The following recipe is from the August 13th edition of our weekly recipe newsletter. To receive this newsletter in your inbox, sign up here!
This week's recipe, excerpted from The Shun Lee Cookbook by Michael Tong, is for Sichuan eggplant. It is served cold, and makes a wonderful summer appetizer or side dish for grilled fish or steak.
Later in the week we'll be excerpting some complex, innovative Chinese recipes for more accomplished home cooks. But for today, here is a light, simple version of sausage, shrimp, and chicken fried rice, excerpted from this week's Cook the Book selection, The Shun Lee Cookbook.
Traditionally, fried rice recipes from Shanghai call for ten different ingredients. This dish is scaled down a bit, but there are still a wide variety of flavors and textures. In addition, there is no need to fear experimentation! Add baby corn, snow peas, mushrooms, or whatever other delicious ingredients you have on hand.
In addition to excerpting a recipe everyday this week, we're also giving away five (5) copies of The Shun Lee Cookbook. Enter to win here.
Since most of the work (and headache) in making rice dumplings is in individually prepping ingredients and wrapping parcels, my mom simply assembles the raw ingredients and tosses the lot into a pressure cooker. Et voilà! You get the same yummy sticky rice dish in under an hour. Want to travel with it? My mom packs single servings of the rice into ziplock bags. Because the rice is sticky and will obligingly clump, you can pop neat bitefuls into your mouth on the go—no utensils required.
Snapshots from Asia: Dragon Boats, Rice Dumplings, and Cheat’s Sticky Rice
I’m having a really good time plowing through The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The New Classics, because so many of the thousand-odd recipes feel inspired and simple. Sure, there are some wonderfully long procedures good for a weekend, but there are just as many that take six ingredients and transform them into a delicious side dish in about 15 minutes. This is a good example.
She actually calls for baby bok choy, a smaller, milder alternative that I completely failed to get. When I saw the bok choy name plastered above some veggie I just picked it up and set off for the register before I realized my mistake. The mishap required a little extra prepping, as I had to remove the stems. It didn’t bother me at all. Perhaps that is because of the killer sauce, which is good enough to pour on any number of dishes.
During the holidays, for a lot of families, it’s tradition to get together to bake cookies and other sweet goodies. I’ve never made cookies with my family, but so much of my childhood was spent making countless dumplings and wontons with my Mom and Grandma either at home or at our family’s restaurant. Needless to say, I’ve become a lover all things dumpling after years of this family fun/borderline child-labor.
This weekend, with family members or guests coming over for the holidays, along with the cookies, why not put them to work and make pork and vegetable dumplings from The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The Original Classics. They would be a great hors d'oeuvre if you’re having a party or if you’re like me, eat a dozen or two doused in Sriracha and make it a meal. You can use the same pork and veggie mixture stuffed in wonton wrappers for your own homemade wonton soup. Rapidly stir a beaten egg in hot chicken broth and ta-dah!—you have egg drop soup to go with your wontons and another mystery of Chinese take-out is revealed. Now all that’s left is figuring out how they get those little fortunes in the cookies…
This stuffing, loaded with mushrooms, smoked oysters, and sweet, fatty Chinese sausage, sounds like a meal in itself. In our interview with Gourmet magazine's editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl about the magazine's approach to Thanksgiving this year, she recommends this recipe, describing it as "really, really good" and "off the charts." Wrap it in lotus leaf for a more dramatic presentation at the table.
And so we're at the end of the line with our featured recipes from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian
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