Chinese Cooking for Beginners: More Than 65 Recipes for the Eager Cook (Ethnic Kitchen) Review

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(More customer reviews)I bought this cookbook in like 1995 in Houston, Texas. It's followed me to Boston and three houses in Chicago. Everything in it is terrific. She uses authentic ingredients and methods. The results are better than many chinese restaurants I've eaten at. Thank you Helene Siegel.


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Helen's Asian Kitchen: Easy Chinese Stir-Fries Review

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(More customer reviews)I own Helen Chen's larger cookbook, "Helen Chen's Chinese Home Cooking" and consider it one of the best Chinese cook books a person could have. Many of the recipes in it have been favorites of mine, and some of the easier ones are duplicated in this slender new volume of stir fries. For the beginning cook, this book may be less daunting. From it, I've now cooked "Garlicky Green Beans"-quite tasty, "Shrimp in Tomato Sauce"-delicious, "Kung Pao Chicken"-yummy and fiery, and ""Kan Shao Green Beans"- stellar. Obviously, I am looking forward to woking my way through the remainder of its pages. I own many other books on Chinese food and cooking, but I can think of few of them as uncomplicated as this which manage to produce such deep, rich, tasty sauces.

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"When I was growing up, my mother did all of the cooking at home and the variety was endless. But it was her everyday Chinese home cooking that I remember best-the often-revisited stir-fry dishes that are simple, easy, delicious, and part of the culinary repertoire of most Chinese families. I hope you will enjoy this collection of some of my favorites. Perhaps some will become part of your everyday cooking, too. So come with me to my kitchen and let me share with you what the Chinese do in theirs." -Helen Chen

Enjoy Easy Chinese Stir-Fries Like These:
Chicken with Mushrooms and Snow Peas
Braised Party Wings
Spicy Chunking Pork
Sparerib Nuggets in Black Bean Sauce
Stir-Fried Broccoli Beef in Oyster Sauce
Spicy Beef Shreds with Carrots and Celery
Coral and Jade
Flower Squid with Mixed Vegetables
Bean Curd with Black Mushrooms and Bamboo Shoots
Ginger-glazed Carrots and Parsnips

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My Grandmother's Chinese Kitchen: 100 Family Recipes and Life Lessons Review

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(More customer reviews)This delightful book will transform the way you think about cooking, about food, and likely about life as well.
Tracing her own skills back to the critical lessons she learned at a tender young age from her beloved Grandmother, Eileen Yin-Fei Lo takes you on a journey from simple baby steps (how to make perfect rice) right up to more
exotic Holiday dishes. But more than just helping you to understand how to cook properly, how to respect the ingredients, the Gods of the kitchen and more, she also shares a whole philosophy of life. An insight into how the Chinese look at things.
You could read this book without lifting one spatula, nor steaming one precious fish, and feel enriched and ennobled by the experience.
I can personally strongly recommend this profound tome to all.

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Award-winning cookbook author and celebrated food expert Eileen Yin-Fei Lo learned how to cook from her talented grandmother. This inspiring and instructive book collects 100 recipes the author learned in her grandmother's kitchen, along with the life lessons, observations, and other gifts she hopes to pass on to readers and future generations. Cherished holiday recipes include steamed buns and fish congees for birthdays, vegetables prepared during the Lunar New Year, and rice dumplings made for the Dragon Boat Festival. All the essential techniques of the Chinese kitchen are represented, including stir-frying, steaming, roasting, stewing, braising, and more. A volume to cook from, to share, and to read as a memoir in its own right, My Grandmother's Chinese Kitchen celebrates a great culinary tradition by sharing family wisdom and timeless recipes.--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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The Chinese Kitchen: Recipes, Techniques, Ingredients, History, And Memories From America's Leading Authority On Chinese Cooking Review

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(More customer reviews)When you make these wonderful dishes, you will know what Chinese food really tastes like, not the brown garlic-ginger tasting stuff you get at a take-out place around the corner. This cuisine has everything going for it - a heavy reliance on vegetables, using meat in a supporting role, and healthful cooking techniques like stir frying and steaming.
The author has very thoughtfully created a glossary with the names of culinary exotica in both English and Chinese characters, so that I can make a copy of the page, point like an idiot at the words for my friends at the Asian market and they will show it to me.
The recipes ALL WORK. I cannot tell you how satisfying it is to pick up a cookbook, place my time and ingredients and trust in the author's hands and have a wonderful meal to show for it. Trust this author. She will teach you, entertain you, and you will know how marvelous real Chinese food is. It would take an active campaign of sabotage to ruin one of her recipes, they are so easy to follow. (but then again, I really like cooking.) This is a cookbook that I will simply never part with, and I will use until its pages are stained with soy sauce and fall out. The recipe alone for Mah Gu Gai Pin is worth the price of the book.

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The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen: Classic Family Recipes for Celebration and Healing Review

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(More customer reviews)As an American Born Chinese, finding this book was a huge relief. Like so many ABCs, I love the food of my culture but certainly didn't know how to prepare it. This is an authentic down home Chinese cookbook. No fancy dishes here - only comfort food need apply. The book is divided into the following: 1) rice from steamed, fried, dumplings and porridge 2) stir fry - including tomato beef and beef chow fun 3) steamed cooking- egg custard, sponge cake, spareribs with black bean sauce 4) cooking with ginger - drunken chicken, cabbage noodle soup 5) seasonal market dishes - braised taro and chinese bacon, stir fried bitter melon with beef 6) celebratory dishes - stir fried clams with black bean sauce, pepper and salt shrimp, sweet and sour pork 7) New Year's dishes - turnip cake, seasame balls 8) authentic recipes from the homeland - savory rice tamales, pork dumplings, stuffed noodle rolls 9) Chinatown favorites - soy sauce chicken, roast duck, barbecued pork and salt roasted chicken 10) a slew of healing soups and dishes. Reading it was a trip down memory lane for me. The dishes are truly authentic to the Chinese family experience and or those who seek authenticity, Young has presented it here. She also includes a handy guide to shopping and mail order resources!

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The Kitchen God's Wife Review

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(More customer reviews)THE KITCHEN GOD'S WIFE, Amy Tan's second novel, is another story that deals with family history and relationships between mothers and daughters. Unlike her first novel, THE JOY LUCK CLUB, THE KITCHEN GOD'S WIFE takes place mostly in the past.
Pearl and her mother Winnie have never had a very good relationship. Winnie criticizes Pearl often, and makes it unpleasant for Pearl whenever they come to visit. The book opens with Pearl, her non-Asian husband Phil, and their two young children making the drive to San Francisco to attend a family wedding.
Everyone in the family is there at the wedding, including close family friends and relatives that have been a part of Winnie's life since her days back in China in the early `20's and `30's. An argument breaks out between Pearl and Winnie at the wedding, but before Pearl and her family return home, she and her mother talk. The story that Pearl hears from her mother is a story she has never heard before. It is a secret that Winnie has kept from her daughter for decades, for fear of hurting Pearl. Pearl herself has a secret, but it becomes secondary as Winnie's story unfolds.
Winnie's modern day world was a lifetime away from her early beginnings in China. She was born to a woman that was one of many wives belonging to a man Winnie knew as her father. He was a stranger to her, never giving her the time of day. Winnie's mother was beautiful and educated, and together they lived the life of the pampered rich because of her mother's station in life. Winnie's life turns for the worse when her mother disappears for reasons unknown to the young girl. Winnie finds herself losing the protective life she had with her mother, the home she grew up in, and placed in the home of a distant relative, to be treated like a second class citizen. Her life is never the same again.
Because of her new station in life, Winnie is destined to never marry, but through a fluke of fate, she ends up marrying a man that should have been destined for her cousin Peanut. However, after they are married, Winnie finds out that this husband is not the romantic wonderful man he appeared to be during the beginning of their courtship. From this point in her life, she knows only unhappiness and suffering.
Winnie has to endure much during this marriage, including abuse, countless miscarriages and loss of children to sickness and poverty, and with the outbreak of war in China, she does not know what her future will be like. What finally brings her to America and to the husband that Pearl knows as her father, is for the reader to find out.
I highly recommend THE KITCHEN GOD'S WIFE. Although this book is not as fast a read as THE JOY LUCK CLUB, I found that the history of Winnie was fascinating, taking me to a country that I know so little about. The story of Pearl becomes second to Winnie's, but Winnie's story bridges the two stories together, as the reader finds by the end of the book.

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