friederike's Reviews
9 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 9Sort by: Title 
| Date | Rating
Chinese Cuisine: Szechwan Style
By Lee Hwa Lin
Wei-Chuan Publishing Co Ltd ,U.S. - 1993
I really enjoyed this dish, while DB thought it lacked flavour - probably only in comparison to other Chinese dishes. To be true, you wouldn't expect it to contain 2 red chilli peppers, though that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Served two with a bowl of rice each.
useful (1)
Really, really delicious. The two red peppers were somewhat hotter than I expected; next time I would probably use 1 or 1 1/2. The dish was relatively simple, with slightly less cutting work to do and fewer steps. We stir-fried the meat instead of deep-frying it, which worked perfectly well. The meat was especially delicious, very tender, though I couldn't figure out whether that was due to the marinade or the quality of the meat or anything else.
useful (2)
Slightly boring. I didn't taste any chicken at all. We only had half the bok choi needed, which isn't a problem as we we're planning to have the other half tomorrow anyway. Actually, this turned out to be in our favour, as I didn't see how I should have been able to boil the bok choi in just 3 cups of liquid. I skipped parboiling them and just boiled them in chicken broth for 3 minutes - DH thought this could even be a little shorter, while I thought I'd rather cook them a minute or so longer. We used goose fat instead of chicken fat, though I wouldn't expect this to be an issue.
We served this with Stir-fried Fillet of Beef with Mango , which was equally unimpressing.
Fun fact: I think this should have properly been translated as Chicken-flavoured Choy Sum instead of Bok Choi. I was surprised that none of the characters matched those of bok choi except for one: 菜, cài, meaning vegetables, dish, order, food. The first two were easy to find - 雞, jī, meaning chicken, and 油, yóu, meaning fat. The last character, 心, xīn, was easy because it's well known - it's the character for heart. It was only when I searched for the combination of cài and xīn that I found out that together, they mean choy sum.
As you may have noticed, the Chinese pronounciation of bok choi (白菜, báicài) and choy sum is fairly removed from what we call it in English. That is because the pronounciation I give here is Mandarin, while the names we know derives from the Cantonese pronounciation, baak coi and coi sam respectively.
useful (0)
This recipe is very similar to Dry-fried Four Seasonal Beans in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cook Book, and there's little wonder why - it's the same dish! I only realised this though when I tried to translate/find the transcription for the Chinese title, literally it says Dry Flat Four Seasonal Beans.
There are small differences though; Yan-Kit's version definitely involves more ingredients and more steps, and yet I had the idea that this version was more aromatic. This version does contain minced pork, but I didn't have the idea that added a lot. Be careful not to deep-fry the beans for too long, they get soft very quickly!
Both recipes require a kind of pickled vegetable. Yan-Kit describes it as 'Szechwan preserved vegetable', this book describes it as 'pickled heading mustard'. What ...? Again, I looked at the chinese characters and found out they probably meant hot pickled mustard tuber (or 榨菜 zhàcài, if you wish; image-google the English name to get pics of the packaging, and the Chinese characters to get images of how a mustard tuber apparently looks). In the end I just bought a random can of Chinese pickles. I look out for this next time I'm in Chinatown!
We served this dish together with Black Pepper Beef, a good match.
useful (1)
Quite nice, but not as exciting as the recipes we're used to. We made some changes, such as substituting sha cha sauce for hot bean paste, and omitting the minced pork, which might have influenced the taste in a negative way. Culpa nostra. We also decided midway not to deep-fry the aubergines but to fry the next batch in just a little oil - it was a vast difference in how much oil they took, but in the end, you didn't taste it at all.
Fun fact: The literal translation of this dish is 'fish-flavoured eggplant'. I can assure you that no fish has been used in this dish.
We served this with Braised Spare Ribs with Black Beans .
Edited the next day to add:
We prepared this dish again, and this time we used hot bean paste (sold by Lee Kum Kee as 'Chilli Bean Sauce') and minced pork, and it was such a difference! Much better! Upgraded to 4 stars as a result.
Edited 2 November 2013:
Server with Stir-Fried Squid with Garlic and Chilli, a very good combination!
useful (1)
Absolutely excellent, hot and salty and then that beautiful looking squid - really good! Remember that Chinese dishes are always supposed to be served as one of many, it's not really a serving for four on its own.
Regarding the Chinese characters: Sha Cha translates as Satay Sauce, though it's not what you would find as Satay Sauce (which would most probably be Indonesian or Malay); instead, it's most commonly sold as (Chinese) Barbecue Sauce. Hua Zhi means flowering branch, hua meaning flowers, blossom, zhi meaning branch, limb, to branch off. In combination, they can also mean both beautiful woman and octopus. I can get both associations, though on my own I would never have found that connection between beautiful woman and octopus.
useful (2)
We made this dish last week, and to my surprise it was the first dish from this series of books that really was a disappointment.
The rice cakes were difficult to make. They didn't actually puff until the oil was quite hot, which I assume was at a higher temperature than 160°C. Once they did puff, it didn't take long until they were burnt. Those that turned out well were delicious, as long as you only ate a few, and tasted a little like popcorn.
The sauce was a disaster, just a tasteless mass thickened with lots of cornstarch. We didn't like it at all.
Also published in Rice: Traditional Chinese Cooking. There is a very similar dish in Rice: Chinese Home Cooking, with less cornstarch, no ketchup, but more ingredients overall, amongst which sea cucumber (hehe...). I'm not sure yet if we'll give it a try.
useful (1)
Spicy Shrimp (干燒蝦仁, gān shāo xiārén) : page 26
Not so good. They were very salty, although that appears to be due to the hot bean paste, nothing we can influence - we didn't add any salt, at least. And the flavours in general are too strong, the coating too thick. I guess it would improve if you used less sauce in general, and especially less hot bean paste and ketchup.
useful (0)
Sweet and Sour Fish (糖醋鱼, tángcùyú) : page 21
The deep-fried fish was absolutely brilliant! I also liked the sauce; DH just isn't that much of a fan of sweet and sour and liked it somewhat less - but that's probably unrelated to this specific recipe.
I followed the recipe fairly precisely, with only two exceptions - I used only four instead of five tablespoons of ketchup, and I'm 100% sure that '1/2 C shredded ginger' must be a typo - that would be way too much! I assumed they meant '1/2 T shredded ginger', as in half a tablespoon, and that's what I used.
Also, though the fishmonger recommended one dorade per person, we decided that one would be enough for the two of us, and so it was. We deep-fried the other dorade the next day and had it with oven-baked fries, a fresh herb mayonnaise and oregano-baked courgette, but for some reason that wasn't nearly as nice as the sweet and sour fish (even DH ceded that).
Note that the Chinese name for Sweet and Sour Fish is actually completely different from the name for Sweet and Sour Pork (i.e. one is 咕咾蜜肉, gūlǎomìròu). Sweet and Sour Fish translates into the characters for sugar, vinegar, and fish, which seems logical enough; the one for pork I just mentioned translates into the characters for to mutter, a sound, and meat.
useful (0)