Twice Cooked Pork - 回锅肉 - Hui Guo Rou

This is one of the dishes Wu Lei prepared when Mao Xiaoyu invited me over for some serious chinese cooking at his place. The dish is Wu Lei's speciality and they eat it almost every weekend. (During the week they make only 1 dish, or the typical fast low budget student cooking like noodles and spaghetti... I already wondering if every Chinese man has a secret life as a master chef when I noticed the home made steamed bread from their other roommate... Just when do actually have time to play Starcraft ;-) ??).

Ingredients:
400 gr pork (in slices of about 1.5 cm)
bunch of spring onions (cut diagonally so that the pieces are 4 x 1 cm)
2 tbs secret sauce
2 tbs corn starch
1 tbs sunflower oil

The secret sauce is in the top left

• Boil the slices of pork for about 10 minutes. Drain and cut in small pieces of about 2.5 cm. Mix the corn starch with the meat so it gets a coating.
• Heat the oil in a wok, and stir fry the the pork for about 3 minutes. Add the secret sauce and stir fry for another minute or so.
• Add the spring onions, and let them heat along for another minute

some of the ingredients	The finished dish is in the middle top

To be honoust I got a bit scared when I saw the meat. I hardly ever eat pork, and I never eat the pieces with the fat on it.. I just don't like the way the fat feels in my mouth, and how heavy it is on the stomach, if I even manage to chew and swallow it. "Courage evo", I told myself, "you should at least give it a try, and it will be very rude to refuse to eat it". When we sat down to eat I first took some safe dofu, and after that took some pieces of pork with a lot of spring onions to make it look more ;-). As I took a bite I felt a bit pressured as Wu Lei was seriously studying my face to see how I would like it. Wow!!! It was good++!! What a relief, and what a surprise!! I actually took a lot more after that initial hesitation! Wu Lei explained that cooking the meat first makes the oil go out of it. When it's fried after the cooking the sauce takes the place of the fat, so it becomes super tasty, and because of the starch and stirfrying it has a nice crisp to it!
So this twice cooking method must be the secret to how Chinese people stay so slender despite of the fatty meat!

Fish With Sour Pak Choi - 酸菜鱼 - Suan Cai Yu

This is one of the dishes Xiaoyu prepared when he invited me over for some serious chinese cooking. Though Xiaoyu wasn't entirely happy with it, because he didn't have the right fish, I though it was delicious! But yes, he now used a rather small fish that comes from the freezer of our beloved Chinese supermarket, that was cut in pieces, but had the bones still in there so we had to be a bit cautious eating it, and it didn't have so much taste. The vegetables tasted absolutely great, and the dish combined wonderfully with the other dishes.

Ingredients:
400 gr fish cut in pieces of about 5 cm (best take the filets of a river fish)
1 package of preserved sour pak choy
2 tbs corn starch or tapioca starch
1/2 tbs shaohsing rice wine
1 tbs sunflower oil

the sour pak choi is the bottom left package

• Mix the rice wine and corn starch with the fish and marinate for 15 to 30 minutes.
• Heat the oil in the wok, and carefully fry the fish for a minute or 3.
• Add the package of preserved pak choi and let everything cook for another 8 minutes or till the fish is ready

Suan Cai Yu happily coming along

Home Doufu - 家常豆腐

This is one of the dishes Xiaoyu prepared when he invited me over for some serious chinese cooking. The recipe is loosely based on a dish called Ba Zhen Dou Fu Bao - 八珍豆腐煲. The name means a hotpot with 8 (Ba) ingredients (including Doufu), they are "shell meat", "squid", "sea cucumber", "chicken chest" "bamboo shoot", "abalone", "mushroom".
Xiaoyu did a simplified version that's Szechuan style and easier on the budget ;-)

Ingredients:
500 gr dofu (from the north)
100 gr pork (in cubes of about 1 cm)
100 gr sugar snaps
spring onion (in thin rings)
100 gr shiitaki (sliced)
3 cm ginger (sliced)
1 pak choi (in pieces of about 5 cm)
2 tbs secret sauce (see picture)
30 gr corn starch (or tapioca starch)
1/2 tbs shaohsing rice wine
20 gr salt
2 tbs light soy sauce
2 tbs water

Our secret ingredient is the bottom right package

• Mix the pork cubes with 30 gr cornstarch (or tapioca starch) & 1/2 tbs rice wine.
• Steam the dofu for about 10 minutes to make it firmer. Cut it in slices of about 5 x 3.5 x 1.5cm. Fry the slices of dofu until they are nice and gold. Take the dofu out of the wok and pour out most of the oil. Absorb some water out of the dofu with kitchen tissue.
• Stir fry the pork for a minute or two. Add the shiitaki, and stir fry some more. Add the dofu, the secret sauce and the water. Add the other ingredients except for the pak choi, and let everything cook for about 5 minutes. Finally add the pak choi and let everything cook for about another minute. The pak choi should keep it's lovely green color
• We didn't have it, but ideally add some slices of carrot to enrich the color palet

Burning hands on steamed dofu	Frying the dofu

Our dish is in the right top	The finished dish in the right bottom

I asked Xiaoyu for this dish after we ate it at Tai Wu, and it was super delicious! However, it didn't taste much like the dish at Tai Wu, as Xiaoyu cooks Szechuan style, and Tai Wu is more Kantonese style. (meaning that the dish at Tai Wu is more sweet, and the one at Xiaoyu's is more spicy).

The dofu should be the soft version, aka north dofu. The texture of chinese dofu is different than the Japanese tofu, and the soft version has a more sour taste to it. The best is to get it fresh from the Chinese store (I actually like the one from the toko in my street best. That one I like to eat even raw). Getting the right dofu is really key to cooking with dofu. Sounds kinda obvious now, but before I started my dofu mission abou a year ago (I was determined to find out why a quarter of the world population likes something that nasty ;-) ) I didn't even know there were different kinds, let alone how to deal with them.

Chinese Cooking @ Xiaoyu's place

Recently I had a wonderful diner at Tai Wu with people from my work. There was 1 dish that I really really loved, so I asked Xiaoyu what it was, so I might be able to find the recipe, or at least order it again.

Dear Brigit,

i remember the dish we ordered last time, it is called in pinyin "Ba Zhen Dou Fu Bao" - 八珍豆腐煲 in Chinese. The name means a hotpot with Eight dainty ingredients(including Doufu), they are "shell meat", "squid", "sea cucumber", "chicken chest" "bamboo shoot", "abalone", "mushroom". You see that it can be a very luxury dish, however, what we ordered there was just a simplified version. But always with "Dofu". about the way to prepare Dofu, first you should choose the right one, we call it "North Dofu", which you can purchase in the Chinese supermarkt we've been to, they are the one in the bucket. Then cut them to piece (5* 3.5*1.5cm), fry them till they turn golden(i prefer to steam before frying). Later it's kind of complicated, maybe we can arrange a time to cook together. :)

the link below is a standard recipe(however written in Chinese) for the luxury one.

http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/558378.html

I am ready for a discussion :)

Xiaoyu



Great!! So last sunday I went to his place to enjoy some good cooking! He and Wu Lei (roommate of Xiaoyu) prepared 4 dishes and rice and everything was delicious!!
I definitely learned a couple of things.

• Even though we spent a long time in the kitchen everything comes from packages!
• Vegetables, sauces, beans etc are available in plastic bags at the store. (yeah, I know..it's silly, but I was always looking for these items in the cans and jars section ;-)
• there's a lot of preprocessing (first cook, and then fry etc)

From cooking

more pics are here.
And here come the links to the recipes:
Wu Lei's Twice Cooked Pork
Ma Po Dou Fu
Fish With Sour Pak Choi
Mao Xiaouyu's Home Doufu

Douqqua

Douqqua is een mezze.. een soort van Arabische tapas. Wat mij betreft bewijst douqqua dat de simpelste dingen meestal het lekkerste zijn, en ik heb er altijd succes mee. Ik geloof dat douqqua van allerlei ingrediënten gemaakt kan worden, maar ik maak het altijd zo. Het recept komt uit een allerhande.

Ingrediënten:
65 gr gehakte hazelnoten
45 gr sesam zaad
2 ts koriander zaad
1 ts komijn zaad
zwarte peper
zeezout

Rooster de komijn en koriander in een koekepan (zonder olie) op laag vuur. Maal het terwijl het nog warm is in een vijzel met stamper. Rooster de hazelnoten en sesam zaadjes (ook zonder olie). Meng de komijn en koriander er door, en maal er zwarte peper en zeezout naar smaak doorheen.

Doop stukjes brood of radijsjes eerst in een lekkere olie en vervolgens in de douqqua.

Ik serveer douqqua meestal met radijsje en pompoen olie, maar maak vaak een grote hoeveelheid klaar en strooi het over van alles heen wat wel een crunch kan gebruiken, zoals roerbak gerechten, salades, curries en rijst..alles eigenlijk ;-)

courgette in yoghurt

Vorig jaar bij het lente diner had Nat een super lekkere courgette salade gemaakt.

Nat:
"eigenlijk is er geen recept.
tjah...de courgettes worden eigenlijk lekkerder als je ze bakt, maar
ik stoom ze. daarna gewoon overgieten met dikke yoghurt waarin je
geperste knoflook, fijngehakte munt of basilicum, zout peper hebt.
overgieten met wat olijfolie."