Archive for the ‘vegetarian’ Category

Making kimchi

28Aug09

Kimchi is Korea’s national dish: fermented Chinese cabbage preserved in a spicy chili mixture. It tastes zingy, spicy and fresh at the same time and goes really well with all kinds of dishes, also with fried rice. In Korea, they have it with about every meal and the Koreans believe strongly in its healthy properties. […]


You know it by now, I love watching Chinese cooking videos – for example on YouTube- and getting new inspiration. The older Chinese cookbooks are to blame- they hardly have any photos, nor mouthwatering pictures, only boring pages with only characters, so you have to be super dedicated to really read it all without a […]


Of course the attractive thing of this salad is, first of all, its name.Laohu cai 老虎菜, ‘tiger vegetable’ or ‘tiger salad’ is an intriguing sounding dish which came into vogue in China in the past five years or so.I actually can’t tell you when exactly it came on the scene, since I have no recollection […]


Quick and elegant, that’s how I would describe this dish. Perfect as a pasta course, with just some grilled pork chop or lamb chop on the side, or a nice grilled fish or chicken. Or just a plain salad with goat’s cheese and bacon strips. Orzo looks like flecks of rice, but it is a […]


These cucumber strips might look too plain and simple to blog about. But in this miniseries on Chinese starters, you really can’t miss out on this one. It is actually the starter I order immediately with no second thoughts when see it on the menu – and in China that is almost always the case. […]


This Chinese starter scores high on the scary-looking exotic foods list. Although your guests can tell these blackish things probably won’t be monkey brains, they will not easily pick up their chopsticks to take a bite, until you tell them these are a must-try. These duck eggs, with their black translucent outside and gooey greenish-grey […]


With this second post, I am on my first steps in getting together a series of Chinese cold starters for hot days. Making a Chinese meal is difficult enough with all the prep work you have to do. It can be tough: cutting and shredding ingredients for hours on end, not even able to finish […]


On my last trip to China I saw this salad everywhere on the menu: a cold salad with finely shredded strips of tofu, almost resembling noodles, seasoned with sesame oil, garlic and cilantro. This is the kind of thing you order first to have with cold beers on a warm summer night, and you practice […]


Tomato sauce

18May08

One of the joys of coming home is to have this first meal. I always crave for the simple, and usually I end up eating my first meal of pasta with a tomato sauce. I could even do without the tomatoes and then only use anchovies, pepper and some garlic. Of course there is a […]


Yesterday I was, again, funshopping in the Asian store, choosing a different one then the large supermarket I usually go to. There are four Chinese supermarkets in the center of The Hague, and I visit them in turns, although I seem to skip the one in the Wagenstraat (长江行 Cheung Kong) because it is further […]


Being in a Chinese cooking mood, I decided to try out this staple of the Hunan kitchen: salted chiles (剁辣椒, duo lajiao). These chiles are supposed to go on steamed fish dishes, or accompany noodles and other treats. But buying them from a jar in the Chinese store might not get you the right stuff […]


One of the books I have cooked out of most extensively is Marcella Hazan‘s Marcella’s Kitchen. I bought it somewhere in the 90s and read it cover to cover. I came to understand so many techniques and basics of Italian cooking, while cooking a huge amount of recipes from the book. Marcella is an old […]


Fresh lily bulb

27Jan08

Roaming through Chinese supermarkets is certainly my idea of a good time. Holding a basket, I can go through all isles as if I have to study it all. I read the packaging for different brands, I hover above their frozen food section, I stare at their collection of vinegars (for example), and I check […]


This spread (or dip) is from a book on Georgian cooking, for which I wrote a review (at foodblog Zestz, in Dutch). With Georgia, I mean the country of Georgia, situated near the Black Sea, bordering with Russia, Turkey and Armenia, not the USA state of Georgia!There were quite a lot of interesting recipes in […]