Life is slowly returning to normal. With the Olympics in town, I couldn't not be surrounded by sports fever. I attended 11 events in total, mostly through friends of friends with last minute tickets. Conversations around me all centered around tickets: who has them, who's willing to sell them, and why the heck they're all "sold out" but the venues are still half empty. The past two weeks have been fun, but also exhausting...too many early morning events, crowds galore, hour-long waits for security check, bad stadium food, and late night carousing (the last, though, was no fault of the Games themselves.) 

I'm continuing with the healthy recipes to combat the massive amounts of fried food I have been eating. Last week I posted Sichuan-Style Snow Peas, a light stir-fry. Today's tomato egg drop soup is even healthier if you consider the lack of cooking oil. It's also incredibly simple, which no special technique other than the swirling in of the egg whites to create the egg strands. Just pour slowly and stir at the same time.

Related recipe:
Seaweed Egg Drop Soup

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Tomato Egg Drop Soup

Serves 4

I'm sure most Westerners who have ever dined with a group of Chinese are familiar with the the following scenario. After a ___-course lavish banquet, you look forward to something nice and sweet to cap off a great experience. Your Chinese hosts inform you that you'll love the dessert; all Westerners love dessert. This one is a Chinese specialty. Anticipation mounts. Then the long-awaited dessert arrives...in the form of red bean soup. You take one sip, utter an "Mmm!" with all the false bravado you can muster, and wonder if anyone will notice you "watering" that plant close by.

Yes, it is well known that most Chinese desserts are merely tolerated by Westerners. While I personally don't mind red bean soup or other sweet dessert soups every once in a while, other people, like a certain significant other of mine, have developed an intense fear of them. It's understandable. While in the West we crave and lust after rich chocolates, cakes, and pies, the Chinese palate can tolerate only moderately sweet things. Thus, Chinese desserts never seem sweet enough, but anyone living or traveling extensively in China can't help but encounter them again and again. 

Not long ago I picked up an outdated Chinese cooking magazine from the bargain bin of a magazine stand. I was enamored of the existentialist thought-provoking photos inside, such as this gem:

I have to admit that I have a strong bias towards jiaozi (饺子). Besides Shanghainese soup dumplings (xiaolongbao), my favorite Chinese 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.)

Two years ago, on Jacob's first trip to Hong Kong, we stayed with my great aunt in North Point. On the first morning my aunt dashed downstairs to her favorite congee stand, and came back with a big take-out tub of plain congee and you jia gui, or Cantonese fried dough. We instructed Jacob to dunk a piece of fried dough, and sprinkle some white pepper on the congee before eating. One mouthful later, he was hooked and couldn't stop talking about congee for the rest of the trip.

This simple rice porridge is a staple at the Cantonese breakfast table. It's cheap, filling, and available wherever you go in Cantonese-speaking areas. (Dim sum is more of a weekend and special occasion treat.) And as many expats and visitors to Hong Kong and Guangzhou have discovered, congee is also a great hangover cure on Sunday mornings. I can't think of any other breakfast that is both as light and as filling.

Of course, sometimes the best congee (or jook, as it is called in Cantonese) is homemade. It's easy to whip up and endlessly adaptable. Chicken congee, pork congee, seafood congee, you name it. Most Cantonese home cooks use chicken stock as a base, but you can just as easily make a vegetarian version with good vegetable stock. Add carrots, broccoli, and some shiitake mushrooms for that nice umami flavor, and you're good to go.

Along with lucky red envelopes, I received a gift for Lunar New Year that I could use immediately in the kitchen: a package of water chestnut flour.

Water chestnut cake (ma tei gow in Cantonese) is another snack, along with turnip cake, that is eaten all year round but especially during Chinese New Year. It's also much easier to make. While the main ingredient, water chestnut flour, may not be a staple on Western grocery store shelves, it is readily available in large Chinatown markets. When I lived in Boston we had a few varieties to choose from. The best kind has a coarse pebbly texture, as opposed to finer dust.

I love how the translucency makes the cake look like marble. I also love tasting the crunchy chestnuts with the jelly texture of the steamed cake.

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.

Hong Kong may not be under snow and ice like Hunan province, but it has its fair share of winter weather. After seeing some wild monkeys at the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery, we trekked back to North Point to meet up with my relatives for dinner. Even incessant rain couldn't dampen my spirits, because I knew my relatives always pick out the best places for Cantonese specialties.

Fung Shing Restaurant at the South China Hotel is one of those clean, brightly lit banquet halls where Hong Kongers go for both special occasions and no-special-occasions. And of course, we ordered a bunch of dishes to serve family-style.

I've had Cantonese roast chicken more times than I can count, and tonight's was one of the best I've ever tasted. The skin was amazingly crisp, the meat amazingly juicy. Usually you get skin and meat of this caliber only on a duck, but this chicken was prepare almost the same way. By repeatedly spooning the sugary sauce over chicken as it roasts, you can get a glistening, perfectly crisp skin.

Sī guā is a common vegetable used in Chinese cooking, but comes with a rather sinister English name: snake gourd, for the long, spindly shape. Despite the exotic name, I've seen it in both New York and Boston Chinatowns. (Sī guā is the long skinny gourd with bumpy ridges running the length of the outside.) The flesh is about as soft as a winter melon's, which means that any cooking method longer than a quick stir-fry will render it very soft.

Snake gourd goes well with a red meat that also cooks quickly, like lean pork. I add some green peppers, onions, and scallions, but keep the companion veggies to a minimum so the sī guā and pork stand out.

Even with a rough exterior, sī guā peels easily. So no need to exert more force than peeling, say, a carrot. My mother likes to cook sī guā with a concentrated abalone extract, which has the smell and texture of oyster sauce. Of course, good 'ol oyster sauce always works too and is much easier to find. Just don't cook melons or gourds with soy sauce or else your finished product will have a sour flavor.

Pork and Sī Guā Stir-fry

Serves 4 to 6, as part of a communal meal

The Cantonese often go ga-ga over Hainanese chicken, a dish prepared by boiling a whole chicken in pork and chicken stock. It originated on the island of Hainan, became a national dish of Singapore, and is enjoyed anywhere on the globe where the Cantonese dine.

Chicken without sauce allows you to taste the freshness of the skin and meat, much like eating shimp with nothing but a spritz of lemon. But no offense to Hainanese chicken - sometimes your tastebuds just cry out for something savory that just melts off the bone.

Soy-braised chicken is a simple casserole dish can be whipped up within 30 or 40 minutes. An earthenware casserole dish is ideal, but a medium sized pot also works. (My mother once said that moist-cooking methods with a lot of soy sauce is bad for metals...maybe any food scientists would like to explain why?)

Soy-Braised Chicken

Serves 4

500 mL (2 cups) soy sauce*
750 mL (3 cups) water*
1 piece ginger, peeled and sliced
45 mL (3 tablespoons) sugar
10 mL (2 teaspoons) cinnamon
5 mL (1 teaspoon) star anise
4 pieces chicken, thighs or wings or combo
1 scallion, roughly chopped

*More if needed to cover chicken at least 3/4 of the way, but maintain the 2 parts soy sauce to 3 parts water ratio.

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.