Category Archives: Asian Recipes

Grilled Chinese Sweet & Sour Pork Kebabs

If you leaf through the new February issue of Coastal Living magazine, you’re sure to stop in your tracks to admire the recipe and full-page, color photo of  “Grilled Chinese Sweet and Sour Pork Kabobs.”

Well, at least I hope you do, because it’s my very own recipe — my first one published in the magazine.

It’s part of the story, “Fresh Tropical Flavors! Pineapple,” which I helped developed recipes for.

I solicited well-known chefs, including legendary Hawaiian toque, Sam Choy, for favorite dishes that showcase fresh pineapple.

I also came up with my own — a riff on everyone’s favorite take-out dish of sweet ‘n’ sour pork. Instead of greasy, battered, fried pork, though, I lightened the dish by threading skewers of pork with red onion, green and red peppers, and chunks of fresh pineapple that get thrown on the grill.

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The Tale of a Bowl of Noodles

A bowl of noodles that represents both the simple and the hard in life.

This is the world’s easiest noodle soup that originated with the world’s hardest job.

Allow me to explain.

Warming, nourishing and filling, this bowl of custardy, thick rice noodles with sweet-smoky slices of Chinese barbecue pork is absolutely no-fuss, no-frett to make.

It has to be. It’s a work-all-day, race-home-to-put-dinner-on-the-table-before-I-collapse kind of dish.

Born of necessity. Born of invention. Born of the need to feed a family speedily, economically and, of course, deliciously.

It’s a dish my late-Mom used to make on hurried and harried weeknights for my Dad, two older brothers, and I.

Like many of my generation, I took it for granted that my parents always made dinner every night, no matter how tired they might be, no matter how much of a hassle it might have been. Not until I became an adult, myself, did I realize what a far from small miracle that truly was.

When I worked full-time as a newspaper reporter, there were long days when I’d arrive home so exhausted that I was in a complete daze. Those times, I’d often think to myself: “How did my parents do it? How?”

Here I was single, responsible for taking care of only myself, and it was downright draining. Even when I got married, and gained a husband to look after, it was still a far cry from how my parents managed to work five days a week and raise three kids without ever seeming too pooped to do any of  it. There was never a complaint, never a word uttered that it was all too much and they just wanted to give up.

I marvel at that, at all that parents manage to get done while life refuses to wait or even slow down one iota.

As a teen, I spent various summers working at my parents’ offices to make extra spending money. I remember waking up on weekdays at the same time as my parents, and climbing into the backseat of the car to go to work with one of them, as my Dad would make the drive into San Francisco’s financial district. He’d drop my Mom off first at the landmark, monolithic Bank of America building, where she would take the express elevator up to one of the higher floors to her job at a stock brokerage firm, where she handled estate work. Then, my Dad would drive on to his job at nearby Greyhound, where he was a book-keeper.

Sometimes at lunch-time, I’d walk with my Mom to nearby Chinatown to help her pick up provisions for that night’s dinner. Or if I was at my Dad’s office, the two of us would head there after work to buy ingredients before he picked up my Mom to drive us all home.

Often, those ingredients included that lovely lacquered Chinese barbecued pork and a box of freshly-made, fat rice noodles. My Mom would put a big pot of canned chicken broth to heat on the stove. In would go a few coins of fresh ginger, some slivers of yellow onion, a dash of soy sauce, a drizzle of sesame oil, and the slices of barbecued pork and cut-up rice noodles.

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Tantalizing Tofu

A tofu dish you'll be excited to eat.

Yes, I’m well aware that ”tantalizing” isn’t a word that one often associates with tofu.

After all, a brick of white soybean curd is not something that gets a whole lot of people excited. Not like an In-N-Out burger done animal-style, or Ad Hoc’s beautifully crisp fried chicken, or a glorious Red Velvet cupcake.

No, tofu doesn’t elicit that kind of impassioned response. But it should. It’s a versatile, inexpensive protein that’s low in calories that we all would do well to eat more of in these lean and mean times.

To that end, I offer up this beauty: “Warm Tofu with Spicy Garlic Sauce,” which has got to be one of the easiest dishes around.

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Brussels Sprouts Go Chinese

A perfect accompaniment to steamed rice.

A lot of people harbor a love-hate relationship with Brussels sprouts.

Me? I’ve had more of a love-avoidance pact with this miniature member of the cabbage family.

Growing up in a Chinese-American household, Brussels sprouts just weren’t to be found on our table. Amid a profusion of bok choy, sugar snap peas, gai lon, long beans, and winter melon, they were one green vegetable never prepared by my parents.

Not that I minded. After all, as I got older, the only descriptions I heard about Brussels sprouts definitely weren’t kind. They were lampooned in magazines for smelling up the house something fierce. And don’t get me started on the disgusted expressions my friends would make whenever this cruciferous veg was mentioned.

So I never ate them. If I saw them on menus, I avoided them, armed with the firm knowledge that they were to be shunned as if they were the Bubonic plague of vegetables.

As I got older, though, and more adventurous with my palate, I actually tried them. And what do you know — they weren’t so nasty at all. In fact, they were pretty darn tasty — firm and crunchy in the center, and covered with tender little leaves.

Brussels sprouts too often get a bum rap.

I enjoyed them with their leaves all separated, and sauteed with bits of salty bacon. I ate them, cut in halves, and roasted in a hot oven until their edges browned and caramelized.

But never had I tasted them in any Asian preparation until I had lunch recently with some friends at Straits restaurant in San Jose’s Santana Row.

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“I Don’t Really Cook….”

Chewy Tteokbokki (top left), and Joanne's Mom's savory omelet (bottom center).

If you’re like me, you have friends or family members who hem, haw, and timidly declare time and again, “I don’t really cook….”

But if you poke, prod, and nudge enough, you realize that, yes, they actually can and do cook.

And quite well, thank you very much — whether they care to admit it to themselves and the rest of the world or not.

Take my friend, Joanne.

You may know her work from the glorious photos she used to take for the San Jose Mercury News, for the poignant pics she now takes for her wedding photography business, and for the lovely shot she took of me on my “About” page.

Joanne is a professional photographer. She is most gifted and skilled. She takes great pride in the work that she does behind the camera. Indeed, if she — instead of yours truly — had snapped the photo above, it would have looked far more gorgeous than my feeble attempt.

Yet get her talking about cooking and she is as bashful as can be. Listen to her words, and she’ll have you believe she can’t make a thing, that turning on a burner is beyond her capabilities, and that her home kitchen is a foreign land she dares not step into too often.

But taste her food, and you realize the truth: She sure can cook.

Joanne, who is Korean-American, invited me and our other friend, Lisa, over recently for a home-cooked Korean lunch. Together, we make up three-quarters of the Woo Hoo Wednesday Club (the fourth was otherwise occupied). Lisa and I, who are both Chinese-American, took copious notes, since Korean food is not a cuisine we are intimately familiar with. Joanne scurried about in the kitchen, as we peppered her with questions.

Her favorite local Korean market?

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