Her--Asian and Western Cuisine

I’ve gotten used to most things after six years in the MidWest except one: food. I enjoy the American meal that I often cook or eat out, but most of the time, I will choose to cook Asian style meals. There were times that I spent going a week without Asian food, and those were terrible weeks for me. When I think about food back home, I often ask myself if I really preferred living here. There are just way too many food delicacies that I grew up with, that I can no longer dine here. There is a saying that goes: you will always miss the food you grew up eating.

We usually like to have meals served warm in my country. In fact, it is quite unusual to see cold dishes like salad or sandwiches. Moreover, we also look for meals with a variety of colors – greens from vegetables, brown from livestock meat, red from fish and seafood, etc. We consider the perfect meal to be one composed of dishes of different colors and served with soup. We enjoy a variety of fresh stir fry vegetables, accompanied with staple food – either rice, noodles or steamed buns.

Many of our dishes are stir-fried in a wok. I like stir-frying as it is much healthier than deep fry, but is pretty easy and quick to make! Stir-fry also consumes the most simplest and common ingredients that is is hard not to be able to do so. Here are some tips to stir-frying almost anything:

To stir-fry, we start by heating the wok with a generous amount of oil in it. when the oil become warm enough, we add a little pinch of spices to bring out the flavor such as garlic, ginger, pepper or aniseed, etc. Once the flavor from the spices are apparent, we will start to continue adding the meat or veggies for stir-frying. Some common combinations include: tomatoes and eggs, meat and green veggies.

While rice and noodles can be found in Asian stores in the MidWest, steamed buns are a specialty that you can’t find here. It is usually made to have a smooth and soft texture, with a hint of sweetness. Best of all, it is also pretty simple to make! The bun itself is made from white fermented flour, and steamed to cook. The process is pretty similar to making pizza dough:

We first mix the white flour with yeast (dry or wet both works fine) in a 5:1 ratio. Then, we slowly and incrementally add water to the mix. This process involves constantly mixing the flour, water and yeast together with our hands. Water should be added a small amount at a time while mixing. The key here is to form an elastic dough that is mixed well, similar to a pizza dough. The dough is then left at room temperature to ferment for 3 hours. Once done, chunks of the dough are taken out at a time to form small circular buns. The buns are then placed in a steam basket, steaming for 30-45 minutes. To test for completeness, the bun should not stick when poked slightly with a fork or chopstick.

I still make asian meals almost daily because it really like comfort food for me. However, I still enjoy the different kinds of food here in the MidWest which I will be expanding more on in a later post!

#HeGao