Happy Lunar New Year, Chinese New Year, Spring Festival, etc! Many countries celebrate the start of the Lunar Near Year, but China goes big; their festivities have actually influenced the celebrations in other Asian countries.
In honor of the holiday, I'm cooking food for China. Since China is so huge and diverse when it comes to food, I knew I couldn't just choose one dish to represent it. After doing some reading, I learned that there are "Four Great Traditions" in China, representing the cuisines from the west, north, south, and eastern parts of the country. There are eight modern cuisines broken down even further, but I figured four days of Chinese cooking was enough!
I started with Shandong, or Lu, cuisine, which represents the northern part of the country. The main dish is a naturally vegetarian one called Di San Xian, meaning "three earthly bounties/treasures from the earth."
The first step is to start stir frying the vegetables. Potatoes come first since they take the longest to cook. They're stir fried in a wok with oil until they're a nice golden brown and mostly cooked through. The three main colors of this dish are yellow, green, and purple. The potato here is the yellow part.
Then you add your green: bell pepper.
Once the bell pepper cooks for a minute, you set that aside and add the purple to the wok: chinese eggplant.
Once the eggplant is cooked down, it's added to the rest of the reserved veggies and a few cloves of garlic are added to the empty wok. After cooking for a few seconds, all the vegetables are added back in.
Then comes the sauce. It's a mixture of soy sauce, sesame oil, white pepper, sugar, and a type of cooking wine called Shaoxing wine.
Shaoxing wine is a new ingredient for me. I thought about skipping it and just using rice vinegar, but the blog I used for these recipes convinced me otherwise.
Once the sauce is added, a cornstarch slurry is stirred in to thicken it up. Sliced scallions are also added. Many pictures of this dish online make it look like there's a thicker, glossier sauce. I used probably more potato than we necessary, so I think it kind of soaked up too much of it. I also probably took too long between adding the sauce and adding the cornstarch (that's the problem with having to take pictures along the way).
The second dish I made is just a simple tomato and egg stir fry. I believe this is eaten all over China, but the blog I used for the Di San Xian recipe suggested eating it together so I went with it. I don't have many process pictures because you all know what scrambled eggs and tomatoes look like. You basically scramble the eggs with some sesame oil, white pepper, and a bit of the Shaoxing wine, stir fry the tomatoes, then add them together with some scallion.
I served these dishes with white rice, of course. This meal was relatively simple and easy to prepare, and was very filling and healthy.
Look for China Part 2 tomorrow! I'm going to be turning up the heat with some spicy Sichuan food!
Recipes Used: Di San Xian // Tomato & Egg
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