'll spare you a lengthy explanation on how characters work and why tones are important, etc etc... just know that my above explanation simplifies things somewhat. Anyway, because the two characters sound the same, eating fish during the New Year's celebrations is believed to mean that the coming year will bring surplus into one's life. I like fish, so I don't really need a reason to eat it. But if eating it means I might have a more prosperous year, I'm certainly willing to oblige.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I didn't like any seafood until I lived in Taiwan. Since living in Taiwan, I am a full-blown, died in the wool convert/believer/advocate. There is something about the way Chinese cooks prepare fish that helped me to see the light. Mostly I think they flavor the fish so adeptly that you can't help but love it. I'm hoping that over the coming year I'll be able to convince other seafood skeptics to give it one more try. In the meantime, for those of you who have already been converted, I hope you enjoy this super simple, yet amazingly delicious preparation as much as I do.

Whole Steamed Fish with Ginger and Green Onions

As noted above, some people don't exactly relish the idea of digging into a whole fish. If you are preparing this dish for people who might fall into that group, you can certainly use something less alarming, like fish fillets.

Whole Fresh Fish:

This one, admittedly major, ingredient is the key to this dish. I can't stress this enough. As Edi said, "The most important thing is to get/catch a died-not-long-ago fish." If you have a Chinese supermarket near you, I suggest going there. The fishmonger can tell you which of their fish is the freshest. The fish I prepared was a black tilapia, but you can use any fish. Just make sure it is A) fresh, and B) one you like. Also, have the market clean/degut the fish and remove the scales.

Fresh ginger - good size chunk, maybe about 2" long

3 green onions

Cooking oil

Soy sauce

Salt and Pepper (preferably Chinese white pepper, if you can find it)

Peel the ginger and julienne into small, short strips. Cut green onions into 1" chunks and then slice (I quartered the green onion chunks so that I had long, thin strips.)

Put the fish on a glass plate. Sprinkle salt and pepper in the cavity and on the outside of the fish. Place about 1/3 of the green onions and ginger on the inside of the fish and another 1/3 on top.

Boil water in a large pan. Place a rack of some kind in the pan (see photo above... I used a wok stand). You don't want the water to touch your plate, so make sure your plate is elevated high enough. Once the water is boiling, place the plate on the rack and cover.

Steam fish for 15-20 minutes. The fish is ready when the meat at the thickest section of the fish flakes easily and a fork or chopstick goes straight through.

Take the plate out and drain off any water that has accumulated on the plate. Heat 2 T. oil in a pan. Once hot add the remaining ginger and green onions and fry briefly until fragrant.

Pour oil mixture on top of the cooked fish. Pour some soy sauce on top of the fish as well. I didn't measure the soy sauce... just gave it a couple good shakes. Serve, with great applause, to your amazed guests.

Guo Nian Kuai Le - Part 2

It's more than a little bit embarrassing to call this post "Guo Nian Kuai Le" when it is so long overdue. But nonetheless, Chinese New Year was the inspiration for today's recipe, so I'm sticking with the theme. I promised in my last post to provide my readers, however few they may be, with a noodle and fish recipe to help celebrate the Chinese New Year. As both of those dishes are easy enough to make, I thought it would be a simple matter to get them both onto the blog before the end of February. I was wrong. I made the noodles about 3 weeks ago, but didn't feel like my recipe had enough flavor to recommend it to others (see how seriously I take my recipe-crafting responsibilities). That meant I had to go back and tweak it a little. Sadly though, having just eaten my fill of stir-fried noodles, I wasn't in the mood to make them again right away. Thanks to my gourmand friend Carri who agreed to be my guinea pig, I perfected both the fish and noodle recipe on the same night last week. However, I don't want to overwhelm you with too many choices, so today you'll have to settle for only the noodle recipe. Next time around I'll bless your lives with one of the simplest, yet yummiest ways, to prepare fish (so stay tuned).

About noodles, they are eaten during Chinese New Year because their length symbolizes long life. For this reason, you never want to do anything to make them shorter. Which means usually you end up slurping them up in one long string... remember, we are eating these with chopsticks so you can't wind them around your fork. Anyway, it makes for fun and entertaining dining.

Noodles are one of my favorite things to eat when I am in Taiwan or China. I love all the different ways they can be prepared: beef noodle soup, zha jiang mian, dan dan mian, etc. I also love Japanese noodle soups, which thankfully, are easy to find in China. However, all of those noodle dishes are hard to find in the States, which is one of the reasons I started this blog... so I could learn how to prepare the food I miss the most. It's therefore somewhat anti-climatic (for me at least) to be presenting you with a noodle recipe that is something of a no-brainer, and not at all exotic. Good ole Chow Mien. However, chow mien is one of those dishes that manages to be both authentic and appetizing to the average American. Plus, as an added bonus, its a cinch to make. Therefore, before moving into more esoteric directions, I thought I would start with something appealingly familiar to most of my readers. Enjoy.


Chao Mian, aka Chow Mien

(Adapted from Martin Yan's Chinese Cooking for Dummies)

Noodles - really any kind will work, but I used a Chinese kind

1 lg. boneless skinless chicken breast

2 T. oyster sauce

1 lg. carrot, julienned (I like julienned pieces about 2" long)

1 1/2 c. bean sprouts, rinsed

Sauce:

1/2 c. chicken broth

6 T. soy sauce

1 t. plus 1 T. sesame oil

1 T. Chinese rice cooking wine

1/2 t. sugar

Cook noodles in boiling, salted water until almost done. They'll cook a little more when you add them to the stir-fry so you don't want them to be totally cooked. Drain and set aside.

Cut chicken breast into small dice. Mix with oyster sauce in a small bowl. Let sit for 10 minutes.

Sauce: Whisk together in a small bowl the chicken broth, soy sauce, 1 t. sesame oil, rice wine, and sugar.

Heat 1 T. sesame oil in a saute pan over medium high heat. Once hot, add chicken and cook until the chicken is done, approximately 8 minutes. Remove chicken from pan and set aside. Add carrots, bean sprouts, and sauce to the pan. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the carrots are almost cooked through, maybe 8 minutes. Then add the chicken and noodles to the pan. Mix well and cook for another 2-3 minutes. Serve.

Guo Nian Kuai Le (Happy New Year) - Part 1

As many of you likely know, Thursday, February 7, was Chinese New Year. As in other cultures, Chinese holidays have certain foods associated with them... foods that help to define and shape holiday celebrations. The 3 foods I associate the most with Chinese New Year are dumplings, fish, and noodles. I'm hoping that before the month is over I'll have a recipe for each one of these on the blog.

There is so much that I love about Chinese New Year. I love that it is celebrated for a week. Why don't we have any week-long holidays in America? Literally, life stops for a whole week. People travel back to their hometowns to spend time with their families. They clean their houses so the new year gets off to a fresh, clean, tidy start. They eat lots of yummy food with their family and friends. They visit Buddhist temples and honor their ancestors. They are in a perpetually good mood (for the week at least) because no one wants to ring in the new year with a bad spirit in their heart. They hang red banners around their door frames with good fortunes or positive sayings written on them. These banners stay on their doorways until the next year, so when you wander through neighborhoods you see them, weathered and looking a little worn, but still festive and welcoming. They also hang upside down characters on their doors to invite good fortune or to welcome spring. It's a very exciting, joyful time and I loved experiencing it during the one Chinese New Year I spent in Taiwan.

My, admittedly belated, gift to you this Chinese New Years is a recipe for some super tasty dumplings. A quick history of the dumpling's place on the New Year's table... In a nutshell, dumplings look like an old form of Chinese money, the gold ingot. Eating them at the New Year means you are hopeful that the coming year will be full of good things, i.e. money. I apologize that my tardiness in getting this post up means that none of you will be able to ring in the new year with a plate full of dumplings. However, you now have a good eleven months to perfect your dumpling technique in time for the next Chinese new year.

Dumplings have actually been part of my Chinese cooking repertoire for a number of years now and whenever I make Chinese food for people, dumplings inevitably make an appearance on the table. The only exception so far being the time, in Virginia, when for some as yet unexplained reason they all fell apart in the water and the meat tasted strange to boot, so they all got thrown away. Usually however, I'm quite successful at throwing together a good tasting dumpling. In addition, people like them and they're kind of fun and look complicated (which they aren't), so they're an easy trick to pull when you want to impress people.

In Taiwan and China you can order dumplings three ways: steamed, boiled, and pan-fried (i.e. potstickers). The boiled variety tend to be the most common and that's how I prepared the recipe below. My favorite version is actually the steamed variety. However, I tend to boil them now because its the easiest method to pull off at home. I always have plenty of pots hanging around my kitchen, but I can't say the same for steamer baskets.

The below recipe is a new take, for me anyway, on dumplings. Usually when I make dumplings I go to a Chinese supermarket and pick up some zhou cai (Chinese chives). However, I really wanted this recipe to be super-doable for any adventurous soul out there willing to give it a try, and zhou cai can be a bit of a pain to find. Fortuitously, my friend Joanne, who hails from Taiwan, stayed with me in January and while at my apartment she made a batch of dumplings using cabbage, not chives. I had many dumplings made with cabbage in Taiwan, and while I liked them there, I've never liked my attempts to recreate the recipe here at home. Joanne kindly agreed to school me in her cabbage-pork dumpling technique and I'm now thrilled to share the below recipe with you. Enjoy!

Shui Jiao (a.k.a. Boiled Dumplings)

1 small head of cabbage

1 1/2 lbs. ground pork

2 T. sesame oil

2 1/2 T. soy sauce

6-7 cloves garlic

3/4 t. salt

Asian dumpling wrappers - You can buy these at pretty much any grocery store. I like the round kind, but the square ones work just as well

Chop the cabbage very, very fine. Part of what makes Joanne's method so good is that you don't have large chunks of cabbage so this step is key. Mince the garlic, also very fine.

Mix all ingredients, except the wrappers (of course). I usually use my hands for this step because it goes faster, but if that kind of tactile pleasure does not appeal to you, feel free to use a spoon. Just make sure everything is mixed up really well.

Fill a small bowl with water. Open the wrappers and put them next to the bowl of meat and the bowl of water. You want everything within easy reach. Get out a baking sheet (preferably rimmed) and sprinkle with flour.

Fill the dumplings. This is actually not complicated, so don't let this step stop you from attempting this recipe. Place a dumpling wrapper on the palm of your non-dominant hand. Take about a tablespoon of filling and put it in the center of the wrapper. Dip your finger in the water and run it around the edge of the dumpling wrapper. The water will seal the two edges when you fold your dumpling. Fold the wrapper in half and press along the edge to seal. Tada! You're done. You have officially made your first dumpling. Put it on the baking sheet and carry on until all the wrappers or filling have been used.

You may notice from my earlier photo that I do this little crimping/folding thing with my dumplings to make them look pretty. A nice, older Taiwanese woman taught me how to do this and I like the way it looks, so whenever I make dumplings, they look like that. However, it is absolutely not necessary, so I recommend just folding the wrapper and sealing it, as outlined above, because it will save time and stress.

Meanwhile, bring a large pot of water to boil. When you have some dumplings ready, dump about 10 into the pot. The dumplings will sink to the bottom and slowly rise back to the top as the water comes back to a boil. You may want to give them a quick stir or two though so they don't get stuck to the bottom of the pot. Once they have risen back to the top and the water is boiling again, add enough cold water to the pot to stop the boiling. Once the water comes to a boil again, again add enough cold water to stop the boiling. Do this one more time. When the dumplings come to a boil after you have added water 3 times, they are ready to eat.

They are good with all kinds of sauces. Soy sauce is the most common. I like to add a little fresh minced garlic, hot pepper flakes, and a little sesame oil to jazz it up. You can also try Asian hot sauces or Thai sweet Chili sauce (my current favorite).

Also, if you make a big batch, cook up however many you want to eat that night, and freeze the rest. Then whenever you want some, you have some ready and can dump them in the water without defrosting. They'll just take a little longer to cook.