I Am Very Tall

I got my cook on today. It took me a little longer than expected to get all the ingredients I needed to start rolling out the promised Chinese goods. Part of it was that it apparently takes a week for things to be delivered from Brooklyn to the Upper West side. Part of it was that Western grocery stores in the UWS don't seem to carry ground pork(!). Must be a Jewish thing. And part of it was that I still needed one or two additional ingredients, which required me going all the way down to China town.

Today, all the pieces came together.


The first dish that I made is generally referred to as "Ants climbing up a tree," or ma yi shang shu. It's generally called that because as you pick up the noodles (which are kind of hard to see, due to blurriness), the ground pork tends to stick to the strands, resembling ants climbing up a tree. It was pretty quick and came out with the right balance of meat, noodles, and spice, at least for me. Pudge has no ability to eat spicy food, which is pretty surprising considering her upbringing.

The process was relatively easy, as are most of the recipes that I've seen in the book. What struck me was that the dish actually requires you to reduce chicken stock, which I wouldn't have expected. I always figured that you just have the noodles mixed up with spicy ground pork and you're good. Instead, you add chicken stock to the whole mix at the very end and then reduce it, allowing all of the flavors to mix together.

The other dish that I made was a simple kung pao chicken, or gong bao ji ding. I changed the recipe a bit, because I'm not such a big fan of peanuts in my food. I also reduced the number of chili peppers in the dish, in order to better suit Pudge's palate.

The dish came out pretty well, although probably not as well as the first one. The peppers probably cooked a bit too long and ended up being a bit darker than I would have wanted. I should probably have kept the garlic, ginger and scallions in larger, chunkier pieces. I may have also put in too much corn starch, making the sauce a bit thicker and clumpier than it should have been. Also, the dish's color came out much browner than expected, making it into more of a "chicken in strange brown sauce." Still, it tasted pretty good in the end.

So far, I've made these dishes and a dish of dry-fried string beans with pork (gan bian si ji dou). Regrettably, I didn't take a picture at the time, but they generally look something like this.
Like everything else, the beans came out tasting pretty good. While there's definitely a little fine-tuning to be done for each of the dishes (I'd probably cut the amount of oil and soy sauce by a notch), they have all come out beyond my expectations. If anyone out there is looking for a good set of Chinese recipes, I would definitely recommend Fuchsia Dunlop's book.