Bean curd with pine flower preserved eggs

As the year winds down and 2016 finally comes to an end, All Under Heaven continues to hang out with some really great books. I still can’t believe that this is happening, but here you go:

Epicurious has my book up there with goddesses like Dorie Greenspan, as well as friends like Jeffrey Yoskowitz. Each and every one of these books is now on my Must Have List. I can think of fewer honors that make me happier than sharing a shelf with these great food writers. Please buy their books!

Check out Munchies - it's always good

Munchies reproduced my Mapo Doufu recipe on its website. If you are wondering what to cook for dinner this week, look no further. I am so proud of this truly authentic and very flavorful rendition of a Chengdu classic.

Public Radio station WBUR just published “7 Recipes from Resident Chef Kathy Gunst’s Favorite Cookbooks of 2016.” It shortlists only four titles, but Chef Gunst goes on to note, “If you, or anyone on your list, love Chinese food, this is your book.... The charming illustrations were drawn by Phillips and even though there’s not a photograph in sight, her writing and very clearly written recipes will make you want to cook your way through China, and this book.”

I ask you, could you find better company to be in?

Eat Your Books is having a cookbook giveaway, and that book is All Under Heaven! This contest ends on January 12, so hurry on over, become a free member of Eat Your Books (it is SO worth it!), and join the fun.

And finally, the wonderful Marc Schermerhorn gives All Under Heaven two thumbs up on his blog, Baketard, where he posts my beloved recipe for Dry-Fried Chicken Wings and talks about cooking from the book with his friends, who gave the book super high points: 

Marc's wings

“Recently I invited a group of friends over to explore the book that in my opinion is THE cookbook of the year, Carolyn Phillips’ comprehensive tome on Chinese cookery, All Under Heaven: Recipes from the 35 Cuisines of China. I have a large cookbook library, and Chinese cookbooks, both from the US and around the world, are the second largest section in my collection -- second only to Italian. None of my books come close to covering the breadth of Chinese cuisine explored in Carolyn’s book. Not even close. This book blew us all away. We made 10-12 dishes together, and Every. Single. Dish. Was amazing. Every one! We always rate dishes between 1-10. Nothing was less than a 9. That never happens.” 

And then he says, "You want this book. Trust me. This is THE book of 2016, IMO." Thank you, Marc, for such a great Festivus present!

*  *  *

Today we have a classic East China appetizer – another incredibly simple yet dazzling combination from the Yangtze River area. 

Back in the early 1980's, the one place my husband and I could always count on to do this dish right was a wonderful mid-priced restaurant in downtown Taipei, Fùxīngyuán 復興園. We became such regular customers there that, as soon as we walked in the door, the cook would prepare this dish just the way I liked it — with an extra egg — and it would be set on our table only sec­onds after we’d been poured hot tea.

Snowflake patterns under the shell

Generally referred to as simply pidan doufu, or bean curd with preserved eggs, this dish relies on the quality of the ingredients, the perfect ratio of bean curd to egg, and the proper execution of the tangy sauce that tops it. The bean curd must be the soft, custardy type, and the preserved eggs should be of the pine flower (songhua) variety, meaning that crystalline patterns have formed under the shells.

Preserved eggs get a bad rap because of their appear­ance and the touristy names associated with them: “thousand-year-old egg” or “century egg” or even “mil­lennium egg.” The fact is, they’re not at all old, and they should be enjoyed while they are relatively fresh because they will dry out if left out for too long. When opened, the whites will have turned a clear, dark amber, and the yolks will be runny and grayish green but taste remarkably buttery.

A long-time favorite

I once was at lunch with a good American Chinese friend in Taipei. She had her young daughter in tow, and of course when the pidan were served, the daughter was horrified at having black eggs plunked in front of her. I grabbed a big wedge, stuck it in my face, and made all sorts of yummy sounds before saying, “Ooooh, Jello eggs...” She bought it, and proceeded to devour what remained on the plate.

And that, my friends, is marketing. Happy holidays!

Bean curd with pine flower preserved eggs

Sōnghuā pídàn dòufŭ 松花皮蛋豆腐

Hubei and Jiangxi

Serves 4 to 6

2 or 3 preserved eggs

1 block (14 ounces / 400 g) soft bean curd (see Tips)

2 tablespoons Sichuan pickled tuber

1 green onion, green parts only

2 tablespoons coarsely chopped cilantro

½ teaspoon sea salt

Get a good brand from Taiwan

1 teaspoon sugar

1 teaspoon pale rice vinegar

1 teaspoon black vinegar

¼ cup / 60 ml toasted sesame oil

1. Peel the eggs, rinse them gently to remove any tiny bits of shell, and slice them into thin wedges.

2. Bring a small saucepan half full of water to a boil and slip in the block of soft bean curd; bring the water to a boil again and then discard the water and carefully rinse the hot bean curd under cool tap water. Drain well and place on a cutting board. Cut the bean curd lengthwise in half and then cut it crosswise into thin pieces (⅛ to ¼ inch / 3 to 6 mm wide). Use your knife to gently lift up the fragile slices and fan them out on a rimmed serving plate. Arrange the sliced eggs on top.

Sichuan pickled tuber from my grocer's bin

3. Rinse the pickled tuber and chop it very finely. Thinly slice the onion greens. Scatter the pickled tuber, green onion, and cilantro over the top of the eggs. Boil the salt, sugar, vinegars, and sesame oil in a wok over high heat until they bubble furiously, but not so long that the sugar burns; taste this mix­ture and adjust as necessary, then drizzle it over the greens to wilt them. Serve slightly warm.

Tips

You can use either “soft” or “extra-soft” bean curd here. But keep in mind that although the extra-soft kind will taste very good, it might look messier, as it tends to fall apart easily.

The bean curd is quickly blanched in this recipe to gently firm it up (so that it’s easier to slice) and to remove any scent of the packaging.

My go-to brand

Use care when selecting the eggs and the bean curd. Get soft, organic, non-GMO bean curd (aka, doufu or tofu). The taste is so much better. And the eggs should preferably be from Taiwan, which tends to make good quality preserved eggs with tender whites and creamy centers. Poor quality ones will be rubbery on the outside and hard on the inside. 

Check to see that the packages says that "no lead" was used. Unleaded would - in a perfect world - refer only to gasoline. But unfortunately some unscrupulous manufacturers stoop to horrible practices in making their preserved eggs. Good ones do exist, though. This one in the photo with the yellow packaging has always served me well, and I usually find those "pine flowers" underneath the shell. 

Chili goop so good it's addictive

I recently made a big batch of this rich, gravelly paste and packed it up into little jars so that I could give it to some good friends who are chiliheads like me. And also like me, they devoured it with pleasure.

Flaky Hunan-style chili paste is one of my absolute favorite things to have around the kitchen. It smells terrific, the nutty and spicy aromas acting as some sort of potent pheromones as far as I am concerned.

And the taste… a light heat, a gentle chewiness, a subtle saltiness, and an amazing depth of flavor makes this a great, basic chili concoction that goes with just about everything short of cheesecake, and now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure it would be good there, too.

Welcome to my addiction

Even though this is from Hunan, it is not incredibly hot. Rather, the coarse, relatively seedless dried chilies create a warm base that vibrates gently on the tongue. This contrasts perfectly with the chopped fermented black beans, which serve to tantalize the taste buds through their salt and that savory, meaty flavor the Chinese call xiān 鮮 (and what the Japanese refer to as umami).

Binding them all together is another ingredient, one I have come to positively adore: toasty tea oil. Pressed from the seeds of the camellia that produces actual tea leaves, kŭcháyóu 苦茶油 (literally, bitter tea oil) is a nutty amber liquid that is used throughout the south-central provinces of Hunan and Jiangxi for cooking and tossing with pickles. Not every Chinese grocery store carries it, but I usually locate it in a place that carries lots of Taiwanese goods.

Taiwanese tea oil

And that is another point: get the Taiwanese product, which (to my mouth, at least) tastes unadulterated. It’s not especially cheap—around $6 for about 600 ml.—but it is worth it.

Tea oil also has a very high smoke point, making this great for deep- and stir-frying. Again, that gentle nuttiness also acts as an extra layer of seasoning, so I use this to fry lightly flavored ingredients where it can shine.

Strangely enough, though, it holds its own against the dried chilies and fermented black beans here. I think this is because it is so totally different in flavor from the other two ingredients that it hits some different sensory receptors. Or maybe it’s just me.

Just a warning, but if you end up loving this as much as I do, you will find yourself eating the goop as is, or else loading enough of it on your food that it's a bit embarrassing. I will make scrambled eggs, for example, and drown them in this delicious crunch, those full flavors finding the perfect partner in the soft yellow curds on my plate. My husband tends to butter his toast at moments like this and just raise his eyebrows at my obscenely-laden eggs. To each his own, I guess.

Chop the beans

So, you can see that I am an addict for the goop in this recipe, and because of that you will find a very large ratio of solids to oil here. If you want more oil in order to turn this into a mingyou, add another ½ to 1 cup of oil to the recipe. Store it in the fridge if you don’t plow through it as fast as I do. Mine never gets old enough to turn stale.

Hunan-style chili paste

Xiàngshì làjiàng  湘式辣醬

Hunan
Makes 1½ cups

1 cup fresh oil, preferably tea oil, but any flavorful vegetable oil will do

1 cup coarse Korean chili flakes with very few seeds

½ cup fermented black beans, rinsed and coarsely chopped

1. Pour the oil into a cold wok. Add the chili flakes and black beans. Turn on the heat to medium or a bit higher and cook this trio, stirring every once in a while as they start to bubble.

Nirvana in the making

2. When the chili flakes start to brown and the oil is a deep red, stir pretty much constantly to keep the flakes from burning. It is very important that you toast the chilies and black beans long enough for their characters to change: for the chilies to turn from slightly sour and soft to toasty and crunchy, and for the beans to become chewy and release their aromas into the oil, and therefore into the chilies. 

3. After about 15 minutes, when the flakes are a very dark color and taste very nutty, remove the wok from the heat. (Be careful not to let them burn.) You will know they are ready when they sound gravelly as you stir them; plus, they will smell insanely delicious. Scoop the oil and solids into a bowl or a clean jar, let them come to room temperature, and cover; refrigerate or can them for longer storage.

Pop Art sweet soup for the New Year

We're now partway through the fifteen-day long celebration that is Chinese New Year, and here is a dish that is welcome any time during this season, but especially on the Lantern Festival, which falls on Sunday the 24th this year.  

The New Year started on a new moon, and this long annual party will culminate on the first full moon, which is called Yuánxiāojĭe 元宵節. To welcome that bright, round moon, people eat balls made out of rice dough, such as the ones in today's recipe.

Sticky rice, also known as nuòmĭ or glutinous rice or sweet rice, is popular all over China. It is especially prominent in dishes from the southern coastal areas, where it has become a staple of many of the local cuisines. Outside of these areas, though, it mainly appears as a flour that is mixed with cool water to form a paste, and this is then either boiled, steamed, or fried. And despite the suggestion of its popular English name, “sweet rice flour,” nuòmĭfěn is bland. It is what you either add to or accompany the paste that turns this into a magical ingredient.

One of the most popular uses for glutinous rice flour is to form tāngyuán, the rice-dough balls that are beloved in so many parts of China and are also an integral part of both the Winter Solstice and Lunar New Year celebrations. Large or small, stuffed or plain, sweet or savory, deep-fried or boiled, I for one never can get enough of them.

The most unusual recipe for the tinier of these soup balls I've found, though, is this one from Jiangxi province. Because of the tangerines in the soup (they are a symbol of good luck because the character for tangerine –jú 橘 – sounds something like good fortune – jí 吉), this becomes an particularly auspicious dish for the New Year.

Knead the dough til soft

Unaccountably unknown outside of the southern province of Jiangxi, Rice Pearl and Tangerine Petal Soup is truly worthy of greater fame for many other reasons. For one, the canned mandarin segments that usually are consigned to the thankless duty of dressing up a Jello mold finally get to strut their stuff here. Both their brilliant orange hue and their slight tartness work as the perfect foils for the slightly sweet broth and the plain little rice pearls. To make this even more of a holiday dish, I've colored the rice flour with a bit of red food coloring, giving this dish a definite Pop Art flavor.

(This is lovely enough for Valentine's Day, too!)

Rice pearl and tangerine petal soup 
Júgēng tāngyuán 橘羹湯圓 
Jiangxi

Serves 4 to 6

Rice pearls:

½ cup glutinous rice flour (mochi flour)

¼ cup cool filtered water

2 drops red food coloring, optional

Tangerines and soup:

2 cups filtered water

1 (11-ounce) can mandarin segments (including the juice)

2 to 3 tablespoons sugar or agave syrup

Make a long rope from the dough

1. First make the rice pearls by placing the rice flour in a medium mixing bowl. Make a small well on the side of the flour and pour the water there before adding the optional food coloring to the water. Use a silicone spatula to swirl the coloring into the water, and then mix this water into the flour to form a soft dough. Place the dough on a smooth surface and knead it briefly. Roll the dough out into a long rope about ½-inch thick and then break off or cut the rope into around 36 pieces. Roll each piece into a small ball. (These can be made ahead of time and frozen; see Tips.)

2. Bring the 2 cups water to a boil in a medium saucepan and then add the rice pearls in loose handfuls so that they do not stick together; stir after each addition to help separate the little balls. As soon as the water comes to a boil again and the pearls rise to the surface, add both the can of tangerine segments and its juice to the rice balls. Bring the pot to a boil once again and add sugar or agave syrup to taste. Serve immediately so that the rice pearls do not soften.

Tips

Roll the bits of dough into balls

I use Mochiko brand glutinous rice flour, but whatever brand you like is fine as long as it tastes fresh.

There are many different brands of canned mandarin (tangerine) segments out there; get one of good quality in a light syrup.

The rice pearls can be made ahead of time and frozen on a pan lined with plastic wrap. As soon as the rice pearls are hard, place them in a freezer bag and store for up to a couple of months. If the balls looked cracked or if the bag is full of ice crystals, discard and make a new batch.

Jiangxi's stir-fried bamboo shoots and cured pork

As I was perusing a Jiangxi cookbook, I came across a recipe that struck me for many reasons. 

First, it really shows how much Hunan cuisine has helped shape the cooking of Jiangxi. Second, it has fresh bamboo in it, and I will pretty much try anything if it has fresh bamboo shoots. 

And third, it calls for cured pork, and since I had a hunk of it whiling away in the fridge, this looked like the perfect recipe for dinner.

It's also a good recipe to show that -- as with Sichuan and Hunan cuisines -- the foods of Jiangxi are not always spicy. Rather, this one reveals the same gentle side that Hunan shows to people who grow to love her, one that soothes rather than startles. As with some of Hunan's great dishes, this one from Jiangxi features fermented black beans, or douchi.

Fermented black beans

If you've never tried fermented black beans before, you're in for a treat. They have a savoriness that is reminiscent of a really good soy sauce, an almost latent smokiness too, but since they're in compact little forms, they sparkle throughout a dish rather than make their presence known absolutely everywhere. 

So, when you take a bite of something that has been judiciously seasoned with douchi, like this one here for example, what happens is that another strong flavor will probably hit your palate first -- in this case the cured pork -- and then you'll most likely start paying attention to the shredded leaks with their herby, oniony flavor, and only when you bite down into a piece of fermented bean will you really notice them. 

They are slightly chopped, of course, so that some of their pungency gets a chance to be acquainted with the other ingredients, but by and large the rest of the flavor will sit there quietly in the rest of the bean and wait for the change to pounce on your taste buds.

Sliced cured pork

The other ingredient here is the cured pork, or larou. The character la refers to the last month of the lunar year, which stretches out over the last weeks of winter, and this is when meats like this would be at their prime in the good old days before refrigeration. 

As in the West, pigs were butchered in autumn when they were at their fattest, and the vast majority of the meat was preserved for use throughout the cold months.

Cured pork -- also known as gammon -- is pretty simple to make, and my late father-in-law was known to take a nice piece of fresh pork with the skin still on it, rub salt and saltpeter and seasonings into it to marinate and cure it, and then let it hang in a cool, dark place for about three days until it had dried out a bit, much like salt-cured ham. At that point it could be smoked or just refrigerated. Sometimes when you slice and fry it, the cured pork will take on a beautiful sheen and look like a beautiful fire opal in your pan!

Rainbow opalescence in frying gammon

Cured pork is popular in many areas of China, and each place has its own special way of doing it. However, unless you eat a lot of larou or just want to try your hand at it, it's easier just to buy a good piece at a Chinese grocery, especially around the Spring Festival (aka Chinese New Year). 

They come in pound or so pieces vacuum packed, and you can keep the unopened package in a cool place. Once opened, keep the meat dry or else it will mold; just cut off what you want and pack the rest in an air-tight bag or container.

Jiangxi style bamboo shoots stir-fried with leeks and cured pork 
Ganshi dongsun chao larou  贛式冬筍炒臘肉  
Jiangxi

Fresh sliced bamboo shoots

Serves 6 to 8 as part of a multicourse meal, or 2 to 3 as a main dish

2 large (winter) fresh bamboo shoots, or 4 frozen ones
1 inch ginger, peeled
8 ounces (or so) cured pork (see note above)
1 large leek
2 tablespoons fermented black beans (douchi, see note above)
6 tablespoons vegetable or peanut oil
6 tablespoons Shaoxing rice wine
1 teaspoon sugar, or more to taste
6 tablespoons stock, or filtered water plus a bit of sea salt
Roasted sesame oil

1. Peel and trim the bamboo shoots. Slice each one in half, and then slice them lengthwise into thin dominoes. Place them in a small saucepan, cover with salted water, simmer for 5 to 10 minutes until tender, and then drain.

2. Slice the ginger into very thin julienne. Rinse the pork and pat it dry; trim off and discard any skin, and then slice it against the grain into thin pieces about the same size as the bamboo. 

Clean the leak with the end attached

3. Cut the leek in half and trim off the dark green leaves as well as most of the roots, but leave on the hard end that holds the leaves together. Silt gets caught inside the leaves, so rinse the split leek carefully under running cool water; shake it dry, trim off the hard end, and then slice the leek into pieces about 2 inches long before cutting each section with the grain into thin julienne. Rinse the fermented black beans in a small strainer, shake dry, and coarsely chop.

4. Heat the oil in the wok over high heat until it starts to smoke. Add the ginger and quickly stir-fry it for a few seconds to release its fragrance before adding the pork. Stir-fry the pork until it begins to brown all over, and then toss in the bamboo shoots. 

5. Cook these together for about a minute, and then toss in the rest of the ingredients. Quickly stir-fry them (you don't want the leeks much more than barely done), taste to adjust the seasonings if needed, and then serve with a little drizzle of roasted sesame oil.

Jiangxi's three cup chicken with a Taiwanese twist

Taipei during the early eighties had a strip of little dives at the upper end of Zhongshan North Road, up in Tianmu where most of the foreigners lived. 

But unlike any of the other restaurants in the area, these "beer houses," or pijiu wu, mainly catered to a Chinese clientele that reveled in what can best be described as local and very Asian tapas. These little shacks were decorated with folk art, had bamboo paneling, and offered lots of good beer, but the real draw was the food.

On Friday nights when we didn't have to work late, we would meet friends at one end of the beer house section and slowly eat our way up the hill and back down, ordering small bites of whatever was the house specialty. Many offered Taiwanese seafood creations, like fresh little oysters in a fermented black bean and fresh chili sauce, or grilled shark, or whole boiled shrimp still in the shell. Other Taiwanese specialties were often on the menu, too, like popcorn chicken, and Chaozhou cuisine held its own against the cultural onslaught with its own seafood dishes and satay beef. All of it was meant to be washed down with the cold local pilsner, and all of it was extremely good.

The dish I looked forward to the most, though, was called Three Cup Chicken. Little morsels of chicken on the bone were served in a sticky, savory sauce with loads of crispy garlic cloves, fresh chilies and green onions, chewy ginger slices, and a big handful of basil leaves that perfumed the air as much as they did the chicken.

It wasn't that hard to figure out the basic recipe, since it's all in the title: three cups (wine cups, that is) of light soy sauce, sweet rice wine, and lard (or vegetable oil). With this basic ratio, it at first seemed that this would be little more than a matter of balancing out the other flavors so that the chicken ended up in a sticky, dark sauce redolent with garlic and ginger, decorated with the brilliant greens of scallions and fresh basil, and punctuated with scarlet chilies. What I finally figured out, though, was that somewhere along the way a very clever Taiwanese chef had substituted oyster sauce for the soy sauce, which provided a nice stickiness to the chicken and added another ever-so-slightly-fishy tang to the sauce. After reading up on the subject, I found out much to my surprise that the chilies and basil were notes that we should thank Taiwan for, too. And that is the Taiwan twist.

As with so many of the dishes here, you can balance the flavors to satisfy your tastes: the garlic can be cooked until it dissolves, or you can have barely cooked cloves livening up the party in your mouth. The white parts of the green onions can be added toward the end if you want more of a bite, and the chilies can be as hot or as mild as you like. It's easy to over-sweeten this dish, though, so try not to add more sugar unless it really needs it.

Jiangxi province

Three Cup Chicken hails from the little-known culinary gold mine called Jiangxi. An inland province to the west of Zhejiang and Fujian provinces, Jiangxi is usually lumped in with Jiangsu and Zhejiang and considered part of eastern Chinese cuisine. Well, maybe. But as I've cooked my way through some of its marvelous dishes, I've come to feel that (as with so many such categories) more attention was probably paid to the name rather than to the actual culinary influences in the area. For example, Jiangxi has Anhui to the north and both Hubei and Hunan encircling it to the left, with a toe in Guangdong and only a small shoulder nestled up against Zhejiang. As one Chinese author noted, Jiangxi's cuisine has strong flavors and features lots of oil, neither of which are anything like eastern Chinese cuisine.

So where does that put Jiangxi? Directly into the loving arms of hearty Hunan style cooking. Granted, Jiangxi is generally not as spicy as Hunan's, but Jiangxi's food revels in garlic, chilies, and sesame oil, and it has a creative streak that demands attention.

This was brought to mind when I recently watched a cooking show from Jiangxi that was trying to determine the best dishes the province had to offer. One chef that was interviewed figured that Three Cup Chicken was a shoo-in because it really is to Jiangxi what clam chowder is to Boston. He then demonstrated his recipe, placing a chopped-up hen he had just killed into a sandpot along with a wineglass full of sesame oil, soy sauce, and rice wine. I was not the least bit surprised that his dish did not win. The poor chicken didn't even get browned first, and nothing else was flavoring the sauce. What a waste of a nice hen.

Back in my beer house days, though, the Three Cup Chicken we ate was always a gorgeous assembly of herbs and vegetables, with just as much plant in there as meat, and the sauce was reduced to a lovely sheen, its flavors absorbed in the meat and guaranteeing an explosion of flavor with each bite. Basil doesn't deal with heat too well, so it was always presented as a huge garnish that we diners could then mix into the chicken, allowing us the savor the fresh, almost licorice taste of this beautiful herb before the chilies and garlic and tender chicken made themselves known.

I recommend using boneless chicken thighs here, but if you like to nibble on bones, chicken wings would make an admirable substitute. Just trim off the wing tips of 2 or so pounds of free-range chicken wings (use the tips for stock), and then whack the wings in two. In fact, if you are serving this as a beer house type of tapa, that would be just the ticket. And if you'd like to try the more traditional way of preparing this dish, check out Diana Kuan's recipe, but leave out the basil.

And if you are not in the mood for chicken, try the salmon variation I just cooked up; it's equally delicious. Jiangxi is famous for its freshwater fish, but I think that this would meet with approval if salmon ever came to be part of Jiangxi's cuisine.

Fry chicken in the sandpot

Three cup chicken 
Sanbei ji  三杯雞  
Jiangxi via Taiwan

Serves 6 to 8 as part of a multicourse meal

2 pounds boneless chicken thighs or 2 pounds chicken wings (see note above)
4 inches unpeeled ginger
16 whole cloves garlic
¼ cup vegetable or peanut oil
¼ cup oyster sauce
¼ cup Shaoxing rice wine
1 tablespoon roasted sesame oil
The white parts of 4 green onions, trimmed and diced into half-inch rounds
2 to 4 fresh red jalapeno chilies (or any other red chili), trimmed and cut into thin rings or half moons
The greens of 4 green onions, trimmed and diced
1 cup (packed) fresh basil, with the large leaves roughly chopped and all the stems removed

Reduce the sauce 

1. Rinse the chicken and pat it dry. Remove any tendons and cut the breast into 1-inch pieces, but keep the skin on.  If you are using wings instead of thigh meat, trim off the tip sections (use the wing tips for stock) and whack the rest of the wings in two. Slice the ginger into very thin pieces (you should have about half a cup); peel the garlic cloves and trim off the hard ends, but leave the cloves whole.

2. Heat the vegetable or peanut oil in a sandpot or wok until it starts to shimmer. Add the ginger slices and fry them over medium heat, stirring often, until they are golden and crispy; use a slotted spoon to remove them. Add the chicken to the ginger-scented oil and stir it as you fry it until the chicken is golden all over.  Pour in the oyster sauce, rice wine, and sesame oil, and toss in the fried ginger and the whites of the green onions. 

Three cup salmon

3. Bring the pot to a boil, cover it, lower the heat to medium-low, and then simmer the chicken until it is tender and the sauce has reduced by more than half. Add the whole peeled garlic and continue to gently cooked the sandpot with the cover on until only the oil remains at the bottom of the pot.  (The dish can be made ahead of time up to this point and reheated just before you add the final ingredients.)

4. Taste the sauce and adjust the seasonings. Toss in the chilies and the green parts of the onions. Sprinkle the basil over the top, place the lid back on the pot, and serve immediately with lots of hot rice and cold beer.

Variation:  For Three Cup Salmon, use 2 pounds of boneless salmon filets, but leave the skin on. Rinse the filets and pat them dry with a paper towel before cutting them into 2 by 1-inch strips (more or less). Fry the salmon with the skin side down first, but don't move it around until the skin is golden. Then turn it only two more times so that the fish doesn't break apart. Proceed with the recipe as above.

Map courtesy Wiki Commons