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<\/a><\/p>\nNow the good news is, several of today’s dishes didn’t need to be served warm, so there wasn’t the usual frantic scramble to try and assemble three or four unfamiliar dishes at once.\u00a0 As seen above, we peeled the lotus root, and then sliced it as thinly as possible.\u00a0 (Out of a sense of self-preservation, we got rid of our mandolin before moving, so the slices weren’t terribly consistent.)<\/p>\n
Into the boiling peanut oil with them!<\/p>\n
And it turns out, that, although no one could possibly have predicted this, if you slice a root vegetable thinly, deep fry it, and then put salt on it, it’s really, really good!<\/p>\n Our second make-ahead dish was a braised vegetable dish.\u00a0 Since both this and our entr\u00e9e call for green onion oil, lets make that first.\u00a0 Green onion oil is just oil in which green onions have been fried and then removed, leaving the tasty onion flavor.<\/p>\n This was used to make a simple sauce, with soy sauce and sugar, which dressed some braised bok choy. After cooking until tender, the veggies went in the fridge to soak up the sauce.<\/p>\n For our main entr\u00e9e, we picked a sweet and sour fish dish.\u00a0 However, don’t think of this like a sticky Teriyaki sauce.\u00a0 There’s nothing wrong with that, but the goal here is something a bit more subtle.<\/p>\n Sweet and sour sauce ingredients: (clockwise from left) Green Onion Oil, Black Vinegar, Rice Wine, Peanut Oil, Rock Sugar, Chicken Stock, and Ginger.<\/p><\/div>\n The fish itself was carp, a common freshwater fish, but not one I had cooked with before.\u00a0 Fortunately, the nice man at T&T scaled it for me.\u00a0 I think I’m still picking scales out of my hair from when I scaled one myself way back for Bangladesh.<\/p>\n The fish gets poached, which is definitely a straightforward process – boil water, remove from heat, put fish in boiling water with ginger, cover for ten minutes.\u00a0 The residual heat in the water cooks the fish, and you don’t have to do anything but mix up the sauce, cook the noodles, and realize that that pot of rice you just started isn’t FOR anything, because you’re making noodles.<\/p>\n The noodles in question were marked “Shanghai Stir Fry Soup Noodles,” so we’re going to assume they were region appropriate.<\/p>\n Fully assembled, along with some more of the fancy tea from last week, the meal looked pretty good.<\/p>\n Tasted pretty good, too!\u00a0 The vinegar sauce was subtle and delicious, and the carp definitely responded well to not being overwhelmed.\u00a0 The cold veggies weren’t bad, and we sprinkled some of the fried onions on top for crunch.\u00a0 And again – lotus root chips are amazing.<\/p>\n But what about dessert? Our original plan had been to make a cookie recipe from the same cookbook – “Sea Moss Sandies.”\u00a0 But then we fell down a rabbit hole of different kinds of sea moss, some of which are native to… Mongolia? Jamaica? And some of which aren’t sustainably grown, and all of them kept forcing me to remind myself that I wasn’t making cookies out of semi-conductors. (Say “Sea Moss Cookies” out loud to an electrical engineer, then ask them to explain that last alleged joke.)<\/p>\n So instead, we decided to make red bean pancakes!\u00a0 We made this decision early enough in the day that we had time to do a quick run out for some glutinous rice flour and red bean paste.\u00a0 The process here is fussy, but not overly complicated.\u00a0 Make a batter out of flour, eggs, oil and salt, and let it cool in the fridge. When it’s ready, make a bunch of extremely thin, crepe-like pancakes.<\/p>\n Spread red bean paste on the pancakes, and fold them into little squares. You can MAKE the paste instead of buying it if you really want to.\u00a0 But y’all have fun with that.<\/p>\n Then you take the folded pancakes, and bust out the fry oil for the third time today.\u00a0 There was definitely a lot of oil in this meal. Finally, dust with powdered sugar and serve: It may not look too fancy, but these things are super delicious, and very reminiscent of similar things I’ve had at Dim Sum restaurants.<\/p>\n Note that since the Red Bean Pancakes were ganked from the net, and not out of the cookbook, we can share the recipe:<\/p>\n Shanghainese Red Bean Pancakes<\/a><\/p>\n So there we are – our attempt at Chinese food from the Yangtze river area.\u00a0 Not as hearty as the food from last week, but subtly seasoned and delicious!\u00a0 Next up, the Coastal Southeast!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This time around, we’ll be trying to make a meal of dishes representative of the eastern areas of China around the Yangtze river.\u00a0 This area includes the city of Shanghai, which is a blending point for many of the historical … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
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