I still remember my first meal at the China Moon Café in 1987. I was in my firm’s San Francisco office as part of my weekly Chicago to Tampa to San Francisco and back circle that I endured for over three months that year. It was a Thursday night and one of our Chicago Partners was also in town. She had been instrumental in hiring me five years earlier and knew that I liked good food. She asked me if I had ever been to China Moon, and while I had been cooking from Barbara Tropp’s, The Modern Art Of Chinese Cooking for a few years, I had never been to her restaurant. I didn’t need to be asked twice to eat in her cooking. A few hours later we were sharing some of the most heavenly Chinese food I had ever eaten at the time, and I will never forget the velvety texture of her scallops…mmmm! She had obviously worked as hard to master the country's cuisines as she had its language and culture, and it was encouraging to confirm that skill in an ethnic cuisine had nothing to do with ethnicity.
My formative culinary years and I spent most of them in Central Pennsylvania, Northern Virginia, New York and New England consuming tired Cantonese cooking and tired Cantonese food loaded with chiles that masqueraded as Szechuan cooking. By the early 1980s I began studying and cooking Chinese food in self defense. I haunted the Asian markets on both the Northside and Southside of Chicago, often asking my Taiwanese friends to translate the labels for me or shed light on the unfamiliar. I had two teachers who in my mind were the very best to put pen to paper on Chinese cooking, and wok to fire, Irene Kuo and Barbara Tropp. With The Key To Chinese Cooking, Irene taught me the basics about ingredients and techniques, and with The Modern Art Of Chinese Cooking, Barbara taught me combination and nuance. I chewed their words over and over again, savoring their wisdom during the decade, and when, over a series of meals, I received the grudging approval of a number of my Chinese and Taiwanese friends, I knew all of my efforts hadn’t been in vain.
Four flavors seemed to pop up in many of the recipes from these two women that I successfully mastered in those days, ginger, garlic, green onion, and chile. Irene’s Szechuan Eggplant with its vinegary sweet heat was a plate cleaner, but my Taiwanese friends informed me that it was really known as Fish Flavored Eggplant since they believed that the combination of ingredients including ginger, garlic, green onion, and chile oil gave it a flavor reminiscent of fish. Barbara’s Four Spiced Pork With Spinach with its sweet heat also wowed them, and it relied on ginger, garlic, green onion, and dried chile. These two recipes are points from which I often improvise as I did the other night.
Equal parts of ginger, garlic, and leeks (instead of green onion) along with 1-1/2 dried Sivri Aci chiles became my flavor base. I marinated my thinly sliced ‘boneless country ribs’ (aka pork shoulder strips) in tamari, sherry, and a touch of sesame oil for one hour. I stir fried 1/3 of my flavor base until I could smell the garlic cooking, added the pork and stir fried for a few minutes more. I removed the pork, returned the pan to the heat, added more oil and the remainder of the base. After a few moments, I added young broccoli florettes and ½ cup of pork stock and I stirred to combine. I lowered the heat and covered for two to three minutes. I stirred the mixture again, added back the pork, stirred, added a mixture of sherry, tamari, sesame oil, and a few twists of black pepper, and stirred again. Two minutes later I turned off the heat and served the dish on steamed short grain rice. Thank you again ladies.
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