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