Shanghai style braised pork

May 3, 2025 12:18 PM

I've been a bit mentally tired lately, and so I've been sticking to the basics with my cooking. That means making a lot of the same dishes over and over, and I know that's not very exciting for the food blog. But I've had some photos from the past couple of months that have been sitting on my phone, and I wanted to share these at some point, so here we go!

Remember how I hang out with one of my friends every other week and we pick a dish to make? Well there was one time when another friend picked out a dish for us, and she went with Shanghai style braised pork belly. Except we only had access to Aldi, so we used pork butt instead. I think it was a better choice anyway. We also used granulated sugar instead of rock sugar because that's what we had available.

It was tasty and not too hard to make! The recipe called for waaay more water than we needed so it took a while to evaporate, but other than that it was pretty straightforward. I also stir fried some broccoli using the method from Made With Lau.

And I was even inspired to make it a second time on my own, and this time I was better about not using too much water for the braising process. I also tried using brown sugar instead of white sugar just to see if that would make a difference. I don't think it did.

I did get a little fancy and I bought sesame seeds just so I could have them as a topping. And I stir fried bok choy this time. Overall, I think this attempt was even better! I do want to make this a third time, but with some hard boiled eggs as well. I feel like I missed out on having braised hard boiled eggs this Easter (you know, with how expensive eggs are now), but the egg prices are going down a little!

Anyway, I was originally going to put a lot more dishes in this post, but I feel like I've typed enough, so until next time!

Stir fried ginger (with chicken)

April 11, 2025 11:13 PM

Because the ginger is the important part of this. You might think it's just an aromatic. No, it is a first class vegetable in this dish.

I've had my family's stir fried ginger sitting in the back of my mind after my mom made it for me earlier this year, and I've been wanting to try making it myself. And today I finally did. And oh my god, cutting up this ginger was so tedious and my hand started cramping up.

That's about 12 oz of ginger, peeled and julienned. I told my aunt that it was so much work to cut up and she was like "it's not that much work! you need a sharper knife and you need to wet the ginger and peel it with a spoon!" Okay, noted for next time.

I used an equal amount of chicken thigh, cut up into little pieces. It is a lot of ginger to chicken. I liked it, but I don't think the average person appreciates this much ginger. So I think I might scale back the amount of ginger next time. Maybe like a 2:3 ratio of ginger to chicken.

Anyway, I turned the heat on the stove up to HIGH (because my mom insists on always cooking with high heat) and once it was hot, I added enough oil to cover the pan, and then I threw in some minced garlic, about 4 cloves.

And then I immedately lifted the pan off the stove and lowered the heat because it was way way way too hot for the garlic 🥵 The garlic quickly darkened in color, and I threw in a handful of the ginger and stirred that around.

Okay, I put the heat back on HIGH and I threw in all the chicken and stirred a little more. Once that was basically cooked, I added the rest of the ginger and stirred some more. And then it was time to add in all the sauces and seasonings. I added

• 1 tsp of dark soy sauce
• 1 tbsp of Shaoxing wine (but any cooking wine will do)
• 1 tbsp of fish sauce
• 1 heaping tbsp of oyster sauce
• 1.5 tbsp sugar -- this is the most important ingredient! (besides the ginger of course)

And then I also added around 1/4 - 1/2 cup of water so I could keep stirring and it could cook longer and not burn. To uh, enhance the flavors some more I guess. It all basically evaporated at the end though.

I was totally just winging all the amounts. I would say that this was a tad darker and saltier (and spicier) than it needed to be, but ultimately, it was delicious. Really, the key is to just err on the side of under-seasoning, and then taste it and adjust.

After I had already eaten a bowl of this, I realized that I completely forgot to add soy sauce! The not dark soy sauce I mean. I guess I didn't need it, but next time I'll cut back on the dark soy sauce and try adding some light soy sauce.

I am honestly so so so happy with this. Maybe one day I'll put together a more nicely formatted recipe entry. For now, feel free to use my rambly paragraphs if you want to try making this yourself!

Mac and cheese and pizza

March 22, 2025 10:43 PM

My focus has definitely been on my Teochew site lately, but I still make time to have some fun cooking sessions with my friends! My friend and I get together every other week and we alternate picking a dish to cook. This Friday, it was her turn and she chose pizza and a spicy mac and cheese, because she's really into spicy food and because she had a whole bunch of heavy cream she needed to use up.

For the most part, I was in charge of the pizza. I just wanted to do something with a simple tomato sauce and cheese, but I let my friend pick the toppings. We added mushrooms, onions, bacon, arugula, and sliced tomatoes, because tomatoes are my favorite pizza topping. My friend really wanted to put jalapeño on it as well, but Aldi was all out!

I think I'm getting a little better at spreading out this pizza dough into a nice circular shape! We cooked the pizza at 500°F for nine minutes, and I was actually really happy with how it came out. I feel like I almost always overcook my pizza and end up with a really hard crust, but this was still nice and soft! I might try to crank up to oven to 525 next time, but I have no idea what my pizza pan can withstand.

My friend did most of the cooking for the mac n cheese. She took out her cast iron pan for the first time ever, and we honestly didn't know whether it needed to be cleaned or seasoned before using it, and we also didn't know how to properly clean and season it after using it 😅 But it seemed to cook the mac and cheese well!

The mac and cheese was quite tasty, but man it was heavy. I took a small portion for myself and then I felt like I couldn't eat any more. But I thought it actually worked quite well with a bit of that pizza sauce on top.

And even though I don't care for spicy foods like my friend does, I'll admit that jalapeño would have been really nice in this. Maybe I'll try making another spicy mac and cheese again, but I think I'll just stick to using milk in my mac and cheese. The heavy cream and bacon was too much for me.

Overall, this was a successful meal! Next time it'll be my pick for what we're making. What should I choose? 🤔

Taco night!

March 15, 2025 7:39 PM

I made some carnitas and invited some friends over to have a taco night! And two of my friends brought homemade tortillas and guac, which were 👌

I was too excited to eat so I didn't really put a lot of effort into photos, but I'll share a couple of photos that my friends took!

Tacos are always delicious, but tacos with friends are even better 😊

A weekend with my mom

March 6, 2025 6:43 PM

My mom visited me this past weekend, and we spent a lot of time cooking and eating. I didn't really have much prepared for her when she got here on Friday night, but I did have some leftover shumai and broccoli so we ate that with rice. My mom thought that my shumai was okay, but the texture was off and she said she had a better recipe. To be fair, the pieces that she had were from my first batch this year where I forgot to add cornstarch.

So we decided to make more shumai. My mom said that in order to get the right texture, you need to "cheep" the filling, and she made a folding motion with her hands. (I know she was saying something in Chinese, but as of right now, I have no idea what the Chinese character is for "cheep", but I think it basically means "to knead". If I ever figure it out later, I'll update this post) Mixing the filling with my hands is much easier than using chopsticks. She also mentioned that we needed to add the oil last, after we already mixed everything else.

I'll admit, the batch we made together was a lot better than the one I made on my own.

Because I wanted to have some vegetables to go with this, I also made some brussels sprouts and bacon, which I know doesn't really make sense with Asian food, but I already had all the ingredients for it.

We didn't have all the ingredients for the shumai, so we needed to go to the store for that. I wanted to check out one of the newest Asian stores. The last time I went there, it was really empty and it seemed like they were still stocking the shelves, but this time it was actually really nice!

My mom noticed that shelled peanuts were being sold for a good price, so we bought a bag of those, and my mom roasted them later. And then we saw some peanuts in the shell, and my mom said that that was also a good price, so we boiled those!

But the best deal that we saw at the store was some sad looking grapefruits that were being sold for 99 cents each! My mom told me that these grapefruit were perfectly fine, even better than the nice looking ones because it has more time to ripen and get sweeter. So we bought all of the discounted grapefruit.

And I agree, that sad looking grapefruit was delicious.

But you know what was the most delicious thing I had this weekend? It was my mom's ginger chicken stir fry. I had specifically asked her if she could make it and also teach me how to make it. So I'm gonna try this on my own at some point!

I've looked up ginger chicken stir fry recipes on google, but none of them are what I'm looking for. Most people cook with very small amounts of ginger, just to infuse its flavor in the dish, but not here. Ginger is a first class vegetable. And that means that we need just as much ginger as chicken in this recipe. Honestly, I wish we could have added more ginger.

But I'll go on more about ginger in a future post. Since my mom was helping me a lot with making food, I wanted to make sure I made her some fresh food of my own. My mom really likes carrot cake, so I made her some carrot cake muffins. She thought they were a little too sweet for her taste, but she still liked them!

And finally, I made her some scallion noodles. I wasn't sure if she was going to like this, but after she took a bite she said "Not bad! Can I add sriracha to this?"

So all in all, it was a successful weekend with lots of yummy food.