I meant for this to be my dinner appetizer, but I spooned so much into my bowl that it became a meal.

Hot and sour soup didn't appear in my childhood of Cantonese home dinners. It did, however, appear in my Chinese-American childhood, as a Sichuan/Northern Chinese dish that became bastardized for the greasy take-out joints of suburban America. I have had one too many versions that were so thick and rubbery I could stretch them with my hands like Silly Putty. Here is some advice to the aforementioned Chinese restaurants in the US: Cornstarch is never a main ingredient; just use sparingly.    

(From upper left: Wood ear, lily buds, fresh bamboo, shiitake mushrooms. Bowl: fresh firm tofu.)

In the US, hot and sour soup also tends to lack the lily buds, shiitake mushrooms, and bamboo shoots that make it a nutrient-rich, even somewhat refined, dish. (This is the Chinese version, not to be confused with Vietnamese, Filipino, or Thai hot and sour soups.) I also like to add wood ear and tofu for texture variation. Today I also used fresh instead of canned bamboo shoots, which I couldn't find when I went food shopping this morning. 

It's the mid-June, meaning asparagus season is coming to a close. I have been seeing less and less of my favorite stalky vegetable at the markets, and what's left tends to be expensive. So I thought I would celebrate the end of the season with a recipe for Shandong-style asparagus. Make this while you still can!

It's true that asparagus isn't used much in Chinese food. I don't recall ever having it at the dinner table growing up, nor at restaurants in Boston's Chinatown. Here in Beijing, whenever asparagus appears on menus it is qingchao-ed (请炒-ed), or lightly stir-fried, with other vegetables.

Shandong province is China's center for asparagus production, so it's no surprise Shandongers showcase the asparagus practically au naturel. And since the dish eaten at room temperature, it makes a perfect appetizer for picnics, grilling dinners, or any other situation when you're wiping the sweat from your brows and spritzing water on your face every 2 minutes to keep cool.

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Shandong-Style Asparagus
Adapted from Saveur

Serves 2 to 4 as an appetizer

1 pound asparagus, trimmed and sliced diagonally into 1 1/2 inch pieces
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
A few drops chilli oil
1 teaspoon toasted white sesame seeds

I have to admit that I have a strong bias towards jiaozi (饺子). Besides Shanghainese soup dumplings (xiaolongbao), my favorite dumplings are thin-skinned and pan-fried, the kind found mainly in Southern China or New York's $1-for-5 fried dumpling joints. Northern Chinese-style dumplings, which offer more thick doughy skin than filling, just can't compare.

What's better than anything a restaurant or dumpling stall can offer are homemade jiaozi, hot off the skillet. On my last day in Zhongshan my mother and I bought dumpling skins from a lady specializing in doughy things like wrappers and noodles, and spent an hour or two wrapping dumplings for dinner.

Since I have so many photos from that afternoon, I thought I would do a pictoral guide on jiaozi-making. (Often dumpling recipes fail to show the step-by-step process in folding.) Also included is my mother's fool-proof method for getting perfectly crisp pan-fried dumplings without burning them.

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Pan-fried Pork and Cabbage Jiaozi, a Recipe in Pictures
猪肉白菜饺子

Makes 50 to 60

Lightly dust your work surface with flour and keep some extra flour within hand's reach.

Dumpling wrappers: When I lived in the US, I always got my wrappers from Chinatown markets (the round kind, labeled for jiaozi（饺子) instead of for wontons (馄饨).). They are a hassle to make at home, but if you really want to give it a try, check out this post from Noodles and Rice.

For the filling, mix together: 1 lb ground pork, 1 cup shredded Napa cabbage, 2 tablespoons minced shallots, 1 tablespoon cornstarch, 2 teaspoons salt or 1 tablespoon soy sauce, a pinch of ground pepper.

Egg wash: Gently beat 1 or 2 eggs.

(The hands shown are Mom's. They are beautifully rough from decades of lovingly cooked meals.)

I'm interrupting my Shanghai posts to bring you this seaweed egg drop soup. This is one of those dishes I rarely ate at home growing up (for some reason my mother never made it) but would slurp with delight at restaurants. The simple combination of seaweed shreds and egg makes for great, light comfort food. And it's an easy way to load up on iron.

After a long absence (several months or years, I don't recall), seaweed and egg drop soup has made a sudden comeback in my life. It all started at Jia Jia Tang Bao, where I ordered it to go with soup dumplings because the only other soup choice was chicken and duck blood soup. Then I started seeing it, and having it, at various cafés in Beijing. Then I thought, why not make it at home?*

I like mine with a lot of seaweed, more than most restaurants normally use. A little extra iron, vitamin C, magnesium, and other vitamins can't hurt. (But you can always use less seaweed, like 1 ounce instead of 2 for every 3 cups of liquid.) Good homemade stock is also critical, since the resulting broth has very few other flavorings. To make this soup meatier and more substantial, you can also add minced pork or sliced shiitakes. But the basic version is one of the simplest Chinese soups you can make, and with very few ingredients.

From a Chinese-American kid's perspective, Chinese New Year is a holiday as cool as, or even better than, Christmas. You get lots of red envelopes full of money, big boxes and tins of candy, and big meals for at least 3 to 5 days straight. You don't have to pretend to like any of the re-gifts or fruitcake you receive. And if your mother has free time, which she somehow always finds during the New Year, she'll whip up batches of snacks for you to eat and to give to relatives.

One of these snacks, eaten all year round but especially during the New Year, is turnip cake. It symbolizes prosperity and growing fortunes, but a kid's main concern is how good something tastes. (Even many years later, turnip cake is one of the first foods I associate with Chinese New Year.) Although this is a staple on dim sum menus, no restaurant turnip cake compares to the homemade version, which bares the aroma of just-cooked mushrooms and pork even days after it's made.

Fans of Sichuan cuisine know that even spice fiends need something to ward off all the heat in your mouth between bites. Cucumber salads are served at almost every Sichuan restaurant I've been too, and are good appetizers as well as good palate cleansers.

It's also easy make at home. However, one of the main ingredients is Sichuan peppercorn, which can still be rather hard to find outside China. For years the US had a ban on Sichuan peppercorn imports, which they recently lifted. But the last I heard the spice is still not widely available. (What is the situation like in other countries?)

In any case, if you aren't able to get your hands on any, you can always substitute with a dash of red pepper flakes or 5 g (1 tablespoon) hot chili paste. If you have Sichuan peppercorns and you're brave enough, leave them whole instead of grinding them up. ;-)

Also, although restaurants here like to serve the cucumbers in longer strips, I personally like them cubed. More surface area = more flavor absorbed.

A less spicy version of the salad can make a good appetizer for Western meals too.

Sichuan Cucumber Salad

Serves 6 to 8 as an appetizer

Wontons, if made well, live up to their Cantonese name, which means "swallowing clouds." Whenever I have wonton soup, it's an exercise in self-control to not eat all the wontons first. These little parcels of pork in wrapper steal the show, even if vegetables and noodles are present.

Wonton soup is available at just about any homestyle Cantonese restaurant, both in China and abroad. Making them at home is another story. Home cooks who didn't grow up making wontons find the folding intimidating (but this is true with all sorts of dumplings.) Many also think making wontons at home is a hassle, especially when going down to the local noodle shop is such a breeze.

I've found that by making big batches of wontons, I can freeze them and take them out for a rainy day. The Cantonese mainly put wontons in soup, and that's the context in which I knew them for most of my growing-up years in China. Then after moving to the US, I discovered the greasy guilty pleasure of American Chinese food, and subsequently the deep-fried wonton. Wonton soup may be awkward to eat if you're out with friends, or throwing a party, but munching on a big basket of fried wontons is as much fun as sharing popcorn shrimp or french fries.