On the road again…

Wish I could claim it’s a voluntary chef’s vacation, but this week begins our family’s relocation from CA to MI, almost 2 weeks of enforced eating out, something I dread heartily. Hoping to find some healthy surprises along the way…. I’ll be posting occasionally, but new recipes are unlikely until after July 4th weekend.
Thanks to [...]

Snowpeas in Vinaigrette

dressing
This is another recipe that I’ve created – not strictly Chinese, but the flavors in the vinaigrette make it almost so. You can serve this with Chinese food or as a quick vegetable dish for any meal – it’s particularly good with grilled salmon. Fresh snow peas are plentiful this time of year in Southern California, [...]

Friday List of Links

A reason for guarded optimism? I was interested to read on the dailySpark about a report out from the Journal of the American Medical Association that concludes, “The prevalence of high BMI for age among children and adolescents showed no significant changes between 2003-2004 and 2005-2006 and no significant trends between 1999 and 2006.” Tara Parker-Pope [...]

3 Cups Scallops

The “3 cups” style of cooking originally refers to a recips for cooking an entire chicken using 1 cup each of soy sauce, sesame oil, and wine. Obviously for lesser amounts of food, the amount of ingredients has also been reduced, but for most recipes of this style, the proportion remains the same 1:1:1. Often [...]

Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009

The newest bill to protect consumers from contaminated food has been introduced in the House: it’s call the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, and like all bills, it seems, it’s many pages long (text is available online from the Library of Congress). I’m desperately trying to find the time to actually read it or talk [...]

Menu: End of School Picnic

This past spring semester, I taught the Gifted and Talented Education program kids at our neighborhood elementary school: we spent 8 weeks on Mandarin Chinese and 8 weeks on Nutrition. At the end of each session we had a dinner party to celebrate, and last week’s event was a combination of the two sessions: together we cooked [...]

A list of links

A wide range of food news links this week – unrelated but interesting stuff!
20 ways to eat healthier right now: a lot like Michael Pollan’s tips in In Defense of Food, great tips for those who want to effect a lifestyle change, not just another diet. My favorite of the 20:
19. Watching Top Chef isn’t [...]

Chinese Coleslaw

This is a recipe I created for a party that we held for a group of my daughter’s friends – we let them decide on the menu, and as they were fairly evenly split between a traditional barbecue and a Chinese meal that we decided to combine the two themes. You can use the conventional [...]

Sweet Steamed Buns

There are a variety of sweet fillings for the steamed buns (baozi) that are usually eaten for breakfast. Like the other baozi recipes on this blog, these can be made ahead and frozen, then resteamed from the frozen state.
equipment:

24 squares of wax or parchment paper, 2×2″
steamer: for this recipe, if you have been rigging up a [...]

Stirfried Cucumbers

Sounds odd, I know – how often do we eat cucumbers hot? But I discovered that stirfrying is a great way to use cucumbers that are just a bit too big, a bit too tough-skinned for those cool summer salads. (As a woman told me at the farmers’ market, as I carefully chose the perfect [...]