Chinese-Style Shrimp Soup Stock

In quite a few posts, I've referenced my homemade Chinese soup stock. Most recently, it showed up in my corn fish recipe, and it also pops up in a lot of Pei-Mei recipes. Usually, a small amount is used to form the basis of a sauce for a stir fried dish. In a pinch, you can (I have many times) substitute a western-style stock, but I try to always keep some Chinese stock on hand. Compared to the western style, Chinese soup stock is mostly clear and is very simple to make. Take some kind of meat waste, such as bones, carcasses, or shells, and simmer with scallion and ginger. Take a look at just a few of the dishes you can make with this stock!

Sichuan-style eggplant, stir-fried rice cakes, fish with corn sauce,
fish with fermented black beans, spring rolls, minced pigeon lettuce cups

Taking something that would otherwise go to waste and making something useful is very rewarding. Luckily, a lot of these waste parts are key ingredients in making pantry staples. I like to call this "using every part of the buffalo." This includes saving bits of chicken skin and fat for schmaltz and pork fat for lard. I also save scraps of vegetables, bones, and shrimp shells for stock. This particular stock uses shrimp. I always buy shrimp with the shells on and save the shells. I put the shells in a Ziploc bag, fill it up with water, and freeze. Once I have enough of these frozen shell blocks, I make some stock. 

This is a very loose recipe because it doesn't require any precision. Pork or chicken bones can be used instead of shrimp for a different flavor. Shrimp gives the stock a subtle seafood flavor that works well in a variety of dishes and also as a broth for wonton soup. I add no salt to the stock, since it's headed for so many different uses down the road. This way, I have full control over the seasoning later. You'll need to add a lot of salt if using for soup. The stock lasts maybe a week in the refrigerator, so I always freeze it. Since only a small amount is used for most recipes, freezing it all in one block is not practical. I've come up with what I think is a clever solution: shattering it into small pieces with a hammer. Very satisfying. 

Pressure Cooker Pulled Pork

Pulled pork is a common sight in the Upper Midwest, where it's often prepared in a crock pot with a sweet and sour sauce and served on a hamburger bun. It's usually just called "barbecue," not to be confused with the smoked meats of other regions. The 1950s church cookbook passed down to me has a few barbecue recipes, which can include basically any meat. While I've eaten this style plenty of times, I happen to have gone a different direction with my pulled pork. My style is loosely Mexican-flavored, although it's not intended to be authentically Mexican. I started making my version a few years ago with the traditional 3-hour dutch oven method. It was a natural fit for my first Instant Pot recipe.

I've had an Instant Pot for a while, but have only recently started experimenting with my own recipes. It's the first pressure cooker I've used. The idea of sealing it up and letting it do its thing can be a little intimidating for someone who usually cooks on the fly. This is also why baking cakes is always a bit stressful for me, although I've gotten much better over time. I most commonly use the Instant Pot to make rice, which it does well. It can also shine when making stews and braised meats that usually take a few hours to cook. There is a lot written about the Instant Pot on the internet. What I often find frustrating about the recipes I find is that they aren't precise enough about the settings. High or low pressure and quick or natural release can make a huge difference. Since the Instant Pot doesn't operate by feel like regular cooking, I will be much more precise about it than my other recipes. That being said, the ingredients here are easily substituted and the ratios are variable. If you don't want to use beer, just use more chicken stock.

This recipe is closely built on my original one from 2018. The cut used is still Boston Butt. This is a great value cut of pork if you're willing to put the work into it. You can certainly roast it whole, but you can also break it down into useful parts. I start by trimming off the large amount of fat from the skin side. These can be rendered into lard or mixed into sausage or dumpling filling. Next, I slice off large strips of meat for char siu. If you like, these can then be cut up into smaller chunks for stew or kebabs. Once all the easily cut off pieces are done, I'm left with the shoulder blade and the less-accessible meat. I then cut the remaining meat off the bone, but you don't need to completely clean it off. These pieces will be much more irregular than the initial strips, so they work well for grinding. The pork I used in this post was from this trimming. The remaining shoulder blade with a little meat left on it can then be used to make soup. 

Upgrade: Pan-Roasted Chicken with Onion Gravy

Today's upgrade is based on a chicken recipe I wrote back in 2012. While there's nothing wrong with that one, it was quite basic, consisting of a pan-roasted piece of chicken with a simple onion gravy. I wanted to do something a little more interesting this time. The gravy has some real complexity. I cooked the onions longer than what you would normally do for a pan sauce, which brings out more sweetness. This balances well with the rendered fat from the chicken skin, salty soy sauce, and tart lemon. This recipe makes more than enough sauce for the chicken, and pairs perfectly with mashed potatoes. 

Leg quarters are quite underrated, I think. We got a big, deeply discounted bag of them a few weeks ago (the first use was smoked chicken) and have them ready to go in the freezer. When we were wedding planning last year, we had to get a kosher caterer for a handful of guests. The menu they provided had "chicken bottoms," which we had never heard of. Turns out, it's another term for leg quarters. The only references I can find to this term come from kosher websites. I always find these linguistic peculiarities fun.

As I've mentioned before, we are on a two-week grocery cycle, in which we carefully plan out 14 days worth of meals to limit exposure. I then categorize the meals based on how fresh the ingredients need to be. This is a perfect meal for the back half of the cycle. The fresh ingredients (potatoes, onion, and lemon) hold up well being stored. I harvested the rosemary from the garden. I highly recommend growing herbs that are better fresh than dry and are typically used in small quantities. This way, you can harvest a little instead of buying a big bunch that will go bad before you can use it. As such, I have rosemary, parsley, mint, and basil in the garden. Everything else in the recipe is a pantry staple. 

Pei-Mei and the Food Regions of China

Since I've done four different Pei-Mei dishes in the last month, I've spent a lot of time reading the books lately. From 2014 to now, I've posted my interpretations of 15 of her dishes, with a few others loosely inspired by her recipes. In this article, I will discuss the history and structure of these books, and how she classifies dishes into regional cuisines. Pei-Mei's Chinese Cook Book consists of three volumes. Volume I, published in 1969, presents 100 recipes roughly evenly split between four regions, plus 20 more listed under snacks and desserts. Volume II, published in 1974, switches to a categorization based on main ingredients (pork, beef, fish, etc.) and adds 110 new recipes. Although this makes it easier to find specific dishes, I do miss having the regional context. Volume III, published in 1979, is organized into menus for complete formal dinners of 12 to 17 dishes each. There are 7 regional menus, plus a vegetarian menu and a buffet menu, for a total of 130 more recipes. There are definitely some among the 360 total recipes that are very similar, such as three dishes that are basically slight variations on Lovers' Shrimp. One uses bigger shrimp, while one adds a third curry-based shrimp to the mix. My edition is clearly a matched set, probably printed when the third volume came out. Since my grandparents left Hong Kong in 1980, they must have purchased it just before they left.

In volume I, the recipes are split into eastern, southern, western, and northern China. Each section is preceded by a map showing which provinces are included. Since the book is from Taiwan, the map shown is actually the full territorial claim of the Republic of China, which includes the independent nation of Mongolia. The borders of the modern provinces of the PRC look a bit different, but I made the map above (credit to paintmaps.com, where you can make one) to show roughly what she means by these three regions. We can immediately notice that large portions of China are missing, and the book focuses on the heavily populated Han Chinese heartlands. The gash down the middle is interesting, as millions of people live there and have some intriguing culinary traditions. Shaanxi is famous for its noodles. While Hubei gets more press these days as ground zero for the coronavirus, they also have a rich food culture. 

Ultimately, trying to boil down a regional cuisine into a few pithy sentences is probably a mistake. It's like saying French food is just butter or Midwestern food is just hotdish and jello salad. All cuisines are varied. There are, however, some themes that reoccur within a region's cooking are useful to point out, as is highlighting some famous dishes. In the rest of this article, I will go through Pei-Mei's four regions and discuss some examples that have made over the years.

Beef Chow Fun (乾炒牛河)

Beef chow fun is a famous Cantonese dish combining wide rice noodles with tender sliced beef. Several years ago, I posted a chicken chow fun recipe using the same noodles. While this is not exactly an "upgrade," this recipe improves upon it with a better marinade inspired by Pei-Mei, and a sauce to tie it all together. This is also a companion recipe to my chow mein recipe from a few weeks ago. Grandpa and grandma would often serve us both in one meal! The name qianchao niu he is interesting. The first part - qianchao means "dry fried," similar to dry-cooked string beans. I'm not sure of the history of this dish, but this name may suggest the beef was originally deep fried. The rest of the name refers to beef (niu) and the wide noodles (he fen) in the dish. I was very happy with how this turned out, but in retrospect, this recipe makes a lot of food. I would probably halve everything next time, but there's nothing wrong with having some leftovers. 

I took the recipe for the beef from "Sliced Beef with Broccoli" in Pei-Mei Volume II. She tosses the beef with some blanched gailan (Chinese broccoli) and a sauce. The beef is phenomenal on its own, and I would happily gobble it up with some rice. When I cook flank steak whole, I typically pan fry it to medium rare to avoid drying it out. Here, the thinly sliced beef is cooked through completely, yet remains super tender. The key is the marinade, which includes baking soda as a tenderizer. If you've never tried this technique before, it will amaze you.

This recipe uses mostly pantry staples and easily found ingredients. The noodles can sometimes be hard to find, though. Rice noodles come in many shapes and sizes. I previously used the super-thin kind for minced "pigeon" lettuce cups. Medium-width rice noodles are used for pad thai. The widest rice, called shahe fen (sometimes transliterated ho fun), are essential to this dish. Part of the problem is that this usually doesn't appear on the package and, unless you know the Chinese word (沙河粉), you'll have to eyeball it. Although dark soy sauce is not typically added at the end of stir frying like it is here, it's essential to achieving the signature brown look for the noodles. Classic beef chow fun usually has mung bean sprouts, which are tragically not sold in Vermillion. I included napa and onion instead, which also makes this into more of a complete meal.

San Diego Part 6: Omakase

A little short of a year later, I'm pleased to finally complete the series on our San Diego honeymoon. It's been fun remembering everything we did and all the great food we ate. We packed a lot of activity into our eighth and final full day in San Diego. In the morning, we went parasailing over the Pacific Ocean. Since we went up together, I don't have any photos of us, but I took one of one of the other people in the group. This was a totally new experience for me, and was a lot of fun.

Back on dry land, we took a quick trip over to the "other" USD: the University of San Diego. The main goal was to get some t-shirts to wear around Vermillion, but we also explored a bit. The campus has a nice Spanish colonial revival style to it.

We stopped back at the hotel to eat the buns we picked up the previous day. On the left, a milk tea bun, and on the right, a chocolate chip bun.

We enjoyed them so much we went back to 85C Bakery for more. Pictured are a cheese pastry, dan tat (egg tart), and sausage bun.

For our afternoon activity, we went to Fiesta Island, a public park located between our hotel and Seaworld. There was basically no one there, so it was like we had a private swimming area!

We decided a sushi dinner would be the best way to spend our last evening before heading home. We managed to snag a late reservation at the bar at Sushi Tadokoro. It's an unassuming spot, nestled in a small strip mall just off of Old Town.

We decided to go for omakase style, in which the chef decides what to give you. He occasionally sent out plates to tables, but for the most part was focused on us. We also made a few requests. For items with a special seasoning (Himalayan salt, hot sauce, and so forth), he specified "no soy sauce."

I took photos of almost everything we had, and will show them all with minimal commentary. I don't remember which specific fish most of them were, but you can see all the unique toppings that you wouldn't see in a more run-of-the-mill place.

Upgrade: White Macaroni Hotdish

Hotdish is one of the iconic dishes of the Upper Midwest, particularly associated with Minnesota. Church cookbooks are full of them, and many families have their own house recipes. My family has two, both macaroni-based styles, which we refer to as "red" and "white." This also gives you a convenient wine pairing. The red kind uses tomato soup, and comes from my maternal grandmother. The white kind, which was one of my earliest posts, comes from my paternal grandparents. Although we lost all three of them in the last few years, their legacy lives on through traditions like these. Today, I'm revisiting the white hotdish to how I make it now, a better version than could muster at the tender age of 23. To this day, it is still one of my top comfort foods, and I'll be making it for years to come.

There is a lot of variation in what can go in a hotdish. In Molly on the Range, Molly Yeh gives a four-part breakdown of creamed soup, vegetables, meat, and starch. Yet, with the exception of starch (I think), all of these are negotiable. Her own tater tot hotdish eschews the soup for a homemade mix of milk and stock, while my family's red hotdish uses tomato soup. I've even winged it with just canned tomatoes. My original recipe for this hotdish had no vegetables (just mushrooms), though I now include onions. You could easily replace the meat with more mushrooms to make a vegetarian version. Starches vary greatly, and can include pasta, rice, wild rice, potatoes, or even crushed crackers. The starch component is what holds the dish together and turns a soupy mess into a hotdish. Thinking about this basic formula, shepherd's pie might be the proto-hotdish. The Jewish noodle kugel, Italian lasagna, and Greek pastitsio are certainly cousins, at the very least.

The biggest difference between this version and my original is the scale. This recipe is designed to use a full one-pound box of macaroni, which I wouldn't have done back when I lived alone. With two of us, I like making it bigger so we can have leftovers for a few days of quick lunches. Although I've scaled up the overall size, I've left the amount of meat at one pound of mixed beef and pork, which corrects the overly meaty balance. Adding onions and more mushrooms gives the whole thing a little more variation. For the topping, I use a mixture of grated Swiss and Parmesan and some breadcrumbs for a little crunch. The Swiss is just a basic supermarket block, as the subtlety of gruyère is kind of lost on this dish. That said, I still prefer real Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano for this, which will give you a little nuttiness. Cooking at a high temperature for 45 minutes leads to a soft interior and crisp crust.

Let's talk about the soup. I had actually meant to get this post out several weeks ago, but messed up the recipe by not using enough soup. This hotdish should be creamy and gooey, and the macaroni should be well-coated before baking. I found a giant 26 oz. can, which is about what you need to adequately coat the full pound of pasta here. A regular-sized can then forms the base for the topping, making for a total of 36.5 oz. of soup. I'm not sure the full can was needed at the end, but it doesn't hurt and I wasn't going to save a half can of soup. If you only have three regular cans instead, the total amount will be 31.5 oz. This leaves about a half can for the topping, which should work fine.

Fish Fillets with Corn Sauce (粟米斑塊)

I've been meaning to write this post since I started No Free Lunch. Fish fillets with corn sauce was one of my childhood favorites, which my dad made somewhat frequently. We just called it "corn fish." It was often one of the meals we had when I came home from college. He apparently discovered the dish in his own childhood in a restaurant in Hong Kong, where he shared a plate with my uncle. While it is not an iconic dish in the pantheon of Chinese cuisine, it certainly is to me. I found a few references to the dish, with the most common Chinese name being sumi bankuai, which I think means "corn grouper fillets." This hints at the fish originally used, so I think any firm, white, ocean-going fish would be appropriate. 

Creamed (or cream-style) corn is an interesting ingredient, though not an uncommon one. Despite the name, it does not contain cream, and the creaminess is all from the corn itself. While we Americans love it, corn is not a popular ingredient in Chinese cuisine. I think it's telling that this is a distinctively Hong Kong dish, which has had a long history of western influence. For the fish, you could use any white fish, but I usually use cod. This is probably the most accessible fish of the type we're looking for, and I had some individually packaged frozen fillets. As with most of my Chinese dishes, I used my homemade Chinese shrimp stock. Any kind of chicken or seafood stock would be also be fine here.

The way Dad always made this was a little different from what I did here. The fish were much larger pieces and battered similar to the fish and chips style. I decided to go the more traditionally Chinese route with a simple marinade and corn starch dredging. This is based on what I did for fish slices with tomato sauce, a similar Cantonese fried fish dish from Pei-Mei's Chinese Cook Book. I like the smaller pieces, as its easier to eat with chopsticks, but the battered version is extra crunchy. You won't go wrong either way.

Steamed Pork Cake (蒸肉餅)

This Cantonese steamed pork cake might be the least photogenic food I've ever made. Despite its humble appearance, though, it's packed with flavor and easy to make. As you might have guessed, this is true home style food. I have some vague memories of my grandparents making something similar, but it was so long ago that I'm not quite sure. The basic concept is a giant pork burger that is something of a blank canvas. This recipe mixes in ham, mushrooms, and water chestnuts. The Woks of Life has done versions with preserved vegetables and salted fish. I think Chinese sausage, sauerkraut, or even shrimp would work, too. Being cooked entirely by steaming, there is no browning and this dish relies on its ingredients for flavor. We get some umami bursts from the mushrooms and a little crunch from the water chestnuts.

This recipe is adapted from the Joyce Chen Cook Book, which is a very interesting piece of culinary history. Published in 1962, it predates even Pei-Mei's books. Chen understood very well that American cooks would have difficulty finding certain ingredients, and builds substitutions into the recipes. For example, she doesn't even bother with Shaoxing wine and goes straight to the sherry substitution. If you can get good Shaoxing wine, go with that, but if not, amontillado is my preferred alternative. It's also a bit odd in that everything is measured by volume, even the pork. I've converted some of the measurements to weight where it makes sense to do so. 

The most notable ingredient here is the ham. Chen discusses this issue at length, saying that getting Chinese ham in the United States is nearly impossible. That is as true now as it was in 1962, especially in South Dakota. It might be possible to get good ham in a Chinatown somewhere, but I'm not sure. Chinese hams are dry cured, so some other similarly-produced ham is the best substitute. Chen recommends Smithfield ham, a dry cured ham from Smithfield, Virginia. The most accessible alternative might be prosciutto. I used regular supermarket ham, which didn't really add much to the dish other than some texture. As with many dishes, Chen also uses MSG here, which I didn't have. I compensated by increasing the soy sauce and mushroom a bit. 

Joyce Chen had a huge role in spreading appreciation for Chinese food in the United States. Her influence was especially felt in Boston, where she ran several restaurants and had a short-lived cooking show with WGBH. Her rebranding of potstickers as "Peking ravioli" is particularly funny to me. Her recipe for Peking ravioli is pretty standard and quite similar to mine. However, it seems that Peking ravioli evolved in Boston Chinese restaurants into their own thing. Ariel says the dumplings she grew up eating are not quite what we make at home, but couldn't quite pin down the difference. When she took her first bite of this pork cake, she exclaimed that it tasted just like Peking ravioli. Next time we find ourselves in Boston, I'll be doing some research, by which I mean eating dumplings!

Sweet and Sour Spareribs (糖醋排骨)

Sweet and sour spareribs are the first recipe I've done from the "Eastern China" section of Pei-Mei's first volume. This region includes Shanghai and the surrounding provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Anhui. Although this is the region of China I've personally spent the most time in, I didn't delve into the local specialties as much as I should have. When I started researching this post, I quickly discovered sweet and sour spareribs are a famous Shanghai-style dish. The name tangcu paigu literally translates to "sugar-vinegar spareribs," which definitely describes it well. While the recipe looks simple, the deep frying does turn it into a bit of a process. The end result is everything I want from a sweet and sour dish: crisp, tender meat in sticky but complex sauce. Serve with rice and let the sauce soak right in and don't be afraid to get in there and clean off the bones. 

Back in 2015, I made Pei-Mei's Cantonese-style sweet and sour pork. Despite the similarity in names, the two dishes couldn't be more different. Although both dishes use the double frying technique (also commonly done with french fries to get maximum crispiness), the Cantonese pork is dredged in a corn starch coating, whereas these ribs are not. They get a nice brown crust similar to what you would see on fried Buffalo wings. The sauce made for the ribs is dark brown from the combination of soy sauce and black vinegar. The Cantonese version has a reddish sauce based on ketchup and white rice vinegar. Both are great dishes, but this one really shows sweet and sour dishes go far beyond the box we often put them in. 

The ribs are the central ingredient. I don't often see spare ribs cut across the bone like this, so I always snap them up when I can. We got these at Costco a few months ago and froze them. The sauce has the usual suspects of soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, and black vinegar. Since this was a quick marinade and sauce, I went with all light soy sauce, but putting in a bit of dark in the mix wouldn't be unwelcome. While the end result was excellent, it was a little on the sweeter side of what I look for in a sweet and sour sauce. As such, I've noted in the ingredient list that the amount of vinegar can be increased to taste. My recipe is a rough doubling of the original, with some adjustments made.

I've been reading a lot Pei-Mei recipes recently, and she deep fries a lot of food. As I've mentioned before, I find deep frying a hassle and don't do it often. However, the crispy-fried meat is, to me, a cornerstone of sweet and sour dishes. It's also an interesting novelty to deep fry spare ribs, a cut that's usually braised or smoked in western cuisine. My research also confirmed this is the traditional approach for this dish. You could probably get away with stir frying, baking, or broiling, all at very high heat, but you won't get the same evenly browned, crispy ribs.

Spring Rolls (春捲)

While most of my interpretations of Pei-Mei dishes are quite obscure from an American point of view, spring rolls are one of the most iconic Chinese dishes. In addition to being a classic dim sum item, they are also popular in other parts of Asia, such as Thailand and the Philippines. Fillings vary greatly. Pei-Mei's version has a mix of pork, cabbage, and shrimp which would also be great on chow mein (omit about half the corn starch). The Chinese name chunjuan does translate directly as spring (the season) roll. These spring rolls are tasty and crispy, and a good traditional example of the dish.

Let's dig into some specifics of the recipe. Pei-Mei recommends using "lean pork" and cutting into strings. I honestly misread the recipe and used ground pork, which was perfectly fine. For the vegetables, the recipe just says "cabbage" on the English side. On the Chinese side, baicai can be either what we call napa cabbage or bok choy. Napa is what we had, and I think it's probably the better choice, since its a bit thinner. Like a lot of Pei-Mei's recipes, this one involves soup stock. This is made relatively easily by simmering chicken and/or seafood with a little green onion and ginger. I make mine with shrimp shells I save every time we eat shrimp. Western-style stocks usually involve onion, carrot, and celery and will have a different flavor, but should work in a pinch.

For the skins, we found frozen ones at a Chinese store and defrosted in the refrigerator the day before. Pei-Mei says the recipe makes 20 spring rolls, we only got 14 out of it. I think we could have stretched that to 15, but definitely not 20. Pei-Mei is fairly vague about the rolling procedure, but it read to me as rolling straight-on, whereas most recipes I've seen online roll diagonally (Woks of Life, for example). In retrospect, I would do the diagonal fold next time, as the way we did it, you get twice as much wrapping on the ends as in the middle. They still fried up perfectly fine, though, so it's rather forgiving. Overall, they turned out well, but were a little too salty for my taste. As such, I've marked the added salt in the sauce as optional. 

Farmer's Cheese and Blintzes

Last month, as part of The Great Big Jewish Food Fest, Liz Alpern and Jeffrey Yoskowitz hosted a live session on making various Ashkenazi pantry staples. Alpern and Yoskowitz are the founders of The Gefilteria and authors of The Gefilte Manifesto. Their mission is to keep Ashkenazi food traditions alive for the modern world. Many Ashkenazi food traditions were born out of necessity, lacking resources in the shtetlekh of central Europe. The session included pickles, schmaltz, and farmer's cheese. In the Midwest in the modern day, many of these staples are hard to find in stores, so we've turned to making them ourselves. 

I've been making schmaltz for several years now. Every time we buy skin-on chicken thighs or leg quarters, I trim off excess skin around the edges and save it in the freezer. These can easily be defrosted later for rendering. I had not, however, made farmer's cheese. This was a childhood favorite of Ariel's, and the live session inspired us to try it out. Farmer's cheese is a fresh cheese, similar to Indian paneer, but loose instead of pressed into a block. It turns out to be incredibly easy, with only two ingredients: milk and vinegar, plus some cheesecloth. We also saved the whey and have been using it in bread making. 

We then put the farmer's cheese to use as a filling for blintzes, essentially rolled up crepes. I've had the frozen ones many times (usually Trader Joe's), but there is really no comparison to making them fresh. Blintzes are usually served with sour cream and some kind of fruit. This turned out to be a perfect application for rhubarb sauce. We followed the recipes given in The Gefilte Manifesto for both the cheese and the blintzes. I will show the process, with pictures, but instead of giving the full recipe, I'll just encourage you to buy the book instead. It's great for both Jewish culinary veterans and amateurs like me.

Rhubarb Sauce

Last year, we got a lot of rhubarb from our farm share. Until then, I had never cooked with it. I had, however, enjoyed rhubarb sauce since I was very young. I don't know if it's a particularly Midwestern dish, but my family had it often while Ariel was unfamiliar with it. It's a lovely comfort food that really takes me back. I usually use it as a topping for vanilla ice cream. Rhubarb is a very tart ingredient, which pairs well with the sweetness and creaminess of ice cream. Superficially, rhubarb resembles a reddish celery, but behaves very differently when cooked, disintegrating into strings. 

Rhubarb freezes well. Cut into one-inch chunks before freezing. Frozen rhubarb can go right into this recipe, which is what I did here. I looked at many other recipes in researching mine, and the main variation is how much sugar goes in. This could change depending on personal taste and the intended use for the sauce. I went a little on the sweeter side here. This recipe is a good base, on top of which other flavorings can be added. Some suggestions I have seen include vanilla and citrus zest.

Beijing-Style Smoked Chicken (燻雞)

Pei-Mei's Chinese Cookbook is a source of endless fascination for me. The three-volume set has been my main reference for Chinese food for the last six years. With hundreds of recipes from all over China, the breadth is not lacking. Sometimes, however, the depth does. As I've mentioned before, every recipe is exactly one page long, shown on facing pages in Chinese and English. Inevitably, this means quite a few recipes are pretty low on detail. Sometimes the instructions don't make sense, which is probably a combination of translation and a general vagueness you see in 1960s recipes of all origins. 

Most of the time, Pei-Mei hasn't steered me wrong, although I do often make adjustments to modernize the recipes or make them more accessible. This time, I tackled her Beijing-style smoked chicken. I had not, until attempting this, ever smoked food before, so I didn't really have a baseline for what to expect. Although the final product was pretty good, I floundered around a bit with the instructions as the heat  levels and cooking times Pei-Mei suggests were way off. As such, I'll provide more commentary than usual in the instructions section. I plan to do an update post next time I try the dish.

Despite the confusing instructions and some of my own mistakes, the chicken came out well. It was almost startling how much smoky flavor made its way into the meat, which was also still quite juicy. I served with rice and stir-fried broccoli and garlic.