Chinese Food Again

Posted on 2008/08/09 10:31:42 (August 2008).

[Monday 4th August]
We'd bought rather a lot of Chinese ingredients on Saturday, and so today I felt compelled to cook something Chinese with the goal of using all the perishable things up.

It ended up a relatively simple meal, compared to Saturday's multi course feast. One thing I was keen to do was having a go at making hot and sour soup - it's a favourite of mine at Chinese restaurants and takeaways. However, I'd never actually seen a recipe for it, and could only guess it what the ingredients were. Obviously there are at least a couple of clues in the name. So, I started with a base of seaweed stock, then added ponzu (a Japanese citrus sauce), some rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, and some Korean chilli powder. For the actual ingredients I put in some straw mushrooms, some deep fried tofu, and a few peas. The end result was extremely pleasing - whilst it wasn't quite like the flavour of "real" hot and sour soup it was a pretty good approximation.

For the main course I decided to try and re-attempt a black bean sauce dish, still feeling some embarrassment for Saturday's failure in this department. So I did tofu and chinese leaf, again with a few straw mushrooms (I think), and used only a very small amount of the black bean sauce this time, plus some mirin and a bit of stock to water it down. This too came out rather well. I served this with steam vegetarian cheung fun (a type of noodle I suppose - but the real version is made from intestines!). All rather good.

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