Beef is rich in protein, and many bodybuilders like to include beef in their diet. At the same time, beef can also be cooked in a variety of ways. You can dry it into beef jerky or make it into steak. Of course, you can also make my other Chinese Home Kitchen beef recipes: Beef Tenderloin with Green Peppers or Tomato, Beef, and Potato Soup, or Red-braised Beef Pot with Tofu. An ingredient can be cooked in as many ways as you want. Today we will be cooking healthy with healthy ingredients. If you like beef, you can try cooking this dish with me. Image credit: Chen Jing for My Chinese Home Kitch ..read more

Do you like pumpkins? When it comes to pumpkins, we’re no strangers, and we can see it both on Halloween and Thanksgiving. Pumpkin pie, pumpkin cake, jack-o’-lantern. Pumpkin is rich in dietary fiber, and in China, pumpkin is a common ingredient, chefs cook it into a dish, a soup, and dessert chefs make it into a dessert. Although I’m not a professional dessert chef, I’m going to use pumpkin to make a “dessert” today, sweet pumpkin fries. Well, it’s really sweet, but I use the Chinese cooking process to make it. It’s more like a snack. Hope you will like it.  Chinese fried pumpkin recipe ..read more

Everyone is talking about the price of eggs these days. Food prices are skyrocketing; in the past year we have had shortages of critical items. The Chinese have a long history of eating healthy, despite scarcity. In America, most of us are one or two generations removed from family who survived the scarcity of the Great Depression and World War II. Our predecessors knew how to eat healthy on a budget, and we can all learn from their history. “Chinese cooking is a cooking of scarcity. …The vast majority of Chinese spent their lives short of fuel, cooking oil, utensils, and even water…. Chinese ..read more

Is it healthy to eat rice? Since I began working with Jing, and learning to cook Chinese food, I’ve been eating more rice. Given my family history of type 2 diabetes, I am concerned about high glycemic index, high carbohydrate, starchy foods in my diet. White rice is notoriously high in carbohydrates and low in fiber. However, the Chinese, especially in southern China, have considered rice a staple in their diet for thousands of years. As a child, Jing worked with her mother in the rice paddies in their village. There was a time, not so long ago, when the wealth of a household was measured in ..read more

Do you like to eat mushrooms? For example, common white mushrooms, enoki mushrooms (flammulina velutipes), tricholoma mushrooms, Shiitake mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, and king oyster mushrooms (pleurotus eryngii). These are all edible fungi. The recipe we are going to make today is Stir-fried King Oyster Mushrooms.   Image credit: Chen Jing for My Chinese Home Kitchen, 2023. Pleurotus eryngii is rich in protein and is used in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Recent research shows that King oyster mushrooms have anti-oxidant, anti-hyperlipidemic, anti-tumor, and anti-inflammatory propert ..read more

Jing is finishing her second year of culinary school at New Oriental Cooking School in Hefei. The school is holding a series of performances and competitions to showcase the students’ skills. Today we have a video (scroll down) for you showing her class demonstrating wok cooking techniques to a synchronized rhythm. Jing’s cooking class competition performance will get your toes tapping! Jing demonstrates her wok cooking techniques. Image credit: New Oriental Cooking School, 2023. I am very proud of Jing. She is only the 6th woman to take this Chinese cuisine course at New Oriental Cooking Scho ..read more

As important as the wok is to Chinese cooking, the one thing no chef or home cook can do without is a good knife and the skill to use that knife. When I coached high school softball, we had a saying: “Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.” In other words, if you practice using improper technique, you will develop bad habits that limit your performance. Chinese knife skills do not get as much mention as the recipes and the wok, but the first phase of Jing’s professional training was spent practicing knife skills using vast quantities of daikon (Chinese radish). Im ..read more

On International Women’s Day, 2021, Jing and I started My Chinese Home Kitchen. March 8, 2023 marks our second anniversary publishing articles about Chinese cuisine, recipes and culture. March 8, 2023: Two years of My Chinese Home Kitchen In March 2021, Jing traveled to Shanghai for the first time to sign her contract with the employment agency, receive her laptop, and get some training for using MS Office and Teams. While there, she took photos and notes for the first articles we published: A trip to Shanghai, The History of Yu Garden. Now she is finishing her second year of culinary school a ..read more

I always had the impression that Chinese cuisine was all stir-fried in a wok. I’ve learned a lot from Jing about real home-cooked Chinese food, and I have began to rethink my diet and cooking techniques as a result. Steam cooking is essential to healthy eating. What’s more, it’s an easy way to make a delicious hot lunch while working from home, without standing over a stove. Image credit: Glenn Emerson for My Chinese Home Kitchen, 2023Image credit: Glenn Emerson for My Chinese Home Kitchen, 2023Image credit: Glenn Emerson for My Chinese Home Kitchen, 2023A bit of history The wok is one of the ..read more

As we all know, in school, in addition to learning, there are exams. Yes, the New Oriental Cooking School I attend has an exam about cooking. In fact, for every dish we cook at school, the teacher will check the eligibility of each aspect and give a comprehensive score. Sometimes, the school will conduct a culinary test for the students, and there will be a comprehensive score by professional judges from several schools. These grades will be incorporated into our graduation grades. This Shredded Chicken with Silver Sprouts recipe is the first recipe we will use for the exam.  Image credit ..read more