I owe my life to my dad’s cooking.
Dad won Mom’s heart when he cooked dinner for her for the first time. It was a simple stir-fry dish that did the job: paper-thin egg pancakes cut into strips, as-tender-as-it-gets pork tenderloin, julienned pickled ginger, garlic, leek, and a dash of salt. My dad calls it Osmanthus pork, after its appetizing yellow hue. Growing up, whenever my dad made the dish, mom would jokingly say to me, “You wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for this dish.” Dad would laugh; mom would smile at him with the kind of tenderness you’d only otherwise see in young lovers’ eyes in the movies.
Osmanthus Pork by Dad, Chongqing, 2018
This is a snapshot of my childhood: loving parents and a full belly of great home-cooked food. I had to become an adult and move thousands of miles away to realize exactly the kind of privilege I had taken for granted.
Mom’s parents were both born in a city in northern China called Tianjin. Grandma, very romantically, married “down” to my grandpa, a sailor, and moved to my hometown Chongqing, a hilly city where the Yangtze river splits into a beautiful, nurturing branch. My grandma had a very well-off lifestyle growing up and did her best to create that for all her daughters. My mom, being the youngest of the four sisters, naturally, was spoiled rotten as a kid. She never learned how to cook before she had me and never took cooking very seriously until I was old enough for school. According to Mom, one day when I was in second grade, I got home from school and couldn’t stop talking about how much I loved my friend’s mom’s spicy eggplants (and I hated eggplants). Mom felt really bad, reached out to my friend’s mom for the recipe, made it the next day, and fell in love with cooking as she watched me gobble down the eggplants – previously my culinary archenemy.
Mom and dad, Guangzhou, 2019
I think that’s what started it all. My parents’ cooking was my first lesson on how to love. It’s why I love cooking so much – I take care of people best when I’m feeding them. I believe food is such a beautifully personal and intimate experience that it should be enjoyed by everyone, as much and as often as possible. And of all foods, Chinese food (in my experience, at least) best resembles the comfort of home – warm, delicious, balanced, accessible. Make a stir-fry out of whatever produce is available, boil up an egg drop soup with tomato or dried seaweed, whip up a simple fried rice with spam and scallions, then share a warm meal over light-hearted conversations, and stay around even after finishing your bowl to keep each other company and help each other out with cleaning.
Don’t get me wrong, Chinese food can also get very extravagant. From ingredients to techniques, from textures to flavors, from preparation to presentation, if there is any room for improvement/innovation, Chinese chefs have most likely explored it. For example, there is a dish called “火芽银丝” (pronounced huo ya yin si; literally, ham sprout silver strings). It’s a Suzhou dish that requires an almost impossible effort. First, cut top-grade ham into thin strips and let them air dry for a couple days; then take fresh bean sprouts, remove both ends, thread a needle through to create a tunnel; thread the dried ham strips into the bean sprouts and stir fry with aromatics without breaking the delicate construction. Urban legend has it that this dish was a favorite of the last empress of the Qing dynasty.
That’s the range Chinese food offers: versatile in every aspect, adaptive to all occasions. While there are maybe a million combinations of spices, sauces, and aromatic herbs, the only tools you absolutely need to create the many delightful flavors and textures are a chopping block, a kitchen knife, a wok, a spatula, and maybe a pair of chopsticks for more intricate maneuvers. It’s a true reflection of the Chinese problem-solving approach, using limited resources exhaustively to create optimum results. It also further emphasizes the human aspect of cooking – when you are all given an identical toolkit, the only variable that determines the outcome is the human wielding the tools.
You may have noticed the irony: what makes Chinese cooking accessible also makes it irreplicable and mysterious.
And that’s where I come in.
This project is my best attempt at demystifying authentic Chinese cooking by sharing my recipes and my processes.
Having lived abroad for the majority of my adulthood, Satisfy my cravings for hometown flavors is always near the top of my day-to-day problem-solving list. With practice, I’ve become quite resourceful when it comes to finding my staple tools and ingredients, using substitutes when the real thing is either too expensive or impossible to find, and reinventing my favorite Western foods with an Asian twist.
I’m here to share something incredibly precious to me with my fellow passionate home cooks.
And I hope that’s what brought you here too.
Now let’s get cooking.
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