Mom’s cooking: by me
Last week, my ASA “dad” Matt suggested organizing a home-cooked family dinner. Since the end of the semester has been relatively relaxed for me and considering how stressed all my peers seemed, I also wanted to help out by bringing them a bit of comfort through food. I ended up dictating most of the menu to be close to a typical meal at home, and it was exactly what I needed and I think what my friends needed: the perfect combination of vegetables, meat, soup, rice, and company. As I cooked with Matt, we reminisced about the familiar smells and sounds of the kitchens of our childhood: the fragrance of garlic and the crackle of wet greens hitting hot oil. I’m so glad that after all these years I was able to pick up some things from Mom, after all. From deciding how many of each ingredient to buy, to deciding how much of what seasoning to use, how long to cook each dish, I understand intuitively what the answers were.
As I stood in the kitchen cutting chicken into bits, my “family” was sitting in the common room, working on their homework. When each dish would come out of the pan and onto the dining table, my friends would come and try a few pieces while I returned to the kitchen, just like Rui, Dad, and I would when Mom cooked for us.
RECIPES: (starting at top center, working clockwise)
Pickled mustard greens & pork This dish was devised by Matt, whose family’s culinary background is based in traditions surrounding Hong Kong / Southern China. Mustard greens (芥菜 jie cai) normally taste kind of bitter and taste really good in soups. Pickled, the original defining smell/taste is maintained but combined with a salty umami flavor. The pickled kind is packaged while still semi-soaked in its pickling juice. Soak the pickled mustard greens for at least an hour. Matt says that he usually soaks the mustard greens for longer, but because we had hungry people to feed we did the bare minimum. This meant that the dish ended up being saltier than I would prefer, but everyone else didn’t seem to mind. Another thing that we think may be specific to Hong Kong cuisine is the tendency to coat meat in cornstarch to tenderize it. Cut pork into strips and marinate in soy sauce and cornstarch mixture for at least half an hour. We used about half a pound of pork for an entire package of pickled mustard greens. Heat oil, add garlic, stir-fry pork until lightly browned, then add pickled mustard greens. This dish ended up being the saltiest dish of the four, so it was a good balance to my three dishes.
Garlic bokchoy A true classic. Green leafy vegetables stir-fried with garlic is a staple to most everyday dinner tables. Make sure you take apart each individual leaf and wash out the dirt! This process can be applied to the cooking of any green leafy vegetable, but in this case we used what we call (青菜 qing cai): Heat oil, add garlic, stir until fragrant, add washed greens, add salt and pepper to taste. The end result is a savory but clean plate of greens! How long you cook your greens should vary on your preference of softness/crunchiness. Typically leafy greens should retain some crunchiness without being raw.
Two-pepper chicken My take on a Sichuan dish called three-pepper chicken, which uses long hot peppers, bell peppers, and sichuan peppercorn. I don’t love the sensation of numbing sichuan peppercorn, so I omitted it. I love the balance between sweet bell peppers and spicy long hot peppers, but since the supermarket didn’t have any long hot, I substituted in two jalapeños. I also prefer using chicken thigh, but the store didn’t have any chicken thigh that looked good, so I substituted in fresher looking chicken drumsticks from which I cut all the meat off the bone. Regardless of what cut of chicken you have, cut chicken into bite size pieces. Heat oil, add garlic, stir-fry chicken. When stir-frying meat, the standard procedure is add some soy sauce / let that reduce / add some cooking wine / let that reduce. I didn’t have cooking wine but it turned out fine! For seasoning, I added a good scoop of shacha sauce (沙茶酱 sa cha jiang) which we typically only use as a hotpot condiment at home, but it was perfect as a coking condiment in this dish. The sauce is made of bits of different seafood and sesame oil and the flavor complimented the chicken well. While chicken in cooking, cut bell peppers into bite-size chunks and dice jalapeños. To control how spicy this dish becomes, you need to pay attention to how much of the jalapeños seeds are used. For my spice tolerance, I removed half of the seeds from each of the jalapeños, which you can do by cutting the pepper in the middle from stem to tip and scooping the seeds out. Add peppers to cooked chicken, add salt/pepper/soy sauce to taste. Optional last step: turn off heat and add chopped green onions for garnish and a little extra flavor.
Tomato egg-drop soup This is such an easy soup to make, and is a go-to when time-crunched and you don’t feel like making a bone based soup that would take longer. A hack that my mom always uses is to flavor the soup with the pickled mustard green used to flavor Szechuan style spicy/sour fish stew (酸菜鱼 suan cai yv). I actually never realized that these pickled greens were the same as the ones that Matt used in the first dish, because the ones he used in his stir-fry were mostly stem while the once used in these condiment packages are mostly leaf. You learn something new everyday! First, cut tomatoes into larger chunks and lightly stir fry in some oil. Add water and bring to light boil. We left the soup like this while cooking the rest of the meal so when we came back to it the tomatoes were definitely nice and soft, but it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes on a high boil. At this point, add the spicy/sour fish condiments aka pickled mustard greens and salt. Definitely don’t add the entire package, but incrementally add so that it doesn’t end up making your soup overwhelmingly sour/spicy. To create the egg drop texture, beat eggs in a bowl and add incrementally to boiling soup while stirring the pot. The soup is now done, but for extra flavor, chop up a bunch of green onions and cilantro and dump it all on top, as pictured.
Don’t forget to pair with white rice!