Glazed Roasted Carrots

Another not officially Chinese recipe, but a fun Asian tweak on glazed carrots, a common side dish this time of year. The idea comes from the September 2009 issue of Food & Wine, but I’ve changed the ingredients and cooking method a bit. A great side dish for an east-west fusion dinner.
ingredients:

1 lb carrots, peeled [...]

Stirfried Bok Choy

We’ve been mourning the fact that we can’t seem to find decent Asian produce in Ann Arbor (this may finally commit me to a garden next summer!), but this past Thursday’s CSA share included some gorgeous, delicious purple bok choy. For more information on the vegetable, visit Kitazawa Seed Company. It was almost too fresh [...]

Grilled Zucchini with Sesame Ginger Vinaigrette

Still coping with a surplus of summer squash…. This recipe can be made with any grilled vegetable and can be served warm or at room temperature.
ingredients:

approximately 1 lb zucchini or yellow crookneck squash
1 tsp sea salt
2 oz Sesame Ginger Vinaigrette, or to taste
1 T chopped cilantro

method:

Slice the squash 1/8″ thick: for smaller squash, I like [...]

Summer Squash, the 101st Way

My children are starting to look suspiciously at any new dish that appears on the table: would that contain zucchini by any chance? We have purchased CSA shares from Two Creeks Organics and are drowning in killer summer squash (frittata, muffins, sauteed, grilled, …) among other delicious veggies and the most amazing pastured eggs I [...]

Chili Peppers with Pressed Beancurd

I was thrilled to see chili peppers at the Westside Farmers’ Market last Thursday and to find a bell pepper in my CSA box as well. For this dish, choose your favorite chilies from among the larger, spicier varieties such as poblano, anaheim, etc. -or use a mix of green and red varieties. Can’t take [...]

Chinese Chives with Pressed Beancurd

Garlic chives, jiucai in Mandarin, are available in Asian markets and at farmers’ markets that have vendors of Asian produce. The look like a long, flattened version of our chives. When fully grown they are not hollow at the center and sometimes have buds at the tips. If you can’t find them, you can substitute the more [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]