Quick Vegetable Pickles

So now it’s finally summer in Ann Arbor – 90s and HUMID. Perfect weather for cold pickles on the side of any meal. Here is an adaptation of a recipe from my son’s godmother – I’ve changed a few ingredients to make it more Chinese. You can use just about any pickling vegetables you like, [...]

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, [...]

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 & Sour Cucumbers

Just about any kind of cucumber will work for this recipe – I prefer the small Persian or Japanese ones, since they don’t have such large seeds and their skin is thin. English cucumbers are great, but who needs all that plastic packaging? If you use a conventional cucumber, you can scoop out the seeds [...]

Steamed Zucchini

Like beets, zucchini is another vegetable I’ve never seen in China or in a Chinese restaurant. But occasionally I come across a recipe for it (as in Jack Santa Maria’s Chinese Vegetarian Cookery). I’ve used zucchini in a pinch (when I’d planned to make an eggplant dish and realized I didn’t have eggplant!) and found [...]

Pickled Beets

Beets…. Not the first vegetable that comes to mind when you think about Chinese food? I’ve never seen beets (called tang luobo, “sugar turnip”) served in a Chinese restaurant or in a Chinese home, but their sweetness is a great foil to the pickling process and five spice powder, so I thought I’d try it. And [...]

Marinated Mushrooms

This is a quick do-ahead recipe that makes a great cold side dish.
ingredients:

1/2 lb fresh white mushrooms, stems trimmed and caps gently wiped clean with a dry kitchen towel or soft mushroom brush
2 T light soy sauce
1 tsp Shaoxing cooking wine or dry sherry
1 pinch salt
1 tsp sesame oil
1/8 tsp chopped salted chilies, or to [...]

Five Spice Peanuts

These peanuts make a wonderful accompaniment for cocktail hour and a great snack any time! I’ve tweaked a recipe for pecans to use more common Chinese ingredients, peanuts and five spice powder. But I’ve left in the butter – not very Chinese, but it really helps glue the spices to the nuts, and everything’s better [...]

Bean Sprout Salad

This refreshing cold dish is often made with shredded poached chicken breast, but in deference to the start of Lent, here is a vegetarian version. You can find bean sprouts in Asian markets and, more and more often, in the Asian vegetable section of conventional stores. Be sure to pick sprouts that look clean and [...]

Seaweed Salad

Seaweed, for all its many nutritional claims, can be a bit off-putting at first, but if you like sushi, you should certainly try some other varieties – sort of like with wine, cheese, or chocolate, you can start with the milder varieties and move toward the stronger-tasting ones. For this recipe, look for wakame, which can be found [...]