Notes about Recipes in this book

• Steamed black mushrooms (Gai yau dong gu)

  • B2T on March 23, 2020

    A lovely recipe with an even more lovely technique. How to get juicy succulent flavor into Chinese dried shitake mushrooms. A recipe that goes”...several steps further.” and is “...a basic necessity.” I cooked this in two ways, adding some “DRIED BLACK FUNGUS SLICE” (like true matchstick sized shreds of wood ear) and some frozen sea scallop pieces (sheltering in and using up some stock that I have in my house, oldest first) for tonight's dinner. Believe me, the additional ingredients in no way detracted from the final result of the mushrooms. The only hard part was saving some for tomorrow. Cooking notes: "I'm old and I can't feature adding soy sauce AND salt.” ...Upon tasting it after 30 min. (I stirred it a few times) “No way, it needs more salt.” Added a few shakes and some “Mushroom Flavored” dark soy sauce, and back in the steamer for another 10 minutes.

• Braised fresh bacon (Hangzhou kau yuk)

  • stef_iuirt1 on May 16, 2026

    We can't have soy sauce so used tamari. Wanted mushroom flavor in there so dropped a handful of the shiitake snacky mushrooms from Costco and it worked!!

• Fried noodles (Chau mien)

  • hillsboroks on March 04, 2022

    This was a fun and tasty dish although I cheated a bit. I used the extra Char Diu pork I had leftover from a recipe in “Asian-American” by Dale Talde and varied the vegetables a bit. But I did add the fresh ginger and the fresh mung bean sprouts. I was able to find a package of the Chinese noodles and they turned out really well. The sauce was great, both easy to put together and it added good flavor to the dish. My husband loved this and thought it was better than many of the chow mien dishes he’s had at local Chinese restaurants.