Fresh prawns are very firm in texture and sweet in taste, which are enhanced by the sweet and spicy sauce. This way of cooking reflects the specific taste of sweet and spicy Chinese food.
The dish is best served with cooked rice, egg noodles or rice noodles.
Ginkgo nuts have some good values to the health, so when the ginkgo is available at the supermarkets with good quality, I will buy them to make a stew dish or sweet desserts. Ginkgo is popularly in Chinese dishes that use Cihnese herbs to add curing-illness effects to the dishes. What is even better is that ginkgo is quite cheap.
This time I made a stew dish of duck, ginkgo and long gourd. You also can replace the gourd with winter melon, which also tastes really good. In order to make the soup thinner, clearer and less fat, I removed all the skin and fat from the duck. You may used boned duck or boneless duck depending on your liking.
The secret to this dish is the application of dried tangerine rinds when stewing the soup. These rinds would bring a ver special fragrance and taste to the dish. Dried tangerine rinds can be bought at the supermarkets, however, I didn’t throw aways the rinds after eating the tangerines but sun-dried them for future use.
This is a way of cooking pork with Chinese flavor. The main taste of the dish is, of course, the sweetness.
In Vietnam, there is a small part of the population are Chinese origins, most of whom live in the middle-south and southern part of the country. They bring the influence of Chinese cooking into the cooking of Southern people, so it is a habit of them to add sugar into the dishes. Therefore, there is a common saying in Vietnam meaning that the Southern people eat it sweet, the Central people eat it hot, and the Northern people (which I am not so sure) eat it salty.
I come from Hanoi in the North of Vietnam, so I find this sweet pork is too sweet for me (of course it should be as it is called). I’m fine with trying new recipes and I am open to eat anything appeared attractive to my eyes. So I decided to make this. The pork was quite sweet to eat with steamed rice, which I often serve with salty dishes or soups. Thus I ate them separately, enjoying the pork first then having the rice with soup. A perfect meal with two dishes.
The dish has authentic flavor of Sichuan-style food, which uses chili bean sauce frequently in cooking. However, following the original recipe turned out too spicy for the taste of my family. So I reduced the chili and chili bean paste used in this dish.
Though I do not feel completely comfortable to eat spicy food on hot days. However, in Singapore it is hot all the year round. So, in order to bring in some new and strange flavor to our meals, particularly with spicy foods, I often choose to cook them on cool days, normally after the a long chain of days with heavy rain. The weather does have some effects on what kind of food I feel like eating for the day.
If you are hunger for something simple and mild in the taste, still good for your health, then you may consider this soup made with chicken and white fungus.
This dish is another application of mine in using Chinese herbs in cooking, so as to make a dish not only tastes good but also provides other health benefits. Consuming this kind of dishes doesn’t mean to see immediate effect, but in the long run, they have curing effects that help prevent us from illnesses.
So let’s try this very simple dish and do something good to your health.
