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December, 2009:

Sichuan Peppercorn Chicken

Dec 23rd, 2009
by dave.
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Sichuan Peppercorn Chicken

I ended up cooking for a few friends last weekend but I was a little late getting everything plated so didn’t have enough time to get any pictures in of that. But there was something new I tried making and I’ll be definitely making it again soon. Just a little hint but it uses long hot peppers, something I definitely don’t use very often.

Aside from that, chicken’s been on sale lately so I took the opportunity to stock up for the next few weeks. Not to mention try a bunch of new dishes in the meanwhile!

One thing that’s always interested me about Asian cooking is that there are a bunch of staple sauces that always seem to be mixed together to generate flavor, rather than different herbs and spices (though there’s tons of different spices too!). I’ve got roughly a dozen different bottles of sauce which I use to varying degrees with some sugar and corn starch and for the most part, that’s that! Just running them off : 2 different soy sauces, oyster sauce, sesame oil, hoisin sauce, a couple bean pastes, mirin, rice wine, sriracha…I think that’s all of them!

But anyway, I got my hands on some sichuan peppercorns recently. Never really used these before but I hear they’re pretty essential in some Northern Chinese cooking. So after roasting a few, and grinding them up, I was ready to go.

This recipe was adapted from Grace Young’s Breath of a Wok.

Sichuan Peppercorn Chicken

Serves 4
Time 20 minutes

Ingredients:
– 1 lb Boneless chicken thighs, cubed
– 1 tbsp canola oil
– 8-12 dried red chilies
– 1 tsp grated ginger
– 2 garlic cloves, minced
– 1/2 tsp ground sichuan peppercorns
– 1 scallion, chopped

Marinade:
– 1 tsp ShaoHsing rice wine
– 1 tsp cornstarch
– 1/4 tsp salt
– 1/2 tsp ground white pepper

Sauce:
– 1 tsp dark soy sauce
– 1 tbsp ChinKiang/Balsamic vinegar
– 2 tsp sesame oil
– 1 tsp sugar
– 1/2 tsp Chili sesame oil
– 2 tbsp water or chicken broth
– 2 tsp rice wine
– 1/2 tsp salt

Method:
1. Combine marinade with chicken and set aside. Combine the sauce.
2. Add oil to a wok over high heat, add chilies, then add the chicken. Let cook undisturbed for a minute, then stir fry for 1-2 minutes to velvet the chicken. Remove and set aside.
3. Add ginger, garlic, ground pepper, and scallion to the heated wok. Quickly stir fry for a few seconds, then add the chicken back in. Add the sauce in as well, stir fry another minute or so. Remove the chilies and serve.

Spicy Chicken and Cashews

Dec 16th, 2009
by dave.
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Cashew Chicken & Yu Choy

In the search for good and quick recipes, the best resources haven’t really been from cookbooks, but from various Internet sources. It seems to me that there are a ton of cookbooks out there that get a little too fancy for their own good (lots of extra and somewhat unnecessary ingredients). Sometimes, the simpler you get (Mark Bittman definitely has it right!) is better anyway (And you don’t need to have 100 different things in your cupboard too!)

One of my favorite sources for Chinese food has been hzrt8w at eGullet. The best thing about hzrt8w’s posts are the intricate detail and descriptions. It really makes it easy to duplicate and alter to specific tastes!

Chicken with Cashews was one of those dishes I never really liked all that much. I found it a little bland most of the time and the cashews really didn’t do it for me. But I decided to give it a shot again after taking a look at hzrt8w’s take on it. Spicy and salty, exactly what I think I was looking for.

As is with most of the recipes I find, I usually alter them slightly just for my tastes. Which means more garlic, less oil, less soy sauce, broth instead of water, and maybe a little more chili to kick things up a bit! I think next time I might throw in a couple dried chilis and try to work in some vegetables. But I think as is with many Chinese dishes, this dish was meant to be served with vegetables on the side. I did that with some blanched Yu Choy and Oyster sauce.

Spicy Chicken and Cashews

Serves 4
Time: 30 minutes

Ingredients:
– 2 – 2.5 lbs Chicken Breast, cubed
– 10 ounces raw (unsalted) cashews
– 2 tsp corn starch mixed with 1/4 cup Chicken Broth

Marinade:
– 2 tsp Corn Starch
– 2 tsp white pepper
– 1/2 tsp Hot sesame oil
– 3 tsp sesame oil
– 2 tsp soy sauce
– 2 tsp ShaoHsing rice wine

Sauce:
– 6 cloves garlic, minced
– 2 tsp Chili Bean Sauce
– 2 tsp Brown Bean Sauce
– 6 tsp Hoisin sauce
– 2 tsp White vinegar
– 1/4 cup Chicken Broth

Method:
1. Mix marinade and chicken together, set aside for 30 minutes to an hour.
2. Add the cashews into a wok/pan over medium heat for a few minutes to roast slightly. Remove and set aside.
3. Add 1 tbsp oil to the wok, add chicken and cook over high heat until just underdone, there should be no pink visible. Remove and set aside.
4. Add 1 tbsp oil to the hot wok and then add the sauce. Give it a quick stir and let sit for 30 seconds to 1 minute. Add in the corn starch mix and stir again.
5. Add the chicken and cashews back in, bring to a quick boil to finish cooking the chicken and then serve over hot rice with a side vegetable.

Cashew Chicken & Yu Choy

Chili Bean Pork

Dec 9th, 2009
by dave.
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Chili Bean Pork

I’ve been trying to expand the different cuts of meat that I usually buy so I’ve been using pork shoulder and pork butt much more lately. I usually end up using pork sirloin cutlets or center cut pork chops but I’ve found that pork shoulder/butt tastes pretty good after marinating and in some cases, I like it a whole lot more! And it’s cheaper. And you can make pulled pork, but that’s an experiment for another time.

I got this recipe out of Grace Young’s Breath of a Wok. I’ve also had variations on this dish at restaurants but since I’m terrible at figuring out ingredients (I’m too busy eating!), I needed a recipe. Well, the recipe originally calls for some vegetables served with it. But, like the complete novice that I am, I completely forgot the two vegetable ingredients I was supposed to add. Fantastic. So I ended up making a salad on the side.

And I didn’t mean to plan it this way, but I’ve been making a lot more spicy and salty dishes as of late, probably because of the colder weather. But maybe that’s what I’ve been craving lately, I tend to go through spurts where I eat many similar things.

Chili Bean Pork

Serves 3
Time : 30 minutes

Ingredients:
– 1 – 1.5 lb Pork butt or shoulder, trimmed and cut into matchsticks

Marinade:
– 2 tsp Corn Starch
– 2 tsp ShaoHsing rice wine
– 1 tsp Sesame oil
– 1 tsp Canola oil
– 1 tsp Soy Sauce
– 1/4 tsp kosher salt

Sauce:
– 1/4 cup Chicken Broth
– 2 tsp Chinkiang or Balsamic vinegar
– 1 tsp Sugar
– 2 tsp Sesame oil
– 2 tsp soy sauce
– 2 tbsp Chili bean sauce
– 2 tsp ShaoHsing rice wine
– 1 tsp Corn starch
– 4 cloves garlic, minced

Method:
1. Mix marinade and pork, set aside for 20 minutes.
2. Heat wok over high heat, add 1-2 tbsp canola oil. Add pork. Stir fry a couple minutes.
3. Add sauce. Stir a couple more minutes until pork is cooked through. Serve over rice.

Stir-fried Rice Cakes

Dec 2nd, 2009
by dave.
3 comments

Stir Fried Rice Cake

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! Spent a few days back in NJ with the family and had a nice relaxing weekend, caught up on a ton of sleep, just what I needed. We had a pretty traditional Thanksgiving meal with turkey, roasted root veggies, salad, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and my mom’s special string beans. Not to mention what you can do with leftovers, day after Turkey Congee is always a huge hit!

I’d like to try my hand at cooking a Thanksgiving dinner sometime, maybe that’s a project for next year. But it’s enough work for me to just cook for a couple people, I couldn’t imagine trying to cook for 10+!

But anyway, back to what I’m posting about today =P

Being that noodles are one of my favorite dishes to eat (any kind of noodle really), I couldn’t believe that I haven’t had rice cakes until just a couple years ago! Rice cakes (Nian gao) are thicker slices of pressed rice noodle, almost like diagonally sliced carrots (best analogy I could come up with…really!). But anyway, they’ve got a more chewy texture to them and they soak up sauce very nicely, and are ridiculously easy to cook with.

You can buy rice cakes in packages from your local Asian food market. This time, I had rice cakes from H-mart, a Korean grocery store up in Burlington, MA.

One of the local restaurants in the Boston area, Shanghai Gate, prepares rice cakes a couple different ways, both of which are excellent. I’ve been trying to figure out one of their versions, the sliced rice cake with pork, and sauce, and some green vegetable I couldn’t figure out. So I wanted to go back and pay closer attention next time =)

But for today, I scoured online to find a good recipe to use and came up with this one from use real butter. It looked really good (and I’d been looking for an excuse to use some napa cabbage I picked up at Russo’s) so off I went.

Stir-fried Rice Cakes

20 minutes
Serves 4

Ingredients:
2 pounds rice cakes (prepared according to package)
1 pound pork sirloin, cut into matchsticks
1/2 head of napa cabbage, chopped thinly
5 scallions, julienned
1 1/2 inch piece ginger, julienned
5 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp sesame oil
5 tbsp canola oil
Salt and white pepper to taste
1 1/2 tbsp cornstarch
2 cups chicken broth (About 1 can)

Method:
1. Mix the pork, soy sauce, sesame oil, and cornstarch together until the pork is evenly coated. Set aside.
2. Heat 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil, half of the ginger and half of the scallions over high heat. After about 30 seconds to a minute, add the cabbage and stir fry. Add some salt and white pepper.
3. When the cabbage is almost cooked, remove from wok and set aside.
4. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil to the wok and add the rest of the ginger and scallions.
5. When the ginger and onions sizzle, add the pork and stir fry until the meat is nearly cooked through.
6. Add the cabbage back into the pot and stir to mix.
7. Add the rice cakes and along with a cup of chicken broth. Add more broth as needed or desired.
8. Continue to stir fry to keep the rice cakes from sticking. Add more salt or white pepper as necessary.

Note : The rice cakes are done when they’re slightly chewy but with no crunch and are firm but not quite mushy.