Cooking Chinese with Xiao Ning (Shi-ah-o Ning, said fast)

The joy of cooking this spring has been enhanced by my Chinese daughter-in-law’s eagerness to learn to cook American foods and her willingness to share her Yunnanese style recipes. A field trip to a Chinese market makes her day. So does a trip to Thriftway, though her hometown of Jinghong has several supermarkets now. There you can buy sweet, tender bamboo shoots, lotus roots, pig’s feet, and pig's skin and vegetables that have no English name.

Xiao Ning has taught me that every vegetable side dish needs a little meat in it. She says the meat protein helps you get more good out of the vegetable protein. She tells me Chinese medicine teaches that pig’s skin prevents wrinkles. Every Chinese meal begins with a thin soup to prepare our stomachs for solid food.

Chinese cooking is thrifty of ingredients and of heat. Usually, much more kitchen time goes into cutting up vegetables than in actual cooking. Chinese cooks do make long-cooked dishes: Hong Chao Ju Rou, Red Cooked Pork Meat, for instance in which chunks of pork stew with cloves and cinnamon.

She regrets she cannot make for us long-stewed pig’s foot with daikon, a Japanese root vegetable that has caught on in China.

I’ve taught her a smattering of French, Italian, Creole, Azerbaijani, and other ethnic and regional dishes. Today, I showed her how to make a Mirepoix, the basis of so many French soups. It’s just chopped up onion, carrot, and celery, stir-fried in oil. Adding any stock or broth creates a simple soup in itself. For a heartier, main dish soup, add a can of red, black, or white beans, 1/3 to ½ cup Uncle Ben’s 10-minute rice, bring to a boil, reduce heat, and cook covered for 10 minutes. Back in China, she can reproduce a near duplicate of this soup by making a Mirepoix, using any cooked beans available and adding a cupful or so of leftover cooked rice.

Xiao Ning loves to harvest handfuls wild fennel for soup and in cooking fish.

Chinese meals most often begin with a soup, and the soup with a home made broth or stock. She asks me, “Mom, do you have bones?” Even bones with no meat left on them have a place in her inventory of possible soup stock materials. They yield magnesium, calcium and other minerals, and a surprising amount of flavor.

Xiao Ning says, “Bones are good for your bah-dee.”

XIAO NING’S FENNEL SOUP
4 servings
4 cups any soup broth or stock
2 cups snipped, washed fennel fronds
4 green onions, sliced
1 fresh red ripe tomato, diced

Bring the stock to a boil. Add the remaining ingredients. Bring again to boiling. Reduce heat. Cook 5 minutes. Serve hot as a starter course.

One day Xiao Ning and my daughter, Suzanna, Leigh went to Seattle, shopped at a Chinese grocery, and brought back several big lotus roots. Xiao Ning sliced the lotus and soaked the slices overnight in vinegar water—about 2 Tablespoons of vinegar per quart of water. We found a frozen cooked turkey drumstick and some bits of pork in the freezer. With those plus some chicken stock, several slices of lotus root cut in bite-size pieces, a generous handful of frozen cut green beans, and a little leftover cooked rice, she created a delicious, nutritious soup for lunch for four people.

XIAO NING’S LOTUS ROOT & BEAN SOUP
Serves 4 to 6
1 large fresh lotus root, sliced and soaked several hours to a couple of days in
2 Tablespoons apple cider vinegar and water to cover
3 cups water
Any meat bones on hand
1 10-ounce can Campbell’s condensed chicken broth
1-inch ginger root, minced, optional
1 clove garlic, chopped

Drain the lotus root slices and cut in quarters. Bring all the remaining ingredients to a boil. Reduce heat and cook gently for up to 1 hour. The lotus root will still be crisp like water chestnuts. Add:
1 ½ cups frozen cut green beans or fresh green beans cut in 1 ½-inch lengths

Bring again to a boil. Reduce heat somewhat. Cover. Cook briskly for 10 minutes, but not so briskly that the pan boils over. Add:
1 to 1 ½ cups leftover cooked rice.

Bring the soup to a boil again. Taste and add salt and pepper as desired. Serve hot.

Vinegar soaked lotus root can also be cut in bite size pieces and used in salad as you would water chestnuts, and as Suzanna Leigh does.