1/2 Chinese New Year

Three warnings about this recipe:

It isn’t healthy.
It might insult other tofu you have known.
It is addictive.

The end result should be a crispy chip that you can eat with your fingers.

For deep fried bean curd, buy the Chinese firm variety.
Two days in advance, cut the bean curd into slices a quarter inch thick by one inch long and a half-inch wide.

Strain the bean curd, uncovered, in the refrigerator for a day.

Soak the bean curd in soy sauce for 24 hours.

Strain before you deep fry.

Heat four or five cups of oil in a wok. Amazingly enough, the electric wok works best for deep-frying. The oil should be at 375° before you fry the tofu.

Add only a handful of bean curd to the oil at a time.

Beware of the tofu cuddle, which will happen immediately. Use a slotted spoon to nudge the slices away from each other.

Eventually the tofu will wagon circle and form a nice little bubbling ring.

When the slices feel crispy (gently tap them with a spoon) pull them out and place them on a paper towel.

Serve with a soy/vinegar/red chili dipping sauce.

There is no predicting at what time Half Chinese New Year dinner is ready to be served. A new dish or a last minute idea generally creeps into the menu and that sort of throws the whole timing of the meal into a tizzy. The unkindest thing you can do to a guest is to invite them into a house filled with food and not feed them

Enter the appetizers.

Mini Rice Balls, while not even half-Chinese, are beautiful, intriguing and powerful. They tart up the palate nicely. We stuffed our rice balls with takuan (pickled lo bak, the long white winter radish of the Orient). Making miniature rice balls takes longer than making standard rice balls because small amounts of rice don’t stick together as well as large amounts of rice.

Make sushi rice.
Cut takuan into half-inch cubes or use small ume (pickled Japanese plums).
Cute Nori into 3x3” squares.
Lay out a plate of rice vinegar. Place two pieces of nori into vinegar.
Take a tablespoon of rice and form a ball around the pickled thing of your choice.
Fidget for a while.
Add more rice.
Wrap nori around ball.
Let sit for an hour so the vinegar dries.
Warn guests about ume pits.

Three things to remember when making Chinese dumplings:

• Strain excess water from vegetable fillings
• Add a thickener (egg, cornstarch or tapioca flour) to low-fat meat such as shrimp or chicken
• Don’t over stuff wrappers
• Seal wrappers firmly
• Boil a few in lots of water

Dumplings are symbols of luck, wealth and love. From the shape to the number of folds there is a dumpling language that can be intimidating. Fortunately, these nuances are lost in the irreverence of our table.

We served both a spinach and a shrimp dumpling at Half Chinese New Year Dinner.

The fillings can be made to your taste, but the texture is the most important thing to get right. If you have a smooth texture, make sure you bind the filling with a whole egg. If you have a course texture, you can use only the white, which will make the filling fluffy.

Shrimp Dumpling filling:
1 lbs shrimp stripped down to just the meat
a palmful of fresh bamboo shoots
Two tablespoons black mushrooms (fresh or dehydrated)
one green onion minced
White pepper
Two teaspoons of salt

Add an egg or just the egg whites

Refrigerate for two hours

I used the round wrappers thinking I would make har gau. Har gau is a little more difficult to make than folded dumplings and requires a steamer. The steamer was going to be in use so we opted for boiled dumplings at the last minute.

Fill a small bowl with warm water or a beaten egg to act as a dumpling adhesive.
Take a round wrapper, add a teaspoon of filling.
Dip a finger in the bowl of water or egg, spread the liquid on one side of the circle.
Fold the circle halves together, press lightly to push out any air, pinch the edges to seal tight.
The pleats of the dumpling are important but not necessary.
Pleat the dumpling just as you would make a paper fan —you may encounter frustration and tears during this process. Dumplings are like complicated women — they are difficult but rewarding.

Set a pot of water to a roil
Add four or five dumplings at a time: they MUST have space to move around and the water must be boiling.

When the dumplings rise to the surface of the water, admire them for a moment.
After a silent self-congratulation, scoop the girls out with a slotted spoon and place in a bowl.

Add a touch of water to the bowl to keep the dumplings from sticking to themselves.

Serve immediately.

You can freeze the unboiled dumplings, just make sure they are coated with cornstarch or tapioca flour so that they don’t freeze together. Drop the frozen dumplings directly into boiling water.

Serve with a dipping sauce: soy sauce, sesame oil and rice vinegar with a side of red chili sauce is a house favorite.

We served Pea vines at this year’s Half-Chinese Dinner to break the flavor of high heat. So far the dinner of duck, pork and beans all had ingredients that were best activated with elevated temperatures. The pea vines were meant to be a salad course of sorts — they are still cooked in a frighteningly hot wok but have a cool flavor.

Pea vines are young tendrils of sugar peas. Often, one has to pick them to remove the tough stalks— a tedious process when there are things burning on the stove. Try immersing the pea vines in cold water for a day ahead of time; they will expand in size and require less cooking.

One does not have to use duck broth. We had duck bones on hand and we made a broth as a matter of course (it’s a bit of a rule in our kitchen — boil all extra raw bones). Any poultry broth will suffice.

Cut:
Three cloves of minced garlic
Pick pea vines but leave them whole

Shake up in a glass jar:
Four tablespoons of broth
Two tablespoons of oyster sauce
Dash of soy
Dash of salt
Dash of pepper (white preferred)

Coat a hot wok with oil and add garlic to crisp.

Add pea vines and mix with garlic.

Add the sauce to create and explosion of steam.

Stir quickly and gently.

Add a touch of sesame oil.

Remove pea vines with haste.

Plate beans, garnish with sesame seeds: serve.

Long beans are thick-skinned beans that take abuse well and have a texture that sauce loves to adhere to. For Half Chinese New Year dinner, the long beans are served alongside the pork and duck as an alternative to meat.


The essential element to this dish is heat. The sauce needs instant heat for the black bean sauce to change from a fermented flavor that stomps on your tongue to one that politely elbows it.

Despite its simplicity, this recipe takes about a half hour to prep:

Do ahead:
Blanch the long beans in salted water and soak in cold water.
Trim the ends and then cut the beans in half or thirds and set aside.

Cut:
Three cloves of minced garlic
A half-inch of ginger minced
Two green onions

Sauce in a bowl or shake well in a lidded glass jar:
Two tablespoons of black bean sauce.
Two teaspoons of tapioca gluten.
Four Tablespoons of shitake mushroom broth (boil some fresh shitake mushrooms into a broth or use mushroom stock from the store).

Red pepper sauce can be added to the wok once green beans are cooking.

Coat a hot wok with oil and add garlic and ginger. When the ginger is crisp and golden add your beans.

Wait until the wok gets hot again. You want volatility, anger and rage to be sweltering inside the wok.
Then add the sauce mix.
The wok will riot.
Cheer.

Stir beans and add your red pepper sauce if desired.

Cover wok and turn off heat.

Plate beans, garnish with green onions: serve.