Chinese Rice Flour Cookies with Date Filling 紅棗泥炒米餅

The best thing about the celebration of traditional Chinese festivals are the traditional style eats, amirite?  And as it's Mid Autumn Festival time (oh the moon tonite!) we thought we'd make some traditional style cookies for those who are not so much into eating mooncakes.  

These Chinese Rice Flour Cookies with Date Filling 紅棗泥炒米餅 are wonderfully light and satisfying traditional cookies, slightly crispy yet crumbly with a lusciously sweet date filling besides packing a visual wallop with their graceful molded shapes.  Plus they are easy to make!

Walnut Sesame Tang Yuan 核桃芝麻湯圓

Mid Autumn Festival is just around the corner and we've been dithering about which mooncake to make.  Will it be our Double Yolk Lotus Mooncakes, our Five Nut Mooncakes?  Or perhaps our Snow Skin Mooncakes will do the trick.  

Not only that but, as my little girl is reminding me, we must buy all the glowing paraphernalia that is needed for Mid Autumn Festival celebration, a night of moongazing and mooncake eating.  Let's see...we have got glowstick glasses, glowstick necklaces and rings, glowstick bunny ears and there's still our annual trip to pick up lovely Chinese lanterns to carry while moongazing.  

And not only all that but we are also making other festive treats such as homemade tang yuan rice dumplings, those luscious little sweet treats whose rounded shapes make it the perfect moon tribute.  This year we made Walnut Sesame Tang Yuan 核桃芝麻湯圓, with a buttery nutty decadent sweet walnut sesame filling that is the perfect foil to the smooth and chewy rice flour wrap.

Preserved Lime Black Bean Steamed Fish 咸檸豉汁蒸魚

As promised, a yummilicious way to use your homemade Chinese preserved limes 咸檸檬 in a savory dish!  We usually use our Chinese salt preserved limes to mix up the refreshing Chinese Preserved Lime Tonic Drink 咸檸 7 (see our recipe at bottom of page here), which magically soothes sore throats like nobody's business. But these luscious salty tangy limes can also be used in savory dishes as a tart yet salty counterpoint.  

We added the salty preserved limes here to a traditional black bean steamed fish and it transforms an old comfort dish into something new and ultra yummy.  Try our Preserved Lime Black Bean Steamed Fish 咸檸豉汁蒸魚 and taste the difference!

Chinese Custard Buns 奶黃包

A Chinese Custard Bun 奶黃包, white fluffy bread wrapped tenderly about a gorgeous center of creamy milk and egg custard...yummmilicious...!!  Sunshine in a bun, that's what it is.  You can't bite into one of these buns and not get a smile on your face.  

This delectable treat is usually only to be enjoyed when one can spare a leisurely afternoon to enjoy Cantonese Dim Sum but no longer!  Now you won't have to wait for the dim sum cart to roll around, you can enjoy it anytime you want at home with our easy to make Chinese Custard Bun recipe!

Longan Dragon Eye Fruit 龍眼

It's that time of the year for that exotic summer fruit, the lusciously sweet Longan Dragon Eye Fruit 龍眼, another fruit that originates from southern China.  This small rather humble looking fruit hides an inside of translucent soft white flesh that is unbelievably sweet.  

I do believe it could be the sweetest fruit that I have ever tasted, even giving the summer favorite and Queen of Fruits, the Lychee 荔枝 , a serious run for the money.

Chinese Preserved Limes 咸檸檬

A sore throat is no fun.  My little girl recently had a sore throat.  Just a sore throat, no runny nose or coughing.  But, thing is, it wouldn't go away.  My little girl doesn't get sick that often, thank goodness, but when she does she's as grumpy as a wee bear bumped out of hibernation.  

I tried some homeopathic meds on her, the kind that works wonders for our usual colds, but it didn't help that much.  Finally, in desperation, we decided to try a Chinese traditional folk remedy for sore throats, a brine preserved lime crushed in some water or, as it is often served in Hong Kong, in a tall cool glass of 7up soda.  

We bought a bottle of preserved limes at our local supermarket and tried it at home.  When I say this I'm not exaggerating but, seriously, my girl's sore throat was pretty much not only soothed right away but somehow chased right out of the house.  Wowzers!  I was converted on the spot!  

Grandma's Shanghai Smoked Fish 上海熏魚

This wonderful dish was one of my 奶奶 grandma's homemade specialities, the Shanghai Smoked Fish 上海熏魚, a very famous Chinese traditional dish that is actually not smoked but prepared in such a way that the tender meat inside has a spiced and slightly smoky flavor while the outside is a delicious flavor infused crust.

My grandma used to prepare this dish whenever we got a chance to get the right kind of really big fresh fish.  I remember watching with big, big eyes as she expertly man handled an enormous fish, deftly cutting here and there with a big sharp cleaver.  Grandma fighting a fish!  And the results of her victory over the fish...my oh my, just yummilicious!  Her smoked fish was quite famous in our family.

Of course I didn't realize just quite how yummilicious gram's smoked fish was until I grew up and discovered to my dismay that the Shanghai Smoked Fish served in Hong Kong restaurants were not even close to the deliciousness of Grandma's.  Not even an itty bitty close as a matter of fact.  

Out of this frustration we decided to try to make it ourselves and have recreated our own version of Grandma's Shanghai Smoked Fish, or 上海熏魚, a version that I am proud to say is pretty darn close to Grandma's!

Lychee Jam

Oh jam it!  Presenting our delicately sweet and tenderly lush pink jam made from the Queen of Fruits the luscious Lychee 荔枝!

That's right my friends it's time to run to your nearest Chinese market and stock up on these seasonal beauties while they last.  We love lychees way too much in this house and always end up indulging a bit too much on them.  But heck why not they only come around once a year!  This year though we got a gift of a whole box full of lychees, a whole boxful!  What to do with a whole boxful of lychee?  

After eating as much as we could I decided to turn some of it into a batch of our Luscious Lychee Ice Cream (our most favorite homemade fruit ice cream!) and the rest I decided to try to make a Lychee fruit jam, which I have never attempted before.  

After a nervous planning and setting out, gosh darn it, the results are totally worth the effort, our homemade Lychee Jam came out tinted a gorgeous rosy pink and tasted ever so intensely of sweet, fresh lychee flavor with a delicate fragrance of summer florals!  Absolutely yummillicious!

Milky White Fish and Tofu Soup 拆魚豆腐羹

Check this soup out!  This milky white, delicate and nourishing soup is made from nothing but fish and its bones!  A famous kind of soup which people murmur about in hushed tones, in awe of the whiteness of the soup and the culinary feats that are required to achieve that pure and awesome whiteness.  

Well, sorry to those folks and yet hurrah for them as well, cuz I'm here to say that this milky white soup ain't so hard to achieve after all, if you know how to go about it!  

No added milk, no added soup stock, just need some fresh fish and fish bones and you're well on your way to making a totally fabulous, milky white, Fish and Tofu Soup 拆魚豆腐羹, that not only is a beautiful creamy white but also tastes out of this work yummilicious!  (And it's the best thing ever for when you're feeling under the weather!)

Silver Thread Buns 銀絲卷

This playful and tasty bread is a great childhood favorite of mine.  When I was little we used to get to eat it only when we happened to go to Shanghai or Northern Chinese cuisine restaurants, a special treat.  

These Silver Thread Buns 銀絲卷 (or Gold Thread Buns 金絲卷 if deep fried to a golden crispy brown) were a real treat for us kids, delicate fluffy strands of sweet white bread all wrapped inside a bun, a surprise every time!  It was so much fun to slowly tear into the bread and pick out the delicate threads of bread, eating them slowly, one amazing stick at a time.  There's nothing like food you can play with, amirite? 

But, shucks, I gotta admit that I still secretly love to pick these buns apart now that I'm grown up.  (Shhh...don't tell!)  The only difference nowadays is that I can make these Silver Thread Buns myself and enjoy their sweet, delicate white fluffiness (and play with my food!) in the comfort of home!