Buddhists Eat Pork, Not Beef, Eat Clams, Oysters and Mussels, Too!

I was very much surprised to read in Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo that Chinese Buddhists eat some meat and fish. Throughout my life I had believed this to be just the opposite and no Buddhist would touch other than vegetables.

On page 35, under the topic of Oyster Sauce, she says this:

and more unusually on page 225 she says that they eat pork! Well, I never.

I cannot too highly recommend her cookbook for it's fresh take on Chinese ingredients and Hakka and Chiew Chow recipes, which are scattered throughout the book.

I have posted this as part of my collection of culinary ephemera.

Shui Mai (all variant spellings, elsewhere)

Dimsum, the Chinese heart's delight of the culinary kingdom are a labor of love. Not including the time to purchase the ingredients, it took me 3 hours to prepare, mix, assemble, and cook the delights. I haven't made these for over 10 years, but they truly are worth the time and effort, once-in-a-while.

If you have a large family and the help has dexterous fingers, the job is much easier.

16 ozs. ground pork
16 ozs. chopped shrimp
16 ozs. baby bok choy
2 scallions, mostly the white part, smashed
2 packages of dumpling wrappers
1/2 tsp. pepper
2 tsp. sesame oil
2 tsp. dark soy
2 tsp. light soy
2 tsp. Shaoxing wine
1 egg

Condiments:

Diluted Red Vinegar
Chile Sauce

I found a pound of shrimp, pre-cooked, but unpeeled. The next time I make this dish, I will but the 32-40 size shrimp, uncooked. As the shrimp must be peeled, you can do this task, while the water for blanching the  baby bok choy heats.

Break the egg in a mixing bowl and beat to mix with the remaining ingredients. Reserve, while the rest of the ingredients are prepped.

Cut the stem ends of the bok choy off. Save them for soup or stir-fry. Discard any leaves that are yellow¹. In a pot of boiling water, add the leaves. Return the pot to a simmer and keep a careful eye on the leaves. When the green color darkens, immediately remove the pot to the sink and run cold water on the leaves to stop the cooking. When the bok choy is the same temperature as the running water, remove them to a strainer or colander. Press the leaves between your hand, squeezing out excess liquid. If all the shrimp's shells are removed, you can proceed to remove the sand vein, by slicing along the top and removing the black line (vein) that is visible. If you cannot remove all of it, that's not a problem. When the shrimp are cleaned, using a Chinese cleaver chop the shrimp into a mince. Put it into a large mixing bowl. Cut the top from the scallions using one to two inches of the green. Smash the scallions and then mince them and add them to the bowl.

Next mince the well drained baby bok choy. Add it to the shrimp. Add the ground pork and mix all these ingredients. I wear nitrile (latex) gloves to do this. Don't overwork this mixture, the pork fat will warm from the heat of your hands. So mix only 30 to 60 seconds. Next add the egg mixture and mix again, this time for 90 seconds.

For the making of the dimsum I find a place to sit. With the shrimp and pork mixture, a small bowl of water, the wrappers and a paper towel, the making proceeds like this:

Fold Diagonally

If your fingers and thumb are moist, dry them on the paper towel. Take one wrapper and put the top edge facing way from you. This makes the wrapper look like a star not a square. With your index finger dipped in water, moisten the perimeter of the wrapper, the width of your finger. Next put one teaspoon of mix in the center. Fold the wrapper to make it look like a triangle as pictured above. (I'm left handed, so your wonton will point to the left, not the right, like mine.) Fold one end over the other. Click to enlarge the picture, below, to see what the wonton is folded like.

Place the wonton on a tray. I have my tray lined with foil, but if you have a plate you can use it. The wontons will stick where they have been moistened so they must be kept somewhat separate. 

When about 76 wontons are made, you can either freeze them. For freezing, they must be kept separate. The wrappers will tear if they are frozen together. On a plate or tray, place the wontons in the freezer, turning them at 30 minutes. After another 30 minutes turn again. If they are frozen, then can be put in a freezer bag and kept. I cannot say how long, but I would (educated) guess at 30 days.

If you are going to make them immediately, bring 4 quarts of water to a boil. Add the wontons, when the pot returns to a boil, add ½ cup of water. The pot ceases to simmer. When the pot again simmers, the wontons are ready to serve. This method of adding more water makes the proper cooking time much easier. There is no exact cooking time! Yay!

¹ If you are a careful shopper, you will buy the package of bok choy that have no yellow leaves. If the bok choy has been in your refrigerator and the tops of the leaves have yellowed, trim that away.

LIttle Ma's Recipe Corner

I love Chinese food. Sometimes, when I think about Chinese food my thoughts run this way: There has been for the better part of my life, approximately 1 billion Chinamen. And even when I was a youth, that great number of people at at least one meal a day. By 2008, as I write this, the likelihood of the Chinese population eating more than one meal a day is good. So, for approximations sake, that is 1 billion 200 million hungry folks eating twice a day or 16 billion 800 million meals a week. Is it any wonder that the Chinese have had to eat all available ingredients. Is it any wonder that the creativity of Chinese cuisine is so outstandingly varied.

And towards that end, I share:

China Vista
http://www.chinavista.com

yet, for simplicities sake:

Welcome to Little Ma's Recipe Corner
http://www.topren.net/travel/culture/cuisine/recipes.html

which is where the recipes are. Some of the recipes list ingredient names which I cannot translate or which are not available in the United States. Sometimes, the instructions are hard to comprehend. I will give a few recipe samples to tease the palate.

Hunan Dishes

Unrobed Eels
Materials:
300g eels
50g soaked slices of bamboo shoots
25g fragrant mushrooms
50g fresh green peppers
25g coriander
1. Preparations: Skin and bone the eels, scald and slice.
2. Put the slices into a mixture of egg white, cornstarch and seasonings, stir-fry in 50% heated oil.
3. Slice bamboo shoots, fragrant mushrooms and green peppers, stir-fry in 80% heated oil, add the sliced eels and cooking wine, toss a few times.

Unrobed most like means skinned. Fragrant mushrooms means shitake mushrooms: "In Chinese, it is called xiānggū (香菇, literally "fragrant mushroom")." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiitake. And coriander is what we in the West, commonly refer to as Cilantro leaves. Seasonings would be five spice powder, or roasted and ground Szechuan pepper.

The quantities called for in this recipe would be enough for three people, if there were two or three more courses.


Another Hunan dish:

Red Peppers Stuffed with Pork

500g red and green peppers
300g pork mince
15g prawns
15g mushrooms soaking in water
1 egg
50 garlic

1. Preparations: Rinse and finely chop the prawns and mushrooms, add to the minced pork, then add eggs, MSG and salt stir together with cornstarch to make a filling.
2. Cut off the ends of the peppers, remove the seeds, stuff with filling, seal the ends with dissolved cornstarch, deep-fry till 80% done and remove.
3. Put the peppers into a bowl with the ends done [down?], sprinkle garlic cloves over them and steam till done, drain off the soup stock, turn the bowl upside down on a plate.
4. Add seasonings [five spice powder?] to the soup stock, bring to the boil, thicken, pour over the peppers.

Seal the ends with dissolved cornstarch I take to mean, reserve the tops of the bell peppers. Stuff the peppers, and using the cornstarch as a glue, glue the tops back on the peppers.

As for the "deep-fry until 80% done", that is very hard for me to guess. The recipe doesn't say whether the pork mince is previously cooked, which is important. If the pork is cooked the 80% is probably 4 to 6 minutes. Otherwise if raw pork, 8 to 10 minutes. While the peppers are in the hot oil, bring a steamer up to steaming hot. The bell peppers used are tiny by comparison with American bell peppers. I've never seed such small peppers in Chinatown here in Los Angeles.



Sichuan Dishes
1 duck (500g)
150g pork shreds
25g pickled chilli shreds

Preparations

1. Clean and scald the duck, then wipe dry; coat the skin with sugar solution, leave to dry.
2. Stir-fry pork shreds in a wok, add thick chilli bean sauce, mustard greens, pickled chilli shreds, five spices powder (prickly ash, star aniseed, sinnamon, clove, fennel), cool.
3. Put the pork shreds into the duck and seal up the duck's anus, stew till done, take out, remove the pork shreds, and mustard greens.
4. Cut the duck into slices, place on a plate together with pork shreds, mustard greens, pancakes and sauce.

Pickled chiles are available at Asian markets. Typically red in color, they come in a brine. Using gloves, remove some from their jar, and shred them lengthwise. For the pork shreds, use any cut of pork, but remove all the fat first. As the recipe call for 500g(rams) of duck, that would be a very small duck. One pound is 450 grams. Serve with mu shu wrappers and Chinese Sweet & Sour sauces.