Tag: Martin Yan

The Cooking Chronicles: Chicken and Vegetable Stir-fry

I am ashamed that it took me this long to make a stir-fry. It’s a dish I quite enjoy, but I typically don’t look to recreate Chinese dishes. On a day where I was craving vegetables, however, stir-fry seemed to be the easiest way to satisfy that hunger.

I used some of the directions in a Martin Yan recipe, though we added a sliced chicken breast to the mix, which I pan fried first. After that, I added the vegetables we had on hand – red bell pepper, bean sprouts, broccoli, white mushrooms, and half an onion. We didn’t have any oyster sauce, so I phoned my Mum for some emergency advice. She told me to use some chicken broth, soy sauce, and sugar for good measure, which we did, and it turned out nicely.

I’m glad I finally took the plunge into the land of stir-fry – I can’t wait to try out other vegetable and meat combinations!

Chicken and Vegetatable Stir-fry over rice

The Cooking Chronicles: Green Onion Cakes

After many trips to the supermarket shopping for recipe ingredients not readily found in my house, I am beginning to appreciate instructions that don’t call for anything unavailable in my pantry and fridge on a typical day. So on a lazy Sunday, I decided to duplicate Martin Yan’s Green Onion Cakes.

Yan, a popular Asian American chef whose show airs sporadically on PBS, can be considered the Chinese equivalent of Emeril Lagasse. Entertaining, enthusiastic, and always energetic, Yan has unquestionable knowledge about Chinese cuisine. Though I admit to rolling my eyes when I watched him growing up, with the new perspective garnered from the experiences I’ve had in the kitchen thus far, I have to say he does know what he’s talking about (my Mum has commented that Yan’s cooking does pander somewhat to the greater Western audience he serves now, however).

This wasn’t my first try at creating these appetizers – I’d made them with May quite a while ago, albeit with a different recipe. Nothing against Yan, but his method didn’t allow for as many layers as the previous recipe encouraged, and thus, my cakes lacked the desired flakiness. On the other hand, it was my mistake in adding too much pepper but not enough salt, and not rolling each cake thin enough (resulting in half-cooked, but nearly burnt products). Still, I’ll have to figure out why the individual cakes didn’t fry evenly – I’m sure it has something to do with the oil.

The cakes were edible at the end of the day, but I will be hunting down the first recipe for a second go.

Green Onion Cakes