chili oil Tag

In All recipes, Meat, Noodle/Pasta/Rice

Sichuan/Chongqing Little Slurp w meat sauce and chickpeas

COULD THIS WORK?

THAT WOULD BE YOUR LAST THOUGHT, BEFORE THIS BOWL OF MAGIC POTION SUCKS YOU INTO AN UNSTOPPABLE WHIRLPOOL OF HAPPINESS.

Sorry I have been absent.

Boy, do I have a good reason.

Recently, I believe, we’ve all been experiencing a kind of peculiar surrealism in life. I don’t know about you, but for multiples times during the span of my day, I found myself staring at the mundane occurrences of my perceived reality – the sound of cars brushing through the street… radios in the background… my farts – like Neo, wondering if this was all just an elaborate Matrix. Am I going to be unplugged and wake up? Or am I trapped here forever? For one, Donald Trump is going to be the president of the United States. And for two, which is completely unrelated and sinks even deeper on a much more personal level, my body and wellness has taken an unexpected turn to a place where my mind is scrambling to cope.

Actually, unexpected may sound understated. Unfathomable, comes to mind.

I was diagnosed with a “condition” so to speak. I want to share everything with you. But the trouble is, I don’t know everything yet. Something along the line of cicatricial alopecia, but let me urge you to think twice before Googling it, and the truth is, there are still a lot more to find out before arriving at a conclusion, so there’s nothing too informative I could tell you at this point. It may come across as unnecessary and self-absorbed to talk about something without any provided informations, I get that, but I simply lack the talent to conduct business as usual, to roast a turkey, to make a pie, when my mind is in disarray. In two weeks time, I hope, I will be able to tell you everything. But before you frantically light up a cigarette, let’s just find comfort in the fact that it isn’t life-threatening, I hope, but let’s face it, not much more fantastic than that.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, something very fantastic.

This is a recipe that I have been developing for awhile. In Chinese, it is called wan-za-mian, meaning peas mixed noodles. It was one of my most missed and pondered upon, single food item that I’ve tasted in Beijing, even though it originates from Chongqing (a city next to Sichuan). It may look alarmingly laborious, that a bowl of noodle consists of 3~4 components, but oh gosh, nothing is more worthy of your time. The amount of liquid in proportion to noodles lurks in between two categories, too little to be called a “soup” but a bit more than just “sauce”, and therefore may I say, just perfect. It comes waddling towards your table in seemingly distinctive parts: the noodles half-submerged in soup, the soft and mushy stewed peas (which I’ve substituted with chickpeas) on top, the dark brown minced pork sauce made with sweet and spicy chili bean paste, and everything, I mean everything, glossed and covered under a layer of flaming rouge chili oil. Could this work? That would your very last thought before this mixture, under your anxious chopsticks, churns and folds into a spicy, oily, savory and deeply complex bowl of magic potion that sucks you, and your thoughts, into an unstoppable whirlpool of happiness.

Believe me. I felt like shit, and this thing still made me happy. Imagine what it could do to you.

11.22.2016

In All recipes, Meat, Noodle/Pasta/Rice

CUMIN LAMB AND HAND-SMASHED NOODLE SOUP

FOR THIS WEEKEND….

I’m quickly leaving you with this recipe today because I don’t have a whole lot to say about it. In fact, it is precisely because I’ve already said everything I wanted about them in my previous posts. This recipe is a good example of how I, and you as well, can utilize all the recipes on the site fluently in combination, to draw to a different conclusion. This particular dish is mainly a soup-version from my xi’an famous cumin lamb and hand-smashed noodles, but it draws from three different recipes that have somewhat became a staple of my own kitchen. Plus a little further processing and tweaks, it can become something that scratches an entirely different itch. So here, whether you are a dry noodle or soup noodle kinda person, or both, you can now travel between two worlds.

08.22.2015

In All recipes, Meat, Snacks, updated recipe

M(Y) SHANGHAI’S COLD WONTONS IN SPICY PEANUT SAUCE

YOUR ULTIMATE REVENGE TOWARDS THE COMING ASS-BINDING HEATWAVES

A REFRESHINGLY PLEASURABLE PAIN, BEST SERVED COLD

It might say something about me, perhaps not in the most positive light, whenever I fell for a Chinese dish-inspiration from half way around the world while living right inside the epicenter of it all, where the “real things” are or so they say. What kind of a food-blogger, who eats and breathes right off of the ground-zero of a very old, very diverse and rapidly morphing food-culture often generalized as “Chinese foods”, would cook you a Chinese dish that comes from an Instagram of a New Yorker who took it at a restaurant that are, out of all places, in Brooklyn. Lazy? Perhaps. Utter dumb luck? That’s for sure. Because you see, without this inconvenient loop around the globe it has traveled, the inspiration for this down-home Shanghainese summer snack, in one form or another, would have otherwise never found its way to melt in my warm embrace. And this is, I guess especially for those who have experienced living abroad, a perfectly explainable social phenomenon.

Thing is, I believe across all cultures, that the restaurants indigenous to where they are located, often times with great effort, focus on serving what they perceive as “restaurant-style/worthy” dishes only. It is a limiting but reasonable box that excludes the slightly less glamorous, homemade gems that are more commonly celebrated within the contentment of one’s own home. It really isn’t hard to understand why. Just imagine, that it would also seem odd, if not lazy, to see PB&J on the menu of a respectable American restaurant sitting in the heart of Manhattan, no? However, when the citizens of such comfort are residing in a foreign land, say, a Shanghainese in Brooklyn, and decided to open a restaurant to selfishly serve his/her personal home-sickness, then guess what, dishes like these start to pop up. And my friends, dishes like these, are always my favourite kind to eat. Take this for example, M Shanghai’s wontons in spicy peanut sauce. Something that I would have taken gladly from its bare and natural implications – burning hot pork wontons slurped cautiously from an even more inflammable pool of peanut sauce and chili oil – let alone after the discovery of its true, counterintuitive ingenuity over a much needed research. It turns out (whether or not this is how it’s served in Brooklyn) that this fabulous summer-snack regrettably overlooked in most-if-not-all Shanghai restaurants in Beijing, is actually… eaten cold.

05.19.2015

In All recipes, Noodle/Pasta/Rice, updated recipe

XI-AN FAMOUS HOT RICE RIBBONS

JUST WHEN I THOUGHT THE SHOW WAS GONNA EXIT FASTER THAN IT ENTERED, ON THE SIDE OF A NEIGHBORHOOD ROAD…

A NEW JOINT OPENED

I must admit, my belated appreciation for the hype of Xi’an Famous Foods, was a slow, reversed progression.

Six years ago before we left New York, it wasn’t yet a thing over there. Then after six years of looming around Hong Kong and then now Beijing, I barely noticed its presence let alone recognizing it as an established “food category”. It was a shameful episode of my negligence, one of which I could only redeem by… well, help you not to repeat my mistake. The first noise I heard from this funnily named Chinese regional cuisine from central-west, ironically, was when a few months ago, I was on my Beijing couch watching America’s Food Network featuring a micro-trending street-eats in New York, called “liang (cold) pi (skin)”. Liang-pi? You mean, the liang-pi they sold from a booth right next to the cash-register in my local supermarket? The liang-pi that periodically showed up on my dinner menu? The liang-pi that, yes, there at the corner groceries as well. And yes, there at the food-courts in malls, too! Now that I’m consciously aware of such thing, the liang-pi that was previously invisible to my radar, now appears to be, actually, everywhere!READ MORE

10.13.2014

In All recipes, Vegatables

FIRE-CRUSHED CUCUMBER SALAD

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THIS IS A CONVICT YOU’LL WANT TO FORGIVE, AND EMBRACE

I don’t mean to sound self-absorbed and overly theatrical if I mustn’t, but officers, I have a stalker.

Please, listen to me before you dismiss my report after I tell you that, yes, it’s a cucumber salad. Harmless and gentle it may sound, but believe me when I say that this fella, is spicy… hard-core, and possibly painful. And it has been disturbingly obsessed with me since… oh~ officers, at least a couple months! I can’t provide the exact records of its past appearances because, you know, that’s the creepy thing about stalker-recipes. Their shadowless movement between the blink of an eye, tailed with the constant awareness that it’s always there… I know I saw it smiling at me between the flips of webpages somewhere during my cyber-surfing, multiple times, or was that through my swiping finger over the stacks of e-magazines? And I could swear, officers, that it winked at me from the dinner-menu of at least two, or several restaurants that I’ve been to lately, plain-naked and sending me its very explicit intention.

It wants me, to eat it. Oh my, you see? I have to put it to rest.

crushed-cucumber-salad01

crushed-cucumber-salad02

09.18.2014

In All recipes, Noodle/Pasta/Rice, Soup, Top Posts In 90 Days

SPICY MISO RAMEN-EXPRESS

I set out to take the first post of 2014 easy… I did. I thought perhaps a harmless little breakfast pancake can be nice, glistening syrup under the hopeful morning light that symbolizes a new start within me… Or, perhaps, a statement-recipe like a creme brûlée and ham french toasts-sandwich that’s simple, but flaunting and strange enough to revitalize this blog’s otherwise-subtle individuality in the year to come… Or better yet, perhaps a complete slacker-post on a summary of everything that could and has gone wrong in my kitchen in 2013… kinda hey~ here’s a fine collection of things you probably don’t wanna eat but don’t I sound really cute talking about it?

But instead, this came out… And believe me, although it may not look remotely that way, this is taking-it-easy, well… as far as Japanese ramen goes.

01.04.2014

In All recipes, Meat, Noodle/Pasta/Rice, Snacks

Wontons for Him

(简体)（繁體)

There are about a hundred activities that are on my list of things to AVOID at ALL COST in Beijing. Taking a cab is one of them. I’m from New York, the international training-hub for cab-EQ and I thought I graduated smoothly with only one slip that caught me off-guard somewhere on Christopher Street. So to say that I have NO tolerance for supposedly my favorite transportation in the world, is saying a lot. If you think New York cab’s got attitude, how about multiplying that by 10 folds then add these to top the cake: a) The car is built to be as safe as a tin can. b) Driver tells you that it’s his second day on the job so that he’s completely CLUELESS on the directions OR how to keep you alive for that matter. c) A thick stench of body odor permeating throughout and you realized only a short stub of screw is left where the window control used to be. d) It’s 104 degrees outside but the AC doesn’t work (they never do) PLUS the window STILL doesn’t open and YES of course… odor, while you are being dragged aimlessly around the city in a lovely tin can. See?

12.06.2012

In All recipes, Condiments

Sichuan Chili Oil

UPDATES AVAILABLE: (sources for ingredients)

I love and use so much chili oil (such as here) that I decided to forge my own. It is the basis of all things sichuan which – IF were also your thing and it better be – is totally worth it to make your own because it tastes so much BETTER than store-bought (which I often find very lacking in flavors). The preparation and cooking itself practically takes no time at all, and it keep FOREVER in your fridge. I promise that it will deliver the kick you’ve been looking for and guarantee to scorch and numb your face right off. You are welcome.

10.25.2012