This weekend we had another "Come Cook with Us" dinner party. The theme today was Chinese food and our friends were two graduate students in the department where I work - both from Taiwan and both working in the same laboratory. We'd originally invited more people but for one reason and another the others hadn't been able to come. So ours was an intimate affair and all the more relaxing for me as a result.
Steve and I got a late start on Saturday as Friday had been a particularly intense work day for me and I'd been on my feet for the better part of 10 hours. We got up, dressed, had a cooked breakfast and went out foraging on Mill Road for supplies for the dishes I'd decided to prepare for the party - braised pork ribs, home-style stir fried aubergine and slow-braised chicken.
I am a great lover of meat but for reasons unknown to us we seldom eat pork. Pork is a very popular meat in Chinese cuisine. So we came away from our trip to Andrew Northrop Butcher's with a whole lot of pork ribs and pork mince (made from the meat under the ribs). Our next stop was Seoul Plaza where we bought some tofu and spring onions. From there we went to Al Amin and got a small chicken.
Back at home I started on the ribs. Chinese-style ribs are usually cut into 1.5 - 2.0 inch pieces for ease of eating with chop sticks. I set to chopping the ribs with my cleaver with glee - what a racket I made! After I'd finally chopped them all I froze some and plunked the others into a pot of cold water and brought that up to the boil. These were boiled for 3 minutes and the water then poured away and the ribs rinsed of any residual scum. Then I added some water back to the pot, tossed the ribs in, added some seasoning and let that come back to the boil. I simmered the ribs in the sauce for about an hour, partially covered, stirring every so often so that all of the meat spent time in the sauce.
Next I chopped up the chicken and following the recipe in my favourite Chinese cookbook, the New Chinese Cookery Course by Kenneth Lo, I prepared the Slow-Braised Chicken dish.
While I was cooking, Juching and Chantal arrived. They'd brought their supplies and had between them 3 dishes they wanted to cook.
Chantal was first up at the stove and she prepared a very tasty fatty pork and leek stir fried dish while Juching prepared her vegetables and assembled her ingredients. Juching's contributions were a beef mince and barbecue sauce dish AND a sticky rice cake and vegetable stir fry. I'd never had sticky rice cakes before and these were a real revelation! They were chewy and tasty and very satisfying to eat. Chantal's pork dish was 'to die for' - subtle and very moreish. Juching's beef with barbecue sauce was very unusual because the barbecue sauce was nothing like American barbecue sauce. It was spicy and contained fish sauce or fermented fish. It was delightful and strange to eat.
All in all we had seven dishes between us - including a wonderful Korean tofu dish, from the book Korean Cooking by Young Jin Song. Steve has made this subtle, deceptively simple and stunning dish one of his specialities and it is one of my favourites. The vegetable box gave us bok choy so I made stir fried bok choy, naturally. In accordance with the sheer volume of food before us, we spent quite a long time eating - going back again and again to the dishes arranged at the centre of the table. The chat was about food and cooking and they paid me the best possible compliment in the world - they said that my dishes tasted very Asian and that they wouldn't have guessed that they had been cooked by a Western person. Wow... that was indeed a fantastic compliment!
We chatted long after we'd finished eating, lingering over the drying rice grains and solidifying pork fat. Slowly we extricated ourselves from our reverie; I served chocolates and tea. We were so buoyed up by our evening together that we all agreed to have a repeat performance of the dinner sometime soon!
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