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Walk into almost any Asian bakery and you never fail to find milk bread lined up next to its siblings: milk bread with raisin, taro, red bean, matcha, and so many more. But the OG plain milk bread is always the most versatile.
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Claypot fuzzy melon with vermicelli was once a classic in traditional Cantonese restaurants back home, yet it’s a dish I rarely see on Bay Area Cantonese menus. At first, I assumed this was because ingredients like fuzzy melon or red fermented bean curd were hard to find. But over time, I noticed that this dish has also been quietly disappearing from restaurant menus back home, so that theory didn’t quite hold up.
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When I was growing up in Guangzhou, every now and then my mom and grandma would bring home Teochew (4hr drive from GZ) meat loaf from the market. These cylinder-shaped loaves would be sliced thin and pan-fried, or cut into strips and stir-fried with noodles or vermicelli. Simple, comforting, and very much a taste of home. The recipe turned out to be much easier than I expected and now I can recreate a beloved childhood delicacy anytime and share it with friends.
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It genuinely hurts me when my partner orders a $20.99 salt-and-pepper pork rib dish at a restaurant and the plate arrives with… eight tiny pieces of ribs. Eight. Altogether barely the size of two palms. That disappointment, combined with my love for anything fried, salty, and peppery (pork ribs, chicken wings, you name it), pushed me to recreate this classic Cantonese dish at home.
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In the cold winter months, I always find myself craving bossam at Korean restaurants. But in the Bay Area, this dish often starts at $40 or more, which usually nudges me toward ordering something more affordable instead. Turns out, bossam is much more straightforward to make at home than I expected.
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The spring roll with an air pocket is my favorite dish at Fuhuihua, the new and buzzworthy Chinese fine-dining restaurant in San Francisco. When I first saw Chef Ge serving a spring roll, I was skeptical, how different could it really be? But the moment I bit into it, the top layer cracked gently like flaky pastry. Beneath that dramatic air pocket, Chef Ge had hidden the ocean itself: crab leg, crab roe, fish maw, and fish fin.
