A beginner's attempt to welcome Year of the Dragon

Let’s party on, people.

Just because the holiday glitz is gone doesn’t mean no celebrating. Chinese New Year, which starts Monday, offers hosts a reason to stretch a little – or a lot.

I unknowingly chose the latter after perusing the recently published “Complete Chinese Cookbook,” by BBC television chef Ken Hom.

Chinese New Year is one of the longest, most important holidays in Far Eastern cultures. Houses are scrubbed beforehand to banish bad luck and make way for good. Visits with friends and family include lots of good food.

Hom advises neophyte Chinese cooks to start with just three dishes, rather than the traditional spread of many. Flipping through the pages, I briefly considered Whole Stuffed Chicken Skin, which involves excavating a raw bird by hand and then “reforming” it by stuffing the limp skin with rice.

Three dishes made the cut: Marbled Tea Eggs; Chili Pork Spareribs and Paper-wrapped Chicken, colorful deep-fried wax paper packets of marinated chicken, hot pepper and ginger.

Shopping list in hand, I entered my neighborhood Asian market and learned it’s one thing to dash in for a bottle of sake or some bargain-priced limes. It’s quite another to venture in with a list.

Consider soy sauce. Recipes called for light and dark, and I already owned a bottle that said neither. Faced with a wall of soy sauces to rival the cereal section of any American market, inertia set in. Which was best? Would the bottle at home suffice? Did price matter?

And what on earth is that? Grass jelly? What for?

I came to moments later with a can of congee in my hand and my eye straying up to a jar of ground snakehead.

Focus. Focus.

A few things got scratched off the list, but some – such as Shaoxing rice wine, Sichuan peppercorns and whole yellow bean sauce – lingered.

At a second store, I found the peppercorns, although I wasn’t sure they were from Sichuan. The whole yellow bean sauce remained elusive despite many linear feet of bean sauces.

Hom had written that all foods in China are considered yin, yang or yin yang. Were markets organized this way, too?

I asked the clerk about the bean sauce, but a language barrier persisted, and she sent me to the miso section instead.

After a fourth foray, I called for help: Toni Chang, a Virginia Beach resident who had months earlier sent in a tip about an Asian bakery.

Chang arrived on a drizzly morning at the Asia Grocery in Virginia Beach with her friend, Wendy Jiang, whose family owns Chen’s Wok at Chic’s Beach.

As Jiang pushed the cart, she and Chang discussed my list. Yes, they said, you need both light and dark soy because they have distinctly different flavors. Fresh water chestnuts are hard to find in the states; canned are fine. Don’t worry that the bottle of Shao­xing rice wine is so big, just use it in other dishes, even non-Asian fare.

The message was clear. Relax. Improvise. Substitute. Just like any other cooking.

Jiang pointed to a box of dense, white discs
vacuumed packed in clear, plastic pouches.

“Rice cake,” she said. “This one is easy to cook. Really good for Chinese New Year.”

Before long, the register was ringing. I had no whole yellow bean sauce for the ribs, but no one thought it would matter.

Chang and Jiang agreed to meet me a few days later at Jiang’s restaurant, where they’d decide if my Chinese tasted authentic.

We reconvened on a downpour of a day. “In China, rain is good luck,” Chang said.

Perhaps I needed it. I’d spent the morning deep frying spareribs in a vat of peanut oil, then simmering them in an inky brew of chicken stock, Shaoxing rice wine and the soys.

I simmered and then steeped cracked, hard-boiled eggs in a mixture of Chinese black tea, cinnamon bark, star anise and Sichuan peppercorns, which filled my kitchen with a musky, spicy aroma as they roasted in a skillet.

In her restaurant kitchen, Jiang demonstrated how to boil the rice cakes – stirring them constantly in a seasoned wok until they floated and had the texture of a gummy bear – then adding chicken and shrimp and finishing the dish stir-fry style with garlic, oyster sauce and other seasonings.

In the dining room, I offered up my efforts.

“Oh, this is tender,” Chang said of the ribs, which were somewhat crisp and mostly savory with a hint of sweetness.

Jiang concurred. “Much better than I cook,” she said.

The chicken in the packets, they agreed, was too salty, perhaps from overmarinating, but the flavors of the julienned ginger and cilantro married well.

When Jiang bit into the Marbled Tea Egg, I worried. But she smiled and said she hadn’t had one in 15 years. In China, she said, they’re a commonplace street food. Next time, she advised to steep them longer to intensify the flavor.

Perhaps the rain had brought me luck. I had made a suitable feast to welcome the Year of the Dragon. The hardest part was the shopping.

Lorraine Eaton, 757-446-2697, lorraine.eaton@pilotonline.com

Check out Lorraine’s blog at hamptonroads.com/blogs/lorraine-eaton

RECIPES

Chili Pork Spareribs

Makes: 4 servings

2-1/3 cups peanut or vegetable oil
1-2/3 pounds pork spareribs, separated into individual ribs

For the braising sauce:
3-2/3 cups chicken stock
2 tablespoons chili bean sauce
1 tablespoon Chinese rock sugar or granulated sugar
1/3 cup Shaoxing rice wine or dry sherry
1½ tablespoon dark soy sauce
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
2 tablespoons finely chopped garlic
3 tablespoons finely chopped green onions
2 tablespoons whole yellow bean sauce
3 tablespoons hoisin sauce
2 tablespoons cornstarch, mixed with 3 tablespoons water

For the garnish:
Chopped green onions

Heat the oil in a deep-fat fryer or a large wok, and deep-fry the spareribs until they are brown and crisp. Do this in several batches, draining each cooked batch well on paper towels.

Combine all the braising sauce ingredients in a large saucepan and bring to a boil. Add the deep-fried spareribs and simmer them, covered, for about 1 hour, or until they are tender. Drain off the sauce and remove any remaining fat.

The sauce can be frozen and reused next time you want to make this dish. The dish can be prepared up to this point the day before.

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Put the spareribs on a rack in a roasting pan and bake them in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes, until they are nice and brown. Baste them from time to time with the braising sauce, if you like. You can also cook the spareribs under a broiler or on a barbecue, until they are brown.

Using a cleaver or a sharp, heavy knife, chop the spareribs into pieces 2½ inches long. Turn them onto a warm serving platter, garnish with green onions and serve at once.

Source: “Complete Chinese Cookbook,” by Ken Hom

Marbled Tea Eggs

Makes: 4 to 6 servings, as a starter dish

7 cups water
6 eggs, at room temperature

For the tea mixture:
6 tablespoons black tea, preferably Chinese
3 tablespoons dark soy sauce
1½ tablespoons light soy sauce
1 tablespoon five-spice powder
2 teaspoons roasted and ground Sichuan peppercorns
3 pieces of Chinese cinnamon bark or cinnamon sticks
3 whole star anise
3-2/3 cups water
Salt

Bring the 7 cups of water to a boil in a large saucepan and cook the eggs for 5 minutes. Remove them from the saucepan and immediately plunge them into cold water, then gently crack the shells with a large spoon under cold running water, until the entire shell is a network of cracks. Let them sit in the cold running water for at least 10 minutes.

Put the tea mixture ingredients into the empty saucepan with 2 teaspoons of salt and bring to a simmer, then return the cracked eggs to the saucepan. Cook them in the mixture for 10 minutes, making sure the liquid covers the liquid completely, remove the saucepan from the heat and let the eggs and liquid cool.

Leave the cooked eggs in the liquid and put them into the fridge overnight. When you are ready to serve the eggs, remove them from the cooled liquid and gently peel off the cracked shells. You should have a beautiful marble-like web on each egg. Serve them cut in half or quarters as a snack with other cold dishes, or use them as a garnish.

Source: “Complete Chinese Cookbook,” by Ken Hom