Chinese Cuisine
Chinese Cucumber Salad
I’m not sure why, but people seem very judgmental and ill-informed about the whole business of pickling. I mean, when you get down to it, “a pickled vegetable” is really just a vegetable that someone has poured vinegar over and then walked away from for a few minutes. Yeh, that’s all. It was only in a recent conversation with my mother, during which her reaction to pickling was “oh, that’s gonna take FOREVER,” that I became aware of the misconception. As if pickling is a task that is culturally united with basket...
read morePickled Mustard Greens
I’m not gonna lie. When I went to the Asian grocery store and found the “prepared mustard greens” in the refrigerated section, they looked like a bag full of some mangled swamp creature. Basically, they’ve been pre-preserved in some way so they can sit on a shelf indefinitely, awaiting transformation. My main thought was “these are probably gonna taste like shit.” Well, after a couple good baths and a splash of vinegar here and there, these mustard greens turned out to be pretty darn spectacular. I served them as a side...
read moreSichuan Beef Noodle Soup with Pickled Mustard Greens and Cucumber Salad
Admittedly, for years, I’ve been a half-assed recipe follower. Let me clarify. I’ve always over-reached in my experimentations (yes, I’ve made some very eccentric dishes in my life), yet have only really read recipes to steal their essence and work things out in my own head, accordingly. So, if a recipe called for some rare type of purple pepper, it was probably going to inherit whatever color and derivation of pepper was on sale when I got to the grocery store. Part of this was because I’ve always lived and cooked on a strict...
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