A weekend of old Beijing style cooking

Five spice beef with potato

Diced beef slowly stewed in Chinese herbs and spices for 2 hours, then take out some of the nice beef sauce to cook the potato.  I’ve eaten potatoes in so many ways and I can tell you this is the best way of cooking potatoes!

Potatoes being cooked in rich beef sauce

This dish is such Beijingers’ favourite.  It can be eaten heartily with potatoes or rice noodles or just with seasonal vegetables.

The finished product - heaven!

Beijing style fried chicken

Eat your heart out KFC!  Best fried chickens are in town! 

The secrets?  No not 11 different herbs and spices but…

First, use free range chicks.  TV hasn’t been lying, happier chickens make for tastier food.

Second, the spices.  The ingredients we used were all fresh and easily sourced (salt, sugar, chilli powder, spring onions, ginger, garlic, fresh chillies, light and dark soy sauce, rice wine and vegetable oil).  I just had a quick search online, apparently the KFC original recipe chicken had MSG in it!!!  Oh how I hate MSG – right no more KFC from now on or rather, I will limit this to once a month going forward!

Chinese fried chicken served on Chinese newspaper - authentic!

Most efficient way to cook eggs

If you have a rice cooker at home, this is definitely the most efficient way to cook rice.  How peasant chic!

Just make sure you wash the eggs before hand!

No time to cook eggs - never again!

Stir fry enoki mushroom with cucumber

Ingredients

1 spring onion, thinly sliced

1 very small knob of ginger (about 1 cm cube), finely chopped

A bag of fresh enoki mushroom 100g, remove the stalks and wash

1 medium sized cucumber, finely sliced

1 tablespoon of vegetable oil

A pinch of salt

1 teaspoon of dark soy sauce

1 teaspoon of light soy sauce

Heat up the oil in a wok then add spring onion & ginger and fry for 30 seconds.  Add mushrooms and cucumber to the wok and stir fry for 1 minute.  After that add salt, dark and light soy sauce and stir fry for a further 3 minutes and you’re done!

You can’t get more simple but delicious meal than this – enjoy!

Note: you can buy enoki mushrooms from any Chinese supermarket.  They’re available fresh or canned.  You can find the fresh ones in the vegetable section.