• 26Feb

    Choosing a good Chinese recipe can be hard if you have never prepared much Chinese food in the past. With ingredients you may not be used to and cooking styles you are unfamiliar with, it might seem a little scary when looking through recipes.

    Its best to start with something easy and fun unless you are an experienced cook or you know exactly what you want. If you absolutely love pot stickers, you might try making those.

    For most people, the best Chinese recipes to start with are single course dishes. The easiest are usually rice, a few vegetables and one kind of meat.

    If you get more complex than that, you might have too much going on at once and it can feel overwhelming. Its very easy to start some rice and cook your meal while the rice is cooking.

    Rice usually takes about 20 minutes and it should take about that long to cut some meat and vegetables and get them cooking. Stir fry is the easiest thing to cook. Its basically meat and vegetables seared over high heat while stirring constantly.

    When choosing a Chinese recipe, you should keep in mind how many people you are going to feed. If its just a meal for one or two, you can get a little fancier and try a couple different types of sauce.

    If you are feeding kids, you cant go wrong with something familiar like sweet and sour chicken. If you try to serve up a bunch of Chinese bean pancakes, the kids might protest.

    Its always best to start small and try something familiar.

  • 22Feb

    Rice has always been a traditional part of Chinese life. Its cheap, filling, tastes great, and can be used in many different ways.

    Everyone has had steamed rice and fried rice and those two very simple dishes are a great addition to many different meals. More popular in the warmer Southern China, rice is grown all over the place and it has been for thousands of years.

    If you have a Chinese rice recipe that sounds great, just take your time and learn to cook rice first.

    Many people think rice is simple to cook and very hard to mess up. That couldnt be farther from the truth. Rice can be completely ruined in many ways.

    There could be too much water, too little water, it can be overcooked, undercooked, and burnt. Anyone who has had restaurant quality rice and then tried to recreate it has learned this lesson.

    Chinese recipes usually call for a specific type of rice that is cooked a certain way. If you think your jasmine rice will taste just as good a little crunchy, you are very wrong.

    Improperly cooked rice can annihilate even the most delicious Chinese recipe and the reaction from friends and family might turn you off from cooking Chinese food for a long time.

    The easiest way to cook rice is with a rice cooker. These are fairly cheap and automatically shut off when the rice is finished.

    You can never mess your rice up again as long as you follow the directions of the machine and the rice itself.

    By adding perfect rice to accompany a great Chinese recipe, you will have a much better reaction from everyone who eats it.

  • 19Feb

    Chinese noodle recipes can be very fun to make and the entire family can get involved. Many Chinese noodle recipes call for fresh homemade noodles.

    These are very easy to make. They usually use wheat or rice flour mixed with water and maybe some egg or milk (depending on the recipe) and then they get rolled out and cut.

    Of course, before you start on a recipe that calls for these types of noodles, you might want a recipe for the noodles themselves.

    These are in most cookbooks and all over the Internet. You should be able to find the perfect one in just minutes.

    In addition to rice, noodles are very important to Chinese culture and are a part of many different types of Chinese recipe.

    From very easy dishes that are just noodles, meat, vegetables and sauce to complex dishes that use very specific types of noodles, they are usually delicious.

    Noodles are typically boiled after they are made. Sometimes, a recipe might call for them to be fried in some kind of oil until they are crispy.

    Chinese noodles cook a lot faster than Italian pasta because the ingredients are different and the shapes vary greatly.

    The boiled noodles can be used in soups, stir fry, with a hearty sauce, or almost anything. Noodles can also be substituted for rice in many different dishes.

    You can always buy noodles from the store or an Asian market for your cooking and this decreases the time you will spend in the kitchen and is a lot less mess.

    For families with kids, making the noodles from scratch can be a fun bonding experience and might help get your kids interested in all types of cooking.