Monday, February 06, 2012

Happy Lantern Festival!

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My veggies and tofu from my trip to Yulin wet market.

Today is the last day of the Lunar New Year, which is also known as Lantern Festival 元宵节. I was hoping to make tang yuan 汤圆 from scratch, but when I went to the market I decided to also make a Sichuan feast for dinner and completely forgot the ingredients for tang yuan! Actually it wasn't such a bad thing, I was able to focus completely on making my Sichuan food without worrying about making something too different than norman and without the assistance or instruction of my ayi.

I took my Sichuan Cookery book to the market with me and decided to make something heavy on the vegetables. I decided on our family favorites of fish fragrant eggplant 茄子 and dry fried green beans 干煸四季豆 and added a couple of new dishes to my Chuan cai 川菜 repertoire. I added flowering chives with smoky bacon 腊肉抄韭菜花 安定 and homestyle tofu 家常豆腐 as they were in season and we needed a little more protein in this meal.

I decided for once that it would good to do mise en place with my dishes. I learned this in culinary school, but for some reason I have always fought this procedure. This time I did a mise en place with every dish and it made things so much simpler, and looked beautiful. Who would have thought?

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Homestyle bean curd mise en place

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Fish fragrant eggplant mise en place

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Flowering chives with smoky bacon mise en place

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Dry fried green beans mise en place

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The finished product!

I have to say that my dry fried green beans were the best of the four dishes and the best I have ever made. I used ground Sichuan pepper this time and it added so much to this dish. I wish more restaurants used it in their dry fried green beans. My personal favorite, fish fragrant eggplant was a little heavy on the black vinegar. Must work on this one! All and all I was really pleased with the meal and happy Jonny and the kids couldn't stop eating it.

Happy Year of the dragon!

2 comments:

hotpot said...

Mise en place means "putting in place" in French. It is the process of setting up the ingredients you would like to use when cooking a dish.

Anonymous said...

It tasted even better than it lloks, Jonny, Angus and Gemma