China Adoption, Chinese Infant Adoption - Chinese cooking: things I've learned so you won't have to.

07/29/06

Posted by : grant in China Adoption Blog at 08:18 pm , 433 words, 103 views
Categories: Chinese Culture, Irrelevancies

"Brown vinegar" can be substituted with rice vinegar. "Black vinegar," however, pretty much tastes like Worcestershire sauce. (British colonial note: it's pronounced "wooster sauce," you rank savages.) With a faint hint of Coca-Cola syrup.

Thus, nothing like rice vinegar at all.

Rice noodles really do only need to be dunked in boiling water. If you try to boil them like, say, spaghetti, you'll have porridge. If you're used to fettucini like me, forget it -- you'd be better off buying them in some sort of notional powdered form.

That lovely cast iron pan -- the one that's been seasoned for generations, so that every bit of corn bread, shrimp creole, sauteed asparagus, fried catfish or pecan pancake that so much as touches it turns out delectable -- yeah, the dirty black one that lives on the back burner of your stove top because you use it so often? It's no substitute for a wok. I've been trying for years now. I don't even think they should call whatever a wok does "frying" -- too deceptively similar-sounding.

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Sometimes recipes call for fresh ginger. If you try to keep fresh ginger around, half the time (if you're lucky) it'll dry into a gnarly rock, and the other half it'll just turn green and putrescent. If, on the other hand, you slice it into long, skinny pieces and stick it in a jar of dry sherry in your refrigerator door, you're set for months. After a while, the liquid's good for seasoning stir-fries, too.

The ramen noodles that come in the styrofoam bowls in the Asian grocery are really nothing like the ramen noodles you choked down in college. They're much better. I promise. And kids love them. (Except maybe the super-spicy ones.) You already knew that, though, didn't you.

If you hate tofu, soak it in soy & vinegar and fry the [expletive deleted] out of it. You can fry anything and it becomes magically transformed. Heck, my father's people do it with Mars bars and sheep stomachs. Both of which, I have it on good authority, turn out delectable. I'll let you guess which one I've got first-hand experience with. But yeah, deep-fried tofu. Is good.

If you want to make any vegetable taste like it came from a Chinese restaurant, you'll probably have to cook it twice. Or cook it halfway in two different ways. Boil it, then fry it. Or poach it, then roast it. Whatever.

I'm not so sure about this one, actually, but it sure seems to be the way things work.