I am glad you loved the recipe so much–it really is a tasty dish and is quite filling and satisfying for vegans and non vegans alike.

As for the oil–to be honest, if you go easy on oil and then cook ground up mushrooms, your wok will likely be too dry.

Mushrooms soak up a lot of oil, and ones that have been ground up are even worse–they are amazingly able to soak up oil as they release their water.

So, you can start out with a smaller amount of oil than I suggest, and then after you add the mushrooms, understand you will need to add more–because other wise your wok will be dry.

I’m trying to be calorie conscious somewhat and perhaps took it easy on the oil. Can you elaborate a bit more on how much/when to add oil in the different stages of cooking? Or is there a rule of thumb. OR perhaps you went over this in your cooking technique threads. I’ll take a look. I’d like some pointers on how much oil to use, much the same way Harold McGee recently had an article just on heat. It was rather fascinating.

Pat

The mushroom buns–I have made them several times myself. I use the recipe for the char siu bao dough, and then the filling is made the same way as the filling for the pork, except, instead of pork, I use rehydrated dried shiitake mushrooms, with some of the rehydrating liquid added to the filling, and some portabello mushrooms. I cut both of them up into a large dice and stir fry them as I would the pork.

My char siu bao recipe is here:

http://www.tigersandstrawberries.com/2006/02/01/dim-sum-delight-char-sui-bai/