Chinese Pea Pod, Tomato, Onion and Orzo Salad - A Crunchy Side or Main Dish

My twin grandchildren came home for the holidays. Our grocery bill shot up like a rocket and, no matter how often I went to the store, I couldn't keep the refrigerator stocked. I couldn't think of tasty lunches either. Apparently the holidays and my grandchildren's erratic schedules had addled my brain. One day I decided to serve sandwiches for lunch. A sandwich wouldn't be enough, so I decided to serve a side dish. What would it be?

After rummaging in the fridge, I found an unopened package of Chinese pea pods, half a box of cherry tomatoes, some tomato and basil feta cheese, and a red onion. Chinese pea pods are expensive and I wanted to use them while they were still fresh.

The pods, which are also called snow peas, are regular peas that are picked before they mature. You can see and feel the tiny peas inside. The Cook's Thesaurus website describes them as an edible pod and common ingredient in stir-fry dishes. According to the website, you should cook the pods for only a minute, no more. The pods may also be eaten raw and the Foodista website offers tips for buying them.

First, look for pods that are a light or medium green. "Those whose color is especially light or dark, or those that are yellow, whitish or are speckled with gray, should be avoided," the website explains. Second, the pods should look firm. If the store sells them in bluk, feel one to see if it's stiff. You may also break one apart to see if it snaps.

Preparing Chinese pea pods is easy. Rinse them under cold water, cut off the tips, and pull off the string along the edge. I leave the strings on small pods. All of these ingredients -- pea pods, cherry tomatoes, red onion, and feta cheese -- became a tasty side salad. I used cooked orzo (rice-shaped pasta) as the base of the salad.

When I tasted the mixture my eyes widened in surprise and I said "Mmmmm." My granddaughter looked at me in surprise. "Guess it's good grandma," she commented. I think you'll say "Mmmmm" when you taste this crunchy salad.

Ingredients

1 cup cooked orzo

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 cups of "matchstick" pea pods

1/2 cup finely chopped red onion

1 cup halved cherry tomatoes

1/2 cup (or more) crumbled feta cheese with tomato and basil

Zest of one lemon

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

1/2 teaspoon lemon pepper

Method

Cook orzo according to package directions. Rinse pasta under cold water and transfer to a large bowl. Add 2 tablespoons olive oil to the pasta to prevent it from sticking together. Rinse the pea pods, cut off the tips, remove the strings, and cut into thin "matchsticks." Add to orzo, along with the remaining ingredients. Toss salad gently. Serve as a side dish with sandwiches or add cooked shrimp, cooked salmon or tuna for a main dish. Makes 6 servings. 

Chinese Starter Recipes

Chinese starter recipes can be a great option whether you are catering for a dinner party or a buffet. You can serve a Chinese starter recipe before any main course cuisine and you might even want to serve a Chinese starter before a traditional western main meal.

Examples of tasty Chinese starters recipes include spring rolls, prawn crackers with a homemade dipping sauce, wonton soup, chicken and sweet corn soup, Chinese stuffed mushrooms, steamed dumplings and more. If you serve recipes like these on Asian crockery with Chinese spoons or chopsticks your home cooking is sure to be very much appreciated.

More Chinese Starters Ideas

There are lots of vegetarian Chinese starters you can make. What about homemade egg rolls or spring rolls with cabbage, mushrooms and bean sprouts inside or vegetarian dumplings?

Stuffed mushrooms or zucchini work well and you can use spiced rice as the filling. Chinese chicken wings are great at a buffet and you can add Chinese ingredients like water chestnuts, oriental mushrooms or bamboo shoots to any salad recipe to give it a flavour of China.

Recipe for Chinese Crepes

These tasty crepes are filled with spring onions, black bean sauce, fresh coriander and more for an authentic Chinese flavour. Use fried wonton skin or fried pork rind to make a crunchy filling. This recipe makes one Chinese crepe, so double it as many times as necessary, making one crepe at a time.

You can find these crepes on Chinese street corners, cooked fresh to order, and they also make a great starter before any kind of meal. They are hot, flavourful and spicy without being too spicy. If you prefer a mild flavour you can leave out the chili sauce.

You will need:

1 tablespoon black bean sauce
2 tablespoons soy milk
2 tablespoons millet flour
1 teaspoon water
1/2 teaspoon chili sauce
1/2 spring onion, sliced
1/2 teaspoon vegetable oil
2 small square crackers
1 tablespoon torn fresh coriander leaves
1 beaten egg
Cooking spray

How to make them:

Whisk the soy milk with the vegetable oil and millet flour to make a batter. Add a teaspoon of water if it is too thick. Stir a teaspoon of water into the black bean sauce. Mix another teaspoon of water into the chili sauce. Put these two sauces to one side.

Spray a frying pan with cooking spray and heat it over a moderately low heat. Pour the batter into the pan and spread it so you get a thin crepe. Cook it for a couple of minutes or until firm, then pour the beaten egg over it. Cook it until the egg sets. Sprinkle the coriander and spring onion slices on top, pressing them into the egg.

Flip the crepe over and spread the chili sauce and black bean sauces on. Put the crackers in the middle, leaving 1cm of space between them. Flip the top third of the crepe over the crackers, then fold the bottom third up. Double the crepe over so the crackers are on top of each other. Serve hot. 

How to Make Chicken Wing in SWISS Sauce

I would like to start with My Chinese Recipes first and hope they will give you some new sights from Chinese cooking.

First, try a funny recipe - 'Chicken Wings in Swiss Sauce', a name having no relation with Swiss, just a wrong pronunciation from our Grandpa and Grandma!

 Ingredient:

6 frozen chicken wings in whole, around 700-750g

1 thick slice ginger

3 stalks spring onion

Sauce:

5 tbsp light soya sauce

5 tbsp dark soya sauce

1 tbsp sesame oil

1 tbsp Shaoshing wine (or any Chinese wine)

2 pcs rock sugar ( table tennis), break in small pieces

2 cups of water

Method:

1 unfreeze the chicken wings, wash and rinse

2 blanch the wings in boiling water for 1 min, remove and put in cold water, raise

3 heat 2 tbsp oil, fry the ginger slice and spring onion for around 1 min, add thesauce and boil until all sugar dissolve

4 add the wings in the sauce until reboil

5 turn to light fire, cover then keep boil around 15 mins

6 turn the wings to another side, off the fire, leave the wings in the sauce with cover for another 10 mins.

TRY, YUMMY!! YUMMY!!.

Tofu With Chinese Sausage Recipe

Tofu is a food originated from China, and is made by coagulating soy milk. Tofu is low in calories, no saturated fat or cholesterol, and contain pretty high amount of iron. Besides, due to tofu is made by soy milk, it is high in protein as well. Thus, for those weight watchers, vegetarians, health conscious and dairy product intolerance people, tofu is always their good choice of food.

Tofu itself has very little flavor or smell. So it can be used to cook with any dishes or ingredients. However, also due to its blend taste, it is not easy to cook a nice, tasty tofu dish as well. In order to use tofu as main ingredient for the dish, one would need to be able to make the taste or essence of side ingredients to be blended into the tofu.

There are many different types of tofu in the market. One needs to choose the right tofu for right dish. For example, soft tofu is suitable for soup, dessert, and steaming, and firm tofu is more suitable for stir fry, or deep fried.

Here is one easy-to-follow Chinese tofu recipe

Ingredients:

• 2 Chinese sausage (can get it from Asian market)
• 2 cakes medium firm tofu
• 1 spring onion, cut into 1 inch sections
• 1 red chili, thinly sliced
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon soy sauce
• 0.8 cup water
• 3 cup cooking oil
• 1 teaspoon cornstarch dissolved in 1 tablespoon water
• Pinch of MSG

Methods:

1. Put in the Chinese sausage into a steamer, steam for 12 minutes. Cut them diagonally into thin slices
2. Cut the tofu into 12 square pieces.
3. Heat up wok and cooking oil over medium heat. Fried tofu for 3 minutes until golden brown. Drain with paper towels and set aside
4. Heat wok and 1 teaspoon cooking oil. Stir fry spring onion and red chili for about 2 minutes. Add in salt, soy sauce, water and fried tofu. Stir and simmer for 5 minutes over medium heat
5. Add in Chinese sausages and cornstarch mixture. Stir well until sauce is thickened
6. Ready to serve.

Healthy Gado-Gado (Vegetarian) Chinese Recipes

Healthy Gado-Gado (Vegetarian) Chinese Recepies

Hi I would like to introduce Gado Gado recipe to all my readers. Please make a note of the ingredients.

Ingredients

For the peanut sauce

Fifty gram reamed coconut
Two table spoon. oil
One onion, thinly chopped
Two garlic clove, crushed
175 grams Crunchy peanut butter
One table spoon tamarind extract
One table spoon soft light brown sugar Salt to taste.

For tile salad
2 table spoon oil
I small onion, sliced and separated into rings
100 grams French beans
100 grams spinach, shredded
50 gills. beansprouts
100 gills. carrots, coarsely grated
100 gills. Chinese cabbage RC, shredded
100 grams cooked rice.

How to prepare the sauce: First dissolve the coconut in 300 ml. lukewarm water. Heat the oil in a sauce pan. Then add onion and garlic and fry until light brown. You have to remove from the 'flame and mix in the peanut butter. Dissolve coconut, tamarind, sugar and add salt to taste. Bring the sauce slowly to a boil and cook, stirring for 2 to 3 minutes until thick. Set away to cool.

To formulate the salad, heat the oil in a frying pan. Add the onion rings and fry until brown; drain and keep aside. Cut the beans into 1/2 inch lengths and cook in boiling lilted water for 2 minutes. Drain and rinse under cold water.
To assemble, arrange the spinach over a serving dish and top with the bean sprouts, carrots, cabbage, beans and rice. Spoon 10m, of the peanut sauce on top and garnish with the browned onion rings. Serve remaining sauce separately, This will serve four.

Good Chinese Recipes For Beginners

It is hard to select a good Chinese recipe if you have got a chance to cook Chinese. It will be a depressing and scary moment when you look through the recipes because of the ingredients which you have never used before and the style of cooking is different and new to you.

When you are not experienced cook and you can't cook exactly according to the recipe then the best is to start with something easy. You can try pot stickers if you like them; it is easy and fun to start with such an easy recipe.

To start with Chinese recipes best are single dishes. They are mostly easy for us to cook. These include rice, vegetables and a type of meat.

You think that you can cook any Chinese recipe then you are totally wrong because you will have a lot going on all at once and you will be devastated. The best is to start with rice.

It takes about 20 minutes to cook rice and also the same amount of time is required to cut meat vegetables. With rice Stir fry is the best option to cook because it is basically meat and vegetable baked on high heat and stirred continuously.

When we start to cook something we should know for how much people we are cooking. You can make your meal fancy only if you serving to one or two by different types of sauces.

In case when you are preparing meal for kids the best is sweet and sour chicken. If you serve kids with bunch of Chinese bean pancakes, they might not eat and dislike them. Always try something which is easy and small.

West Lake Fish In Vinegar Sauce

Zhejiang, being the Land of Fish and Rice, has a wide variety of fish dishes. One of the famous fish dishes is a local delicacy from Hangzhou, which is the West Lake Fish in Vinegar Sauce or the Xi Hu Cu Yu. In Hangzhou, their dishes are usually named after a famous place or a famous person and usually have some fascinating stories behind them.

Xi hu Cu Yu is sometimes called as "Sister Song's Treasure". The interesting story behind it is about the death of the older brother, and Sister Song, the wife cooked the fish with sweet and sour sauce to stimulate the appetite of the grieving younger brother. The sauce is sweet and sour, as a symbol of the sweetness of life, and sour to remind them of the sour oppression for the commoners and for their grieving. Having eaten the fish with sweet and sour sauce, the younger brother left town. He was greatly moved by the significance of the dish he just ate and he made sure to earn fame and fortune before he went back to Hangzhou to avenge his elder brother and to look after his sister-in-law.

In other versions of the story, the younger brother became an authority several years after, and in one banquet that he attended, the same dish which is the fish in sweet and sour sauce was served. He was surprised and asked the host who cooked the dish. He found out that it was his sister-in-law who had been a helper to avoid reprisal.

This dish may be named after the beautiful and ever famous water wonderland, West Lake, but do not worry because any white fish can be used for this recipe.

Here are the ingredients:

• 1 Whole Fish - approx 2 lbs (grass carp, snapper, sea bass or any white fish)
• 6 cups water
• 4 - 5 slices of ginger
• 1 stalk scallion - finely chopped
• 1/3 cup cider vinegar - or black (Chiangkang) vinegar if available
• 1/4 cup sugar - brown or white sugar can be used
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 2 tbsp rice wine
• 2 tbsp cornstarch
• Pinch of salt
• Chinese Celery (Qin Cai) - for garnishing

Preparation:

In the traditional way of preparing this dish, the fish is put in a basin of water and starved for 2-3 days to remove any muddy taste.

1. Wash or rinse the fish. Make sure to remove gills, and scales. Using a sharp knife, slice 2 or 3 diagonal cuts on each side of the fish.
2. If you want to make it artistic, slice 2 - 3 diagonal cuts on one side of the fish. And then on the other side, you can also slit the flesh from the tail up to the head of the fish. Do this by gently pressing on the fish while slicing from the tail, and along the backbone.
3. In a large pot, bring the 6 cups of water to a boil together with the scallion and ginger. Make sure to have enough water to cover the fish so you don't have to turn the fish as it may break the flesh.
4. Poach the fish for about 8 to 10 minutes. Drain, and then set aside.

For the sauce:

1. Boil ½ cup of water. The water used to boil the fish can be used because of the added flavour from the ginger and scallion. Alternatively, chicken stock may be used.
2. Add in the soy sauce, sugar, and vinegar. Simmer over a medium heat to dissolve the sugar.
3. Mix the rice wine and cornstarch in a bowl, before pouring it in to thicken the sauce. Make sure to stir constantly to avoid lumps.
4. Remove from heat and season with salt. Black pepper is optional.