Stir Fry Pizza ala Gong Bao Chicken 宮保雞丁比薩

What you're seeing here is the result of some serious pizza experimentation! It all started when we tried out some interesting pizzas at a local pizza joint (for my B-D!)  Their pizzas were topped with all kinds of foods that I didn't usually associate with pizzas and it was pretty delish.  That got me thinking about ways to make a different kind of pizza, a kind that tasted not like a pizza but was still totally a pizza.  

Sounds confusing, eh?  I was confused at first too.  After a bit of thought I realized what I wanted was a pizza to taste like two things: 1) a pizza and 2) another dish of my choosing.  So if you've got a favorite dish like barbeque chicken and you love pizza as well, you could make a barbeque chicken pizza that tastes like both barbeque chicken and pizza!  Double the yummy, amirite?!

The original Gong Bao Chicken Stir Fry

Daringly (for us kitchen nerds:), we took on the Chinese Gong Bao Chicken Stir Fry 宮保雞丁 (click to check out our recipe), a powerhouse of flavor and texural contrasts, as our other 'taste/dish'.  Note that this dish is a stir fry and its many different ingredients are meant to meld together in the wok during a hot and furious stir fry session.  But pizzas are made in the oven.  So a stir fry on a pizza?  Would that even work?  Well, we decided to take a gamble and see.  

Ginger Scallion Sauce 薑蔥醬

Here's a quick and easy Chinese sauce that's simply fabulous.  It's found in many places in Hong Kong but mostly at the siu mei shops 燒味鋪 that sell those delectable barbeque Chinese meats.  An order of 'white cut chicken 白切雞' or 'soy sauce chicken 豉油雞' comes with a generous side of this Ginger Scallion Sauce 薑蔥醬, also known as Ginger Spring Onion Sauce, an aromatic oil sauce intensely infused as well as packed with scallion and ginger.  

Chinese Spiral Flaky Pastry Mooncake 千層紫薯酥

The Chinese way of making flaky pastry, also known as Huaiyang Pastry 淮揚酥皮, is the bomb!  You start with a basic layered dough that produces a wonderfully light and delicate flaky pastry.  This basic dough can be rolled out and wrapped in three different ways to produce different pastry skins.   In the first the layers are hidden, only showing after the pastry is opened (see our Chinese Flaky Pastry with Lotus Seed Paste 白蓮蓉酥餅 recipe).  The second way exposes the flaky layers.  We wanted to try something alternative for this year's Mid Autumn Festival 中秋節 so we used the exposed layers method to make this truly elegant Chinese Spiral Flaky Pastry Mooncake 千層紫薯酥, yummiliciously stuffed with a lush soft purple sweet potato filling and a hidden heart of tender white mochi.  

Purple Sweet Potato Mooncake Filling Paste 紫蕃薯餡

It's almost time for my favorite Chinese festival of the year, the Mid Autumn Festival 中秋節. Mooncakes, glowing lanterns, the full moon in the velvet sky, what's there not to like!  We're serious about our mooncakes in this household and every year will prepare one of our homemade mooncakes, choosing between fragrant Lotus Paste Double Yolk Mooncake, nutty Five Nuts Mooncake, delectable Black Sesame Walnut Mooncake, or the icily delicious Snow Skin Custard Mooncake.  

This year we wanted to try something different so we decided to try making mooncakes with both a new filling and skin.  To wrap the mooncake we chose to use the Chinese Flaky Pastry Dough that we wrote about recently.  There's a different way to the roll out the pastry dough that exposes the delicate layers in a flaky spiral swirl.  So beautiful!  And for the mooncake filling, we experimented with this Chinese Purple Sweet Potato Mooncake Filling Paste 紫蕃薯餡 which, as it turns out, makes an amazing filling: lush and gorgeously purple hued, the sticky soft paste rich and deliciously sweet with a fragrant hint of cloves and nutmeg.  We stuffed our mooncakes with this yammilicious filling along with a hidden heart of soft and tender mochi.  Also note that not only is this filling for mooncakes but also for all other kinds of pastry, for example these Chinese Flaky Pastries.

Winged Bean Garlic Stir Fry 蒜蓉炒翼豆

 Have you ever seen a bean with wings?  Or wings with a bean?  No?  Well then, I am very pleased to introduce you to the fabulous Winged Bean 翼豆!  We discovered these strange beans in the wet market the other day.  So funny looking with four little wing like corners on each bean. Never seen them before but the vegetable lady assured us that they were quite delicious.  Excited as always to try a new veggie, we scooped up a bag full to take home.  True to the vegetable lady's advice a very simply prepared Winged Bean Stir Fry was delicious: kissed with fragrant garlic, these stir fried beans were tender yet still lightly crunch with a sweet light flavor reminiscent of green peas and snow peas.

Gong Bao Chicken | Kung Pao Chicken 宮保雞丁

This easy Chinese stir fry, the Gong Bao Chicken 宮保雞丁, also known as the Kung Pao Chicken, is a dish of bold and striking flavor and textures, a voluptuous treat for the culinary senses.  It is a savory dish, touched with the umami of soy sauce, the tang of black vinegar, the pepperyness of ginger, the hot of chili pepper, a hint of numbness from the szechuan pepper,  and the fragrant aroma of sesame and spring onion.  In texture the Gong Bao Chicken is tender and chewy (the chicken), crisp ( the water chestnut) and crunchy (the peanuts).  This easy to make yet spectacular stir fry has a little bit of everything nice!

Note:  This dish has chili pepper in it!  Integral part of the dish.  As you've probably noted ours doesn't.  This is because our little girl can't tolerate spicy at all (working on training her!) and so for the time being we cook without it :(

Chinese Pickled Vegetables 自製中式泡菜

These little veggie goodies that you can make at home are fantastic little bombs of fermented probiotic goodness!  With a simple brine of salt and water vegetables can be transformed into delicious health boosting pickles that can keep for a long time.  This process to do this is known as lacto fermentation whereby good bacteria known as Lactobacillus are used to break down starch and sugars into lactic acid, a natural preservative.  The transformative result is veggie pickles with a tanginess introduced, flavors intensified and layered with new taste notes, texture still packing a bit of crunch.

As this was the traditional way to preserve vegetables in the days of old, one can find lacto fermented food in most every culture.  Sauerkraut, kimchi, jalapeños, dill pickles, yogurt, kefir, natto (our new obbession!), kombucha, tempeh and miso are just a few examples of the endless variety of fermented foods found around the world.  Today we introduce the traditional Chinese way of making Pickled Vegetables 泡菜, a brine soak resulting in yummiliciously delicious veggie pickles infused with aromatic Chinese spices.  It's super simple to make, just need a bit of time and patience.

Mandarin Pancakes 荷葉餅

I love flatbreads of all kinds.  Probably cuz I love finger foods and these little breads are so wonderful for making snackable packages of finger food!  Perhaps you have tried these particular Mandarin Pancake flatbreads before while having Peking Duck or Moo Shu Pork: they are used to wrap up the cooked meat and veg into yummilicious little packages before consuming.  These Chinese breads look like and serve similar purposes with flatbreads from other cultures, like the chapati from India and the tortilla from Mexico, but actually these Chinese flatbreads have unique charm and feel all their own.  

And while traditionally this flatbread is used with specific Chinese dishes like the Peking Duck, etc., we like to modern it up by using the Mandarin Pancake to wrap up just about anything, be it warm and saucy or cool and spicy.  The great thing about these easy to make sesame scented Mandarin Pancakes 荷葉餅 is that they are soft and flexible yet strong enough to hold both food and sauce without leaking.  Make a bit of stir fry and,  instead of cooking up rice, just use these flatbreads to wrap up your stir fry and there's your dinner! 

Shunde Style Sashimi 順德魚生

You'd probably be surprised to know that eating raw fish actually started in China, not Japan. I know that I was pretty surprised as raw fish is synonymous with Japanese food these days.  But the Chinese have been enjoying raw fish since the Zhou Dynasty, around 823 BC.  A long time, that.  Even the rebel leader Song Jiang 宋江 from the 14th century classic Chinese novel 'Outlaws of the Marsh' 水滸傳 enjoyed a platter of raw fish now and then!

Chinese Fermented Rice Drunken Chicken 糟雞

This is a twist on the classic version of the famous deliciously chilled and wine flavored Chinese Drunken Chicken.  Y'all be knowing that wine has a most wonderful way of flavoring food.  In our previous recipe post on the traditional style of Chinese Drunken Chicken 醉雞 we remarked on the fact that different types and mixes of chinese wine can be used to produce tailored to your taste buds flavorsome results.  For this chilled Chinese Fermented Rice Drunken Chicken 糟雞 a new element is added to the wine marination, a Chinese fermented rice, a sweetly fresh,winey concoction of fermented rice, and the results are a tender chicken deeply infused with winey flavor as well as hints of sweet ricey umami that is arguably even more delicious than the traditional drunken chicken.   Fans of the unique addictive taste of fermented rice will have to try this dish while those who haven't tried it yet, you're in for a treat!

Banana Jam

Here it is, our super easy to make Banana Jam recipe, a yummiliciously intense banana jam flavored with brown sugar toffee hints and caramelized to jammy perfection.  We discovered the joys of this jam when searching for ways to power up the banana flavor factor for our ooey gooey chewy fabulously banana-y Chinese Banana Rolls 香蕉糕.  And what a discovery!  Not only did it do the flavor trick for our banana rolls but boy, oh, boy is a peanut butter banana jam sandwich yummy!

Chinese Banana Rolls 香蕉糕

We were asked by a reader for a recipe for these quintessential Hong Kong treats, the Chinese Banana Roll 香蕉糕, a banana flavored rice mochi roll that would "taste like the ones I bought in a hong kong bakery when I was little".  After discussing with my hubby about his childhood memory of these delicious rolls, researching recipes, scouring about for store bought banana rolls (they're not that easy to find nowadays) and making more banana rolls than we could eat, we finally came to two conclusions.  

First conclusion: most of the banana rolls nowadays most likely get their distinctive banana aroma from using either real banana extract or synthetic banana oil (probably the latter).  Second conclusion: the banana roll recipes we tried that used fresh banana as a flavoring base didn't really work as the final banana aroma was way too weak.

So after much experimentation and making and eating a couple of yards of the delicious stuff, we've come up with a way to use natural bananas but with their flavor intensified so that our version of 

Chinese Banana Roll 香蕉糕 comes out as a soft lusciously chewy piece of tender mochi roll flavored sixty percent creamy banana flavor and forty percent ricey goodness.  It's purrrfectly bananas!

Chinese Flaky Pastry Dough | Huaiyang Pastry 淮揚酥皮

The Chinese Flaky Pastry Dough 油酥皮, also known as Huaiyang Flaky Pastry Dough 淮揚酥皮, creates a layered pastry that is similar and yet not similar to the western style of layered pastry like the kind achieved in the croissant.   The western layered pastry is usually constructed with butter while the Chinese layered pastry is constructed with lard or shortening.  The western style achieves beautiful firm layering, chewy bite and a crispy golden surface.  Yum, amiright?  But the Chinese Huaiyang Flaky Pastry Dough 淮揚酥皮  achieves another kind pastry heaven, a delicate tender, flaky, white pastry skin that practically melts in your mouth!

Chinese Flaky Pastry with Lotus Seed Paste 白蓮蓉酥餅

For the Dragon Boat Festival 端午節 this year we decided to supplement our traditional yummilicious zongzi meat dumplings 粽子 with these lovely Chinese Flaky Pastries stuffed with white lotus seed paste 白蓮蓉酥餅, a traditional pastry featuring golden fragrant rich filling wrapped in a wonderful melt in your mouth flaky pastry skin that is layered just like western butter flaky pastry but even more delicate and light.  It takes a bit of time to make this kind of pastry, but this lovely and delicately flaky pastry  is so totally worth the effort!  

Chinese Bean Sprout Salad Cold Dish 冷拌芽菜

Here's another deliciously chill veggie dish for a hot summer's meal.  We discovered this unusual vegetable dish in the wonderful The Key to Chinese Cooking by Irene Kuo, one of our favorite Chinese cookbooks as our dear readers will already know.  This seemly very simple and humble vegetable cold dish knocked our socks off the first time we tried it and we've been making this simple dish often ever since.  

It was not so much the very yummilicious taste and texture of this dish, but rather the fact that the taste and texture of this vegetarian dish is somehow exactly like that of the exotic Chinese Jellyfish Salad!!  Yes, we're talking about a dish made from real jellyfish and it's quite the seafood treat as you can see if you check our Jellyfish Salad 涼拌海蜇 recipe.  So, if you've interested in a vegetarian version of Chinese jellyfish salad or just would like to explore a new, simple and delicious veggie dish,  try out this Bean Sprout Salad Cold Dish, a refreshing cold dish of crunchy yet tender vegetables marinated to chilly perfection in a light sweet and sour dressing.

Chinese Celtuce Vegetable Cold Dish 薑汁萵筍

Recently we've been deep in the veggie zone, dipping through our cookbooks and trying out all kinds of Chinese ways of preparing vegetables,  a fabulously fun and delicious thing to do cuz Chinese cuisine kicks some serious veggie a**!   One treasure we discovered was this recipe that goes all the way back to the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1368) when a hermit/poet named Lin Hong 林洪 compiled one of the earliest Chinese recipe books beautifully titled Simple Offerings of a Mountain Hermit 山家清供.  That makes this recipe around 800 years old!  This Chinese Celtuce Vegetable Cold Dish 薑汁萵筍 is a simple yet elegant salad cold dish featuring the unusual crisp yet tender jade hued celtuce vegetable drizzled with a tasty tart and gingery dressing.

Spring Rolls 春捲

I love, love, love spring rolls!  There's just something about getting to bite through all that lovely golden crunchiness into a juicy and yummilicious meat and veg filling that is soooo divine.  Whenever we go to have dim sum I always have to get a plate or two of the spring rolls and indulge myself, oh yeah, it's spring roll heaven time baby!  It's so hard to stop myself from being a pig and eating all the spring rolls...so, in the spirit of spring roll fever, I thought why not make spring rolls at home, lots of them, hot and delicious, so that all of us could pig out (instead of just me :).  These shatteringly crispy crunchy on the outside, juicy and deliciously savory meat and veg stuffed on the inside Chinese Spring Rolls 春捲 are super easy to make at home.  That way everyone can crunch their way through as many yummilicious spring rolls as their heart desires!

Grandma's Spring Onion Egg Pancakes 蔥油蛋餅

Dearest readers, I've been feeling really homesick for some of my beloved grandma's 奶奶 wonderful cooking and was ever so pleased when I discovered this recipe in one of my favorite Chinese cookbooks, The Key to Chinese Cooking by Irene Kuo, an absolute treasure trove of authentic Chinese recipes first published in 1977.  I was casually flipping through this book the other day and reading here and there and suddenly I realized that this was it! This was the recipe for my grandma's delicious after school pancakes!!  I had never quite been able to recreate it and couldn't find a recipe through research, probably because it's such a humble homey kind of food that no one ever thought to put it in a book.  Well, no one except the talented and very smart Ms. Kuo, that is.  

Let me just say, y'all in for a treat!  My grandma's humble little Chinese Spring Onion Egg Pancakes, 蔥油蛋餅, are super duper yummilicious!  So easy to make (perfect for after school snacks or breakfast), just mix the simple batter, fold in the aromatic spring onions and ladle on to pan and minutes later you've got a hot golden savory pancake in hand, its aromatic folds wrapped around a lush half cooked eggy center that is the secret heart and soul of this Chinese pancake.  Ohhh...the contrast of the soft spring onion infused pancake, the lusciously gooey yolk and the just firmed whites... what a delight to the eyes, tummy and heart!  Home cooking at its humble best...gobble, gobble and my pancake's all gone and it's time for another one!

Liangpi Cold Skin Starch Noodles 凉皮

Our homemade wheat gluten 麵筋 post is a popular one, many of our readers enjoying the magic of making delicious wheat gluten, also known as seitan or kao fu, from just washing the starch out of a simple flour and water dough.  One recurring question that comes up, however, is what to do with all the starch that is washed out when making wheat gluten?  Well, here's the answer!  With all that goopy leftover starch and a good bit of effort you can make these Liangpi Cold Skin Noodles 凉皮: thin, white, smooth noodles that have a delightfully chewy texture and a neutral taste that is perfect for absorbing the flavors of the sauces it's mixed with.  Once the homemade Liangpi Noodles are made they are traditionally mixed with thinly sliced vegetables and various aromatics then tossed with a kick ass sauce of soy sauce, vinegar, sugar and chili oil.  If you like yummiliciously flavorful cold noodles then you're in for a treat!