Homemade Hunan Salted Chilies

Back when Fuchsia Dunlop’s Hunan cookbook, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook came out, I wanted to make a jar of salted chilies as per her directions so that I could use them to get an authentic Hunanese flavor in my recipes. This condiment, which is easily made at home (a good thing, because it isn’t available in […]

Chinese Wheat Noodles 101

Italy and China have been metaphorically duking it out over which country is the birthplace to the ubiquitous noodle.
Archaeologists can confidently say that noodles as a foodstuff originated in China; recently a noodle excavated inside an overturned pot near the Yellow River was carbon-dated to approximately 4,000 years ago.
That is an old noodle, […]

An Introduction To Chinese Noodles

There is nothing more delicious, comforting, appetizing and filling than a bowl of well-prepared noodles, whether one is dining in the East or the West. Noodles are a favorite food among people of all ages, and nearly every culture where grain is consumed has created some sort of noodle to beguile the senses and fill […]

The Intermediate Chinese Pantry

Six months ago, I wrote a post entitled “Staple Ingredients of the Chinese Pantry” where I listed the basic must have goodies for a budding Chinese cook. And the post was a great success, and it helped a lot of folks out and almost immediately, readers were asking for a follow-up on what to buy […]

Morganna’s Simple Vegetable Stir Fry Using Barbara’s Rules of Three

To test my theories on making simple Chinese stir fries, Morganna set out to follow my Rules of Three, and concoct a vegetarian dish to accompany another stir fry I was making that included meat.
Morganna is generally no better at following formulas and recipes than I am, but she stuck to the premise of my […]