"Lotus Eat"

Yesterday I tried my hand at steaming Chicken and rice wrapped up in Lotus leaves.

I got the recipe from my Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook.


The first thing to do is soak the dried lotus leaves in hot water for about 5 minutes.

The chicken was cut into large slices and then marinated with some thinly sliced pork belly in Shaoxing wine, light soy sauce, freshly chopped ginger and scallions.

Some long grain and glutinous rices were toasted in a dry wok with some star anise until they were brittle and yellow. The smell was amazing!

The meat and rice were mixed together with a little water, divided up among the lotus leaves and wrapped into neat parcels.

The parcels were steamed for 30-40 minutes. When they were done they were served with a stir-fry of baby shanghai bok-choy, lotus root, enoki mushrooms and scallions.

The aroma when you unwrap the parcels is wonderful, it really gets your salivary glands going!
I will definitely make this again, but I will use smaller pieces of chicken (like they did in the restaurant) and will add some shrimp too.

There is also a different lotus leaf recipe for me to try in my Land of Plenty cookbook.

Desert was some custard buns; delicious steamed buns that have some sweet custard in their middles. YUMMY!

I flossed today

I'm super excited to have found pork floss at the Cleveland Asia Market today.

It is dried pork meat that has then been shredded into floss like texture. It has a lovely rich flavour.

I used some for lunch with my congee. I also had it with some roasted unsalted peanuts and kimchee.

It was delicious!

Tonight I'm going to try making sticky rice and chicken steamed in lotus leaves. It's one of Joshua's favourite foods from the Chinese restaurant we frequented in Omaha and I now have a recipe from one of my cookbooks.

I LOVE Chinese food...

.... and I'm not talking about 'American Chinese' food (General Tso's, Sweet n sour chicken, beef lo mein). I'm talking about the authentic Chinese food, that Chinese people eat in China.

The Chinese food I have been cooking is from Chinese cook books full of recipes straight from China and full of ingredients that I can only find at the Chinese market. AND IT HAS ALL BEEN DELICIOUS. I'm sure to a native of China it probably doesn't taste quite authentic, but I feel confident that it's pretty close!

I am currently on vacation in Las Vegas. I drove here from Cleveland, which is a 33 hour drive away and obviously haven't been doing any cooking during this time. And my tummy has been suffering!!!!

So yesterday I was super excited to find that the Bellagio has a restaurant called Noodles that serves some good authentic Chinese food (as well as some of the expected American Chinese dishes and other dishes from Japan and Korea). I had congee for lunch yesterday, congee again for lunch today (with edamame and kim-chee) and a wonton soup tonight for  dinner, which had shrimp dumplings that were to die for. And my tummy is already feeling a lot better.

Yummy congee:

Here is a photo of tonights soup:

I LOVE CHINESE FOOD!!!