Sliced pork in Yu-Xiang sauce & Brocoll

04302008186
Originally uploaded by cutejoos

I was quite impressed with myself tonight. Looking at the above photo of our dinner made me realize that I cooked everything from scratch all in an hour, including prep time!! Father-earth was quite happy with our meal as it's been awhile since mother-earth cooked any broccoli (she actually doesn't like it which is why she won't cook it). I followed Master Lu's method of cooking the broccoli which came out to be a vibrant green color after parboiling. I then sauteed the broccoli with some garlic & a little bit of oyster sauce for flavor. The next dish continues my Shanghainese trend for the week, I saw it in one of Mother-earths Pei Mei's cookbooks and it seemed simple enough. Sliced Pork in Yu-Xiang sauce. Yuxiang translates literally as "the flavor of fish. Now why this name was even used is odd since the sauce has no fish nor does it taste like fish. However, the spices and seasonings in yuxiang sauce were apparently used originally to flavor fish dishes, hence the meaning. I had to revise the recipe a little since I wasn't able to find the clouds ear mushroom at the nearby supermart & I thought mother-earth still had some water chestnuts in the fridge but it turns out that she had bamboo shoots. So I decided that I had to make do with what was on hand & ended up using the bamboo shoots which I sliced into thin strips & then parboiled to get rid of the unpleasant smell. The meat was then marinated before it was cooked in the spicy Yu_xiang sauce.

Braised Lion's Head 狮子头 in clay pot

Braised Lion's Head
Originally uploaded by cutejoos

It's been awhile since mother-earth made Braised Lion's Head, a dish that evokes memories of my childhood growing up with my sister on D. T. Street. Having decided that I would make this for our dinner tonight, I went online to see if I could find the origins of this classic family favorite of ours. I was really surprised to find that this was a dish that traced it's roots to Shanghai, I always assumed that with it's popularity, it would be a dish from Fujian province where my grandparents are from. Now I'm really curious as to how my grandmother and the other chinese families here in The Pines got introduced to this dish because I can remember eating this since I was but a wee little sprite which was some 30 odd years ago (scary thought!), a time when the internet was non existent. I have been a fan of cookbook author Eileen Yin Fei Lo for quite sometime now, she does things old school, meaning she still uses mainly traditional chinese ingredients in her cooking & she doesn't do short-cuts, (buddha jumps over the wall soup takes 3 days), you can tell that she "honors" those classic chinese dishes that have been around for generations. Her version of this dish was quite simple enough and I had all the ingredients on-hand which was the key thing. The secret to the success of this dish is that the ground meat has to be marinated first before they are formed into huge baseball sized patties, then pan fried till its gets a nice golden brown crust. I did this first step yesterday and placed the patties in the fridge, then after coming home from work I continued on to the next step which is to place some chinese cabbage in claypot with some stock then put in the patties & let it braise for an hour or so till done.