Chinese Cooking Class...

I haven't had a cooking class since before Christmas and now I have four coming up in the next few weeks. Today was Simple Chinese II. (No...I didn't attend the first Simple Chinese, but that wasn't a pre-req - so I was all good!)

Christine was our chef today and Susan attended with me - which always makes cooking more fun. Friends make cooking more social...

There were three dishes on our list today: Chinese Spring Rolls, Three Cup Chicken, and Deep Fried Gold Cake with Yam and Sweet Potatoes.

We started with the Chinese Spring Rolls as the filling needed to cool down before you could roll them in your wrappers.

Susan working on the filling

The filling itself would be great on rice or noodles...very flavorful...carrots, cabbage, ginger, spring onion, garlic chives, wood ear fungus (that was a new one for me!), minced chicken, soy sauce, and oyster sauce. What's not to like!?

Once the filling had cooled, we made the actual rolls and fried them. WOW! Yummy! And easy! We don't fry at home, but Christine said you could easily brush them with butter and bake them in the oven. Today...we splurged and fried them! Total deliciousness! (Blaine better hope he is home from work on time or they may be gone!)

Spring Rolls in various stages

Next was the Three Cup Chicken which is a traditional Taiwanese dish. I loved the dishes today because they were simple without a ton of different spices and ingredients - very easy to replicate at home. Three Cup Chicken has you searing your chicken pieces and then simmering them with ginger, garlic, sesame oil, soy sauce, Shao Xing wine, rock sugar, dark soy sauce, fresh chilies, scallions, and Thai basil. The dish becomes very dark and rich looking...and the sesame oil, herbs and soy sauces make it very fragrant.

Three Cup Chicken - Some of the ingredients

How good does the final dish look??

The last dish was dessert - Deep Fried Gold Cake with Yam and Sweet Potatoes. Gold Cake is a dessert that turns up primarily around Chinese New Year - which begins at the end of the week. (More on that later this week in the blog.) 

You essentially sandwich pieces of the Gold Cake between a thin slice of yam and sweet potato, dredge it in a batter and fry so that the Gold Cake gets warm and melty. (Is melty a word?)

The Gold Cake is in the top left corner. It is steamed in banana leaves. You take it out of the banana leaves and slice it into small chunks. Upper right corner shows the Gold Cake sandwiched between the yam and sweet potato. The final version is in the lower right corner.

Tonight I may dust a little powdered sugar on the dessert - just to sweeten it a little bit more. Christine said that the Gold Cake we used today was not as sweet as some you can buy.  I find that most Chinese desserts are not overly sweet - which is quite different from our American culture where sweet and sinful seem to go hand-in-hand! Nonetheless, this was an interesting combo!

Next week Thai cuisine on Thursday! Should be yummy! Looking forward to learning how to make my own Pad That!