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<\/a><\/p>\nWe’ve started getting in the habit of printing out our shopping list in both English and Chinese, and it makes it much simpler to communicate what it is we’re looking for.\u00a0 On this run, for example, the recipe in English called for “water spinach.”\u00a0 Asking a clerk for water spinach earned a blank look, but showing them a printout of “\u7a7a\u5fc3\u83dc” got me a lovely bag marked with those characters as well as the Romanization “Ong Choy.”<\/p>\n
So what’s for dinner tonight? Coastal areas have lots of seafood, of course, so we’ll be following last week’s fish dish with skewered shrimp.\u00a0 On the side, we’ll have two different vegetable dishes, and a sponge cake for dessert. All of these dishes cook very quickly, (except the cake) so the hard part was trying to make them all at once and get them to the table still warm.<\/p>\n
Let’s get to it!\u00a0 First up, the shrimp.\u00a0 Although it’s easy to acquire fresh seafood around here, we had a bag of frozen tiger prawns already, and waste not want not.\u00a0 The prawns get a quick soak in Shaoxing wine and oil, while we make a compound butter with scallions, garlic, and fish sauce.<\/p>\n
Next, the shrimp are threaded onto skewers.\u00a0 In a picture perfect cooking show world, we would carefully fill the vein cavities of the shrimp with a beautiful line of compound butter.\u00a0 In the real world, we just kinda smeared some on with our fingers, hoped for the best, and into the oven they went. They sure did look pretty when they came out, though.<\/p>\n So while those were cooking, time to make the veggies.\u00a0 The simpler of the two is Gai Lan or “Chinese Broccoli”.\u00a0 If you’ve been to a dim sum restaurant and seen a token plate of green vegetables among all the dumplings and pancakes, it was probably Gai Lan.<\/p>\n Preparation is simple – just a quick minute in boiling water and it’s ready to eat.\u00a0 It’s commonly topped with oyster sauce, which we mixed with sugar, rice wine, and sesame oil, which makes a sweet, rich dressing. (We should probably have taken a picture AFTER we stirred the ingredients together, but we were hopping at this point.)<\/p>\n Our other vegetable dish features that jar of fermented bean curd from earlier.\u00a0 Ong Choy has long, thin stems which have to be cooked slightly longer than the leaves, so they got chopped up and separated into different bowls. (Note that “Bubl\u00e9” sparkling water is not a traditional ingredient, and was not used in this preparation.)<\/p>\n This one gets stir fried, with the ingredients going into the wok one at a time in cook time order: ginger, jalapeno pepper, stems, leaves, and bean curd.\u00a0 This Fujianese bean curd has a beautiful red color, a salty, funky aroma, and a texture a lot like feta cheese. I think we used a little too much relative to the amount of green stuff – it doesn’t look like much in the picture, but a little fermented curd goes a long way.<\/p>\n So to sum up – the stir fry time for this dish was about three minutes.\u00a0 The Gai Lan took about a minute to cook, and the shrimp only baked for 8.\u00a0 No wonder we were hustling to try and get them all done at once!<\/p>\n No complaints at all on the results, however!\u00a0 The salty, spicy ong choy, and the sweet oyster sauce on the gai lan were very different, and didn’t feel redundant at all.\u00a0 And shrimp full of butter and garlic is a common concept for a reason!<\/p>\n What’s for dessert?\u00a0 Well, we picked a sponge cake recipe from Hong Kong which is probably more influenced by European colonists than more traditional Chinese sources, but with a twist I’d never encountered before – the cake is steamed, rather than baked.<\/p>\n Ingredients are standard cake stuff – flour, water, eggs, soy sauce, vanilla, milk, sugar…<\/p>\n …wait.\u00a0 Soy sauce? That’s a little different, but in the end you couldn’t really taste it.<\/p>\n Into the wok with the cake (a phrase I have NEVER uttered before), and a ten minute steam produced a beautiful, light sponge cake.<\/p>\n Two slices later, and it looked like Pac Man, but that’s really more Japanese than Chinese.<\/p>\n So that’s three Chinese regions down, and two to go!\u00a0 Next up, my personal favorite, Sichuan, a cuisine we attempt regularly even when we’re NOT blogging about it, because it’s just so darn tasty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As we continue our trek through the regions of China, this week we reach the southeast, which includes Guangdong province. “Canton” is an old, botched Romanization of Guangdong, so when we talk about “Cantonese” food, this is the area we … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n