A crowd-pleasing little appetizer: chewy, flavor-potent cubes of pressed tofu (dougan) brined with Chinese herbs, spices, and oolong tea leaves. Makes a great holiday gift. I love making a batch of this tea-brined tofu and keeping it in the fridge. It lasts for up to two weeks, and the longer you let the tofu sit, the more flavorful it gets. You can dish it out to serve to guests as an appetizer to nibble on before a meal. What’s in the brine? If you’ve been cooking Chinese food for a while, you might be familiar with some of these spices. Part medicinal and part culinary, a few of them shar ..read more

Adapted from the recipe in my cookbook, The Vegan Chinese Kitchen. A stunning dish layered out of tofu skin (beancurd sheets), completely vegan and can be made gluten-free. This Buddhist appetizer is nearly a thousand years ago, but I first encountered it on a trip to Shanghai in 2019. I was eating lunch in a charming vegetarian restaurant that smelled of incense and old mahogany furniture, and as I watched the server bring the “bird” out, beautifully plated and skin crisped to a deep golden brown, it struck me that this would be perfect as a vegan holiday dish. The “goose” is made from layer ..read more

A guide to making Cantonese-style mooncakes with 6 different flavors. All vegan and made from scratch! Happy start of the Mid-Autumn Festival weekend! I’ve been making snowskin mooncakes (a variation with an easier mochi skin) to gift friends and family for a few years now, but this year I wanted to try my hand at traditional baked mooncakes. There’s just something about the glamorous, embossed pastry and the richness of the sweet and savory fillings that’s both appealing and intimidating, especially for someone who’s never made them before. Mooncakes really aren’t something people traditiona ..read more

There’s no better way to showcase new beans than with this simple Chinese preparation. I use a combination of purple beans, yellow wax beans, and regular green beans, picked at the height of tenderness, then blanched quickly and seasoned with an aromatic ginger soy sauce. Makes a beautiful little appetizer or side. Blanching is a common Chinese preparation to cook tender greens and vegetables like broccoli/gailan, asparagus, choy sum, or green beans. You dip the ingredient in boiling water for a brief period (sometimes just 30 seconds) until cooked al dente, drain or shock in ice water, then ..read more

A simple and flavorful Chinese method to cook zucchini, using aromatic garlic and a special technique that keeps the zucchini tender but al dente. Serve as part of a meal with rice and several other Chinese dishes, or as a vegetable side. Zucchini has spongy flesh that releases a lot of water, so it can quickly become soft and mushy when cooked, or remain undercooked with a raw bite. To prevent either of these outcomes, salt the zucchini before stir-frying. This extra step will get some flavor into the zucchini and break down the spongy flesh, creating a wonderfully al-dente but tender textur ..read more

Chilled soy milk noodles in a nutty, creamy broth, topped with ume plum vinegar-pickled tomatoes, fresh julienned cucumber, and crispy rice. Lately I’ve been craving kongguksu. The broth for this Korean cold noodle dish is made by blending soaked soybeans (and sometimes pine nuts) until creamy, the freshest, savoriest soy milk. it’s a mild dish with subtle flavors, meant to soothe rather than stimulate, and traditionally, you top it with julienned cucumber and tomatoes and eat it with bites of kimchi or other spicy, acidic banchan. For my version, I used soba noodles instead of traditional so ..read more

Romanesco florets stir-fried in Sichuan “dry pot” style, with spicy doubanjiang and garlic, glazed figs, five-spice yucca fries, and a crispy rice paper tuile. I’ve been obsessed with romanesco. A type of cruciferous vegetable, romanesco has pale green, fractal-like heads that are denser and nuttier than broccoli or cauliflower. The stems have lots of crunch, and each romanesco flower is surrounded with tender finger leaves that roast up crispy and caramelized like roasted brussels sprouts. I spotted a vendor selling tiny romanesco at the downtown farmers market in Portland last week— t ..read more

Liang fen are semi-translucent, savory jelly noodles made from mung bean starch and enjoyed as a popular street food and snack in many parts of China, especially Sichuan. The first time I ate liang fen was in Chengdu. It was a humid, lazy afternoon, and the street vendor selling the noodles filled a paper bowl with freshly cut jelly noodles and topped it with a spicy, red-oil laced dressing and a crunchy topping of fried peanuts. My mouth watered even before I tasted that first bite. This dish is all about texture. Cool, slick noodles that glide pleasingly in the mouth, juicy crunchy jul ..read more

A guide to making Chinese boiled soybeans. Simmered in a savory broth with aromatics like chiles, ginger, scallions, peppercorns, and star anise, these protein-rich soybeans are salty, tender, and full of flavor. Serve chilled as a snack or an appetizer. Young soybeans (毛豆 máodòu), also called edamame, are soybeans that are harvested while still pale green and immature. In China, they’re usually boiled whole in their pods in salted water, which lightly seasons them. When I was growing up, my parents would buy big bags of frozen soybean pods from the Asian supermarket and toss them in a large ..read more

A crowd-pleasing little appetizer: chewy, flavor-potent cubes of pressed tofu (dougan) brined with Chinese herbs, spices, and oolong tea leaves. Makes a great holiday gift. I love making a batch of this tea-brined tofu and keeping it in the fridge. It lasts for up to two weeks, and the longer you let the tofu sit, the more flavorful it gets. You can dish it out to serve to guests as an appetizer to nibble on before a meal. What's in the brine? If you've been cooking Chinese food for a while, you might be familiar with some of these spices. Part medicinal and part culinary, a few of them shar ..read more