It's a Wrap!

On a cold, rainy night like tonight we were looking for a quick, easy, healthy, tasty, and comforting meal.  We were hungry for some delicious pot stickers like we had at Chinese New Year, but we wanted to keep it Paleo, and use some of our share ingredients, so decided to make some Asian lettuce wraps.

Essentially, we used the recipe for the pot sticker filling.  We started by mincing up some ginger, garlic, and scallions.  

That was all mixed with some ground pork, salt, white pepper, sesame oil, a little soy sauce, and a dash of Chinese cooking wine.  Next we chopped up our shitakes from the share, and tossed it all together.

We cooked the mixture in a pan with a bit of coconut oil, and it was ready in no time.  While that cooked, we julienned some carrots to wrap up in the lettuce, and chopped up a little more green onion, and some cilantro to garnish.

We tore the leaves from the head of bibb lettuce to use as our wraps, and set up a little station to build our wraps.  Just spoon in some pork and mushrooms, add a few carrot sticks, top with some green onion and cilantro, and you're good to go!

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

Happy New Year!  Chinese New Year, that is.  It kicked off last Sunday, celebrating the year of the snake, and festivities will extend for another week.  We were too busy to cook up a meal last weekend, so we treated ourselves to a very traditional dim sum at Oriental East.  But with no work today, we had the time to out a menu together, trek out to H Mart, and whip up something tasty.

Chinese tradition is steeped in symbolism, and the new year's feast is no exception.  There are lucky dishes, and lucky foods, thought to bring you wealth, good health, longevity, prosperity, luck, etc.  Since it is just the 2 of us, we couldn't make everything, but we tried to cover most of our bases.  And we ended up with quite a bit of food.

The whole fish (from our CSA nonetheless), ensures a good start and finish, and to avoid bad luck throughout the year.  The potstickers are said to bring prosperity.  The long beans wish a long life for parents.  Soup and oolong tea are thought to be keys to good health for me, a water pig, and more specifically for Justin, a water dog, sizzling rice soup.

We started with potstickers, so we could nosh on something while we cooked everything else.  We used some ground pork, and mixed in ginger, green onion, soy sauce, sesame oil, and a little Chinese cooking wine.  Once that was all mixed together, it was time to make the dumplings!  You just put a dollop of the meat mixture in the middle of the wrapper, and dab a bit of water around the edges to get it to stick together.  You want the bottom to be flat so the dumplings can stand up in the pant.

Once all of your potstickers are made, put a little oil in the pan, and let the bottoms of your potstickers pan fry for a minute or two.  Once they're golden brown on the bottom, pour some water in the pan, throw the lid on, and let them steam for a few more minutes so they cook through.  Then just serve them up with a dipping sauce of black vinegar with minced ginger, and enjoy!

Next up was the shrimp with candied walnuts.  This is a dish you would typically see at a Chinese banquet, but it's one of Justin's favorites, so we figured, why not?  He peeled and deveined the shrimp, then tossed them in a little cornstarch.  The walnuts were tossed in a simple syrup, then tossed into the fryer for a minute.

The sauce for the shrimp isn't the healthiest; sweetened condensed milk, a little mayonaise, lemon juice, and a bit of honey.  But it has a nice sweetness to it.  The shrimp were tossed into the fryer next, and only took a couple minutes to cook up.  Then you just toss it in the sauce, and enjoy!

For the whole fish, we used the trout we got in our last share.  He was the perfect size for our giant feast.  This is one of the simplest dishes you could ever make.  Just fill a pan with a few inches of water, and add some green onion and ginger.  Once the water heats up, slide in your fish, and cover so he can steam.  After about 5 minutes, you can flip him over and let him cook for another 5 minutes.  Then place the fish on a plate/platter and top with some sliced green onion, ginger, oil and soy sauce.

 

The kung pao chicken cake together easily.  Cube up your chicken, and toss with some cornstarch, sesame oil, and some soy sauce.  Once its browned, add the green onions and dried red chilies.  The sauce is pretty simple too...just some soy sauce, Chinese cooking wine, sesame oil, vinegar, water and a little cornstarch to thicken it.  Then toss in your peanuts and make sure everything is coated in the sauce.

The sizzling rice soup was also quite easy, and it sat on the stove while we cooked everything else.  The base consisted of some chicken broth, water, and some of the pork stock we had in the freezer from our pig head.  Then we added in some ground pork, shitake mushrooms, snow peas, and green onions.  We also threw in a couple shrimp, right before we were ready to eat, so they wouldn't get overcooked.  Once we ladled the soup into bowls, we added the crispy rice and let it sizzle!

And for our vegetable, we went with long beans.  They're similar to green beans, but longer and skinnier.  We just steamed those up in a pan with some onions, and a black bean garlic sauce.

We had quite a bit of food, but we wanted to try and get as many traditional/lucky foods into the mix as we could.  At least we have lunch for the rest of this week!

I'm Dreaming of a Blaaack Fungus...

...with every Chinese dish I cook...

Ok...enough of the modified Christmas carols.  One of the many things I found so interesting about Kara were her stories about her Chinese side of the family, and all the great foods she grew up with and fun times shared over traditional meals.  Our first Chinese feast was amazing, featuring my personal favorite Cantonese dish - Honey Walnut Prawns, as well as a whole red snapper, gai lan (Chinese broccoli), and pea shoots.

How would we possibly follow that up you might ask?  Well, with hot and sour soup and tomato beef chow mein, of course! Our quest for this meal began with a trek out to Super H-Mart in Fairfax.  Kara called her mom on the way there with some clarification about the ingredients.  She mentioned dried mushrooms...lily root...and a black fungus.  She wasn't sure of the name, but described it as looking kind of like seaweed, and black. So we set out through the aisles of the store in search of the ingredients and much to our surprise we found a package of wood ear mushrooms with some writing, presumably in Korean, and in big bold letters in English, "BLACK FUNGUS".  Who would've thought the mystery black fungus would simply be called, black fungus?

Seeing  as how tonight was a rainy dreary night it was perfect for some delicious soup and satisfying noodles. We started with the ingredients we picked up at H-Mart and added some ground pork, some sirloin and of course some killer tofu.  Our first step was to rehydrate our dried ingredients in water-the aforementioned black fungus, the lily root, and dried mushrooms .

The next step was to get everything into the hot tub with some chicken broth. We seasoned our soup with some black pepper, vinegar, and a little Sriracha sauce.  

While our soup was cooking, I got to work on seasoning the beef.  Just a quick dredge in some flour and a toss with some soy and sesame oil.  The beef then got stir-fried in a wok with some green peppers and onions.  Some tomato sauce, curry, and hoisin sauce was then added to the wok.

 

While our beef was frying the next step was to get our noodles were boiled, like pasta, then put under the broiler to give the dish a nice crunchy texture.  The beef and sauce then gets poured over the noodles.

 The meal came together and we had a quick, tasty, authentic Asian feast whipped up on a Monday night.

 With plenty of leftovers, since we still can't cook in small portions.