Mapo Doufu is Jan’s favorite dish. She also prefers it the traditional way that Mao Zedong liked it, made with “stinky tofu.” Mapo Doufu actually takes days to make it properly, because first you need to let the tofu go “bad.” Fortunately she also likes it with made with fresh tofu, which is what I will be doing today.
Karl’s Mopo Doufu
(Mapo Tofu)
Filed under Main Dishes, Pork
Tonight’s dinner is Mapo Doufu and Beef with Mushrooms, neither of these dishes is heavy on the leafy greens. I need a side dish to go with them. Everyone in my household likes Chinese Broccoli (gai lan), so this is just another stir fry.
Karl’s Spicy Chinese Broccoli, Carrot and
Bamboo Stir Fry with Sichuan Pickles
Filed under Side Dishes, Vegan, Vegetables
Eilene is graduating from High School today and last night I decided to make one of her favorite dishes, spicy chicken and pan fried noodles. We lived in Chengdu, Sichuan, P.R. China for a year and a half back in 1988-90. While I have tried to replicate many dishes that we had during that stay, this recipe is closer to one from Cook’s Illustrated. I have wandered far from that original recipe.
Filed under Main Dishes, Poultry, Vegan
Jan has put up with my meat eating for 35 years now (30 of them in the married state as of this month). She considers herself a born again carnivore, but she still misses being a vegetarian. Since she let me have lamb on Easter, I planned on a tofu stir fry for dinner tonight. Eilene, however, had some friend over and so I had to add some things to what I was planning to make to have enough for two adults and three hungry teen-aged girls. They must have liked it because they cleaned it down to the last noodle and scrap of vegetable.
[no picture, it disappeared too fast]
Filed under Main Dishes, Vegetarian MD
Fun question: I was watching A Taste of History and I found out a bit of American history.
Who introduced tofu to America?
(hint: It was not Thomas Jefferson. Answer below the recipe.)
This dish is not what I went to the store to prepare. As I was sitting and thinking about dinner I remembered the stir-fried lettuce stem I was served in Chengdu. When I got to Lion Market, I found that they did not have it. I had seen it there before, so I guess it simply is not in season. What was in season was Chinese broccoli (gai-lan in Mandarin). What I normally do with this vegetable is make Spice Chicken and Noodles, but that is a real production number and takes hours to prepare. I wanted something simpler for a week day meal.
Twice-Cooked Tofu
Filed under Main Dishes, Vegetarian MD
I needed a vegetable side dish to go with my twice-cooked tofu. In China, it is a very poor household indeed that has only one dish to go with their rice. Variety is the spice of life and the Chinese take their food very seriously. Like the French, if they are not eating, they are talking about food or thinking about food.
To make a change from what I made to go with the twice-cooked pork, I used celery as the foil to the giant bamboo in my side dish.
Spicy Giant Bamboo and Celery
Filed under Side Dishes, Vegan, Vegetables
Adapted from CHICHI’S CHINESE
When we lived in Chengdu, Sichuan, this was one of my favorite dishes. My Chinese friends would ask, “Why do you want to order THAT? It’s a peasant’s dish!” One of my first culture shocks in China was when one of my students proudly announced, “My father was a peasant. My mother was a peasant. I am a worker.” Because there are no peasants in America, we tend to forget that many other countries still have them.
One thing that I have learned since that time is that it is not just twice cooked pork that I like, but the way that dish was prepared by the old cook at the Panda House Restaurant. Many of the recipes that I have found, since I came back from China, call for fatty pork belly and cabbage. The cook at the Panda House used a very lean cut of pork and lots of green onions. The other recipes are nice, but his was spectacular.
Twice Cooked Pork (on the left) and
Spicy Giant Bamboo and Daikon Stir-fry
(on the right)
Filed under Main Dishes, Pork
I needed a vegetable side dish to go with my twice-cooked pork. I wanted something with spice, color and crunch. I had some daikon radish, red bell pepper and green onions left over from another meal that would add the color. I only needed some chili garlic sauce to add the spice and some giant bamboo for the crunch.
Stir-fry on the right
Filed under Side Dishes, Vegan, Vegetables
The reason that most of my recipes start with “Karl’s …” is so I can tell the ones I downloaded from the internet (usually for reference) from the ones I have changed enough to call my own. This is one of those occasions where I had a dish in my mind (a faded memory of some dish served at a Chinese banquet), but how it was made and what when into it was a mystery.
One search technique I used for this recipe was Google Images. Using the search “clay pot chicken” brought up hundreds of pictures that I could then scan for ones that “looked” like what was in my memory of that dish in China. However, the recipes I found on the internet did not come close to what I was looking for. I had to be creative. I took an ingredient from this recipe. Oyster sauce as the marinade base seemed a good choice, I was also making Ma po Dofu for this meal so I did not want to use Hoisin (another common marinade ingredient in clay pot chicken).
Filed under Clay Pots, Main Dishes, Poultry, Techniques
karllueck
Miriam
Jabberwocky Stew 