Easy Roasted Chicken with Chinese 5 Spice Powder

Chicken is probably the easiest meat in the world to make. Put some spices on it and bake.

Ingredients

• 2 chicken thighs, separated
• 1 tbsp Chinese 5 Spice Powder
• 3 tbsp light soy sauce

Let's do it!

1. Put everything into a big bowl and coat the chicken well. Let marinate for as long as you can. Me, I marinated for about 20 minutes.
2. Set the toaster oven for 350ºF. Put the chicken in a toaster oven-safe container (careful, some things are only good for the oven, but not the toaster oven) and put in the oven.
3. Set for 20 minutes.
4. After 20 minutes, turn it over, check to see if it's done (probably not). Ovens vary. Maybe cook it for another 10, or another 20 minutes. Pierce it with a knife and if the juices run clear, it's ready.

Lunch it up!

This is great with any starch and loads of veggies, like brussel sprouts cooked with bacon!

Bitter Melon and Beef

I had quite a weekend a while back and my friend, Steph, the earth-to-plate food master, suggested a concoction of bitter melon, cucumber, green apple and some other stuff in order to detoxify myself. Raw bitter melon. For some reason, Asian grocery stores no longer sell bitter melon one by one, instead they sell them packaged in threes or fours. Annoying. I love bitter melon (cooked) so I decided to make a favourite of mine for lunch. Oh, I haven't tried the concoction yet.

Ingredients
1 piece of beef, a bit bigger than my hand, I buy the cheapest steak I can find, usually. If you like more meat, go for it. If you like less, you can do that, too.
2 medium bitter melons

2 tbsp oyster sauce
2 tsp light soy sauce
1/2 tsp salt
1.5 tsp honey
1 tbsp Shao-Hsing wine, a cooking wine that you can get in the Asian grocery store. It has a red label.
1.5 tsp sesame oil
1.5 tbsp cornstarch
1/4 cup water

1 tbsp fermented black beans, rinsed and drained
3 cloves garlic, chopped

Let's do it!
Bitter Melon:
Chop off the sharp ends and slice in half lengthwise. Using a spoon, scoop out all the seeds and pith. Slice diagonally into thin slices. Sprinkle with salt liberally and put in a strainer for 30 minutes while you prepare the other stuff.

After the 30 minutes, rinse off the salt and squeeze the excess liquid out. Boil some water and blanch the melon for a couple of minutes to get even more of the bitterness out. Strain and rinse with cold water. Now it's ready to go.

Beef:
Mix together all the stuff in the middle group of ingredients except for the cornstarch and water. Take the beef and tenderize with a meat hammer (which I didn't do, but wish I did). Slice thinly and mix into the marinade and stick in the fridge until you're all done with the winter melon prep.

Putting it all together:
Heat some oil in a wok. When it swirls around the wok quickly, add the black beans and garlic. It WILL splatter, so make sure you're wearing pants or at least an apron. Trust me on this one. Add the beef without the marinade and mix well. After a couple of minutes, add the bitter melon and mix well. Mix up the cornstarch, water and marinade until the cornstarch is all dissolved. Add this to the mix and stir fry until the mixture thickens. Taste and adjust for saltiness/sweetness.

Serve over rice and enjoy the detoxifying effects of the bitter melon.

Elaine's Mom-style Chinese Chicken Curry

I love my mom's curry. It is amazing. But since I am not my mom, I can only make half-amazing curry, despite following her every direction as she hovers over me in the kitchen. Someday she will bequeath whatever secret she has to amazing curry (it better not be love) and I will be able to do it. But until then, here's how I make mine.

Ingredients
1/2 onion, quartered
3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
1 inch piece of ginger, peeled. Sliced, if you don't mind finding all sorts of ginger in your food
2 small potatoes, peeled and cut into roughly 1" cubes
8 chicken wings including tips, separated into the three chicken wing pieces
1 can coconut milk
1-2 tbsp yellow curry powder. Like soy sauce, I have 4 kinds of curry in my house. I use Jamaican yellow curry for this recipe
Roughly 1-2 tsp fish sauce or soy sauce to taste
salt

Let's do it!
Stir fry the onion, ginger and garlic in some oil in a pot with a lid. Stir fry until the onion is soft.

Add potatoes and fry for a little while longer.

Add curry paste and stir around for a couple of minutes. Everything is going to start to stick to the bottom of the pot. Add coconut milk, stir, scraping the bottom of the pot (with a wooden spoon, obviously) and cover. Simmer on low until the potatoes are half done.

Add chicken wings, add a pinch of salt and cover and simmer until the chicken is done. Add soy sauce/fish sauce to taste.

Serve over rice.

This recipe is pretty easy, and not very spicy (unless you get spicy curry). It's one of my comfort foods. I particularly enjoy mashing the potatoes into the rice.

Unfortunately, my husband is not into curry, so UNFORTUNATELY I have to eat it all by myself. Right now I have some in the freezer. I'll let you know if it freezes well.

Basic fried rice

Fried rice is another one of those recipes that use up all the leftovers in the fridge. All you really need is rice, soy sauce, veggies, protein and oil. You can have an endless amount of combinations. I have yet to make a combination that tastes bad, but that doesn't mean this recipe is infallible. Think before you mix. If I'm using leftover meat, I won't use any meat that's got a sauce on it. In terms of veggies, I had a cucumber in the fridge, but thought it might not mix well with the other flavours. Plus, cooked cucumber? Gross.

Ingredients
3 servings of cooked rice, cooled (preferably overnight)
1/2 onion, diced
1/2" slice of ginger, peeled and left intact (Unless you like eating ginger)
2 dried Chinese mushrooms, soaked in water, stems removed and diced. Water reserved
1/4 tsp shrimp paste
1 egg, beaten
1 serving meat (I used frozen smoked sausage), diced
1 tsp light soy sauce (or more, to taste)
Optional: any other kind of veggies or meat you have diced. I tossed in some chives from the garden, though green onion would make more sense.

I'm sure there's some kind of science around why you want the rice to be old and cold. I don't know it, but it's a tip I got from my brother and it seems to get good (i.e. not mushy) results. If you're not using brown rice (and why not?), you can rinse it after it's cooled, to rinse out any residual starches.

In terms of the dried mushrooms and shrimp paste, they're not completely necessary, but I find that they really elevate the dish from rice that's fried to FRIED RICE. Both can be found in an Asian grocery store (but not the Asian area of any grocery store that I've been to) or on the internet. Shrimp paste smells like rotten shrimp, but is a fantastic addition to a lot of Asian dishes.

Let's do it!
Heat 1 tbsp of oil in a wok on medium heat. Pour in the scrambled egg and let sit until it's mostly cooked. Turn it over to cook on the other side. Slide out of the pan and chop it up into 1" x 1/2" slices, or diced, or whatever you want. Put aside.

Throw the onion and ginger in the pan. Saute for about 4 minutes, until the onions start to soften. Throw in the other veggies (mushrooms, and whatever else you have). Cook for another 3 minutes to meld the flavours. Add the meat and cook for another 3 minutes.

Turn the heat up to medium high and throw in the rice. Stir fry it. Mix 1 tbsp of mushroom water, the shrimp paste and soy sauce in a bowl until it's blended well. Add it to the wok and mix everything well. Add the egg. Taste the rice. Is it salty enough? If so, you're done. If not, add a bit more soy sauce.

That's it!

Chinese-style pork, broccoli and brown rice with pickled cucumbers

I’ve sort of been craving Cantonese pork ribs lately, but really didn’t want to mess with the bones at work, so I went with pork chops. Sorry about the grossness of the picture. It’s biking season and everything sort of got bashed around.

Chinese-style pork
Ingredients:
2 pork chops, sliced into strips
1 tbsp dark soy sauce
1 tbsp light soy sauce
1 tsp sugar
½ tbsp cooking sherry/rice wine (you can find this in Asian grocery stores)
a small splash of sesame oil
1 tsp hoisin sauce
1 tbsp cornstarch mixed in water for later

Let’s do it!
Mix all the sauces and sugar together and taste. Adjust for sweetness/saltiness. It’s okay if it’s pretty salty, it will be mixing in with pork, and later rice.

Marinate the pork while you’re making the broccoli.

Heat a pan/wok, pour in some oil and fry the pork and marinade until cooked. Add in the cornstarch and water at the end. Stir until thick. That’s it.

Stir-fried broccoli with garlic and ginger
Ingredients:
1 head broccoli, rinsed
3 cloves garlic, sliced thinly
½ inch piece of ginger, peeled and sliced into matchsticks
salt

Let’s do it!
Chop up the broccoli: peel the thick skin off the stalk, and cut the bottom of the stalk off. Slice the stalk into thin rounds until you get to the florets. Take the florets apart with your hands (you will lose less of them this way) for any florets with thick stalks, slice only the stalk, then pull it apart with your hands.

Heat up a wok with some oil. When the oil is shimmery, add the garlic and ginger. Fry until golden. Move it around a lot, or it will burn. Add the broccoli and stir around, flipping them. Add ¼ cup of water and cover, letting it steam for maybe 10 minutes until dark. That’s it.

Pickled cucumber
Ingredients:
1 cucumber, seeded and sliced thinly
2 tbsp vinegar
1 tbsp water
1 tsp sugar
dash of salt

Let’s do it!
Mix all this stuff together and let marinate for at least an hour.

Lunch it up!
Put the pork and broccoli on a bed of brown rice in a microwavable container. If you like to keep things separate, then do so, but I would warn against heating stuff up in plastic containers. If you're a guy, you'll get boobs. If you're a girl, you'll get an extra uterus.

Keep the pickles separate, obviously. For some spiciness, I added some sriracha to the pork and broccoli at the last minute.