Make the Most of the Least - Cook Chinese

We seen the price of food escalate, especially, it seems, in the produce department. Our best defense: Cook Chinese. The folks in China are said to save 35% of their income. Plainly, they know how to make the most of everything. How do they do it? For one thing, few families own even one car. And they eat simply. Meats and vegetables often garnish the rice bowl or the bowl of noodles in broth.

Partly to make eating with chopsticks easier, and partly to save fuel, the Chinese cut vegetables in small pieces so they’ll cook quickly. Their aim is to cook the outside of each vegetable piece to kill any germs on it, but leave the inside crunchy and undercooked so most of the enzymes and vitamins live through heat exposure.

Most Chinese cooking uses small amounts of meat, only a couple of ounces per serving, thinly sliced to cook in seconds, and look like more. Combining meats and vegetables allows the proteins in the veggies to be more completely used in the body, they say, and, ideally, a meal should contain five kinds of vegetables for a maximum range of nutrients.

Soups are served late in the meal, or as part of a family-style meal. Everything goes on the table at once, sweets included. At a family dinner with son Steve’s Chinese in-laws in Kunming, sautéed apples garnished with caramel filigree appeared alongside dishes of spicy braised pork, garlic leaves cooked in chicken broth, gently sautéed pea vines, green beans similar to shelled edamame with tiny pieces of ham, fried goat cheese—a rarity apparently reserved for American visitors, fresh pineapple wedges, a thin soup, and at the end of the meal rice to fill up any empty spaces.

No tea was ever served to us with a meal in China. The reason given was that tea hampers digestion. They say you should wait until at least 15 minutes after your last bite before you drink it, or drink it between meals.

Fusion cooking in post-Mao China often combines cuisine elements of several provinces in a single meal with some hot dishes, some mildly seasoned dishes, and some sweeter dishes. No separate dessert courses.

Chinese cooks use whatever is available and most cost effective, wasting nothing. Once we had a stir fry featuring crispy chicken skin combined with vegetables in a delicious simple sauce.

One way to stay closer to our old food budget is by cutting waste. Date leftovers and plan them into upcoming meals. Toss the bits you might have thrown away into future soups, stews and casseroles instead. Collect bones in a bag in your freezer. Make soup stock from them at your leisure. We need the minerals such broths can add to soups and sauces.

1. Stems from broccoli: peel, slice, include in stir-fries or steam 5 minutes before adding the separately steamed florets. Peel, slice and include cabbage cores. Or blanch the slices and add them to a vegetable salad.
2. Stems and inner ribs from kale, cut in pieces and cooked in salted water, or chicken broth can serve as a vegetable in their own right. Or include in vegetable stew.
3. Zest from lemons and oranges: More flavor and vitamin C than in the fruit. Grate or thinly peel—just down to the white part but not including it. Mince, dry on back of stove, in sunlight, or in oven warm from baking, but turned off.
4. Salal and black berries: Free fruits. Harvest salal berries—most tasty when first ripe. Include in jams, jellies, and syrups made with wild blackberries. Delicious!
5. Onion skins: More of some nutrients than in the onion’s body. Hoard and cook in salted water. Drain. Use the broth in soups and gravies. May be frozen.
6. Use the bones. When I first heard of people saving the bones after eating off the meat and boiling them for soup stock, I was shocked. But now I think, “How practical. The stock leaches mineral from the bones into the broth, and there are always bits of meat left on the bones to add flavor and protein. Boiling kills any germs.
7. Freeze single portions of meat left over from a meal. I label a freezer bag “pour le cassoulet” and into it go the last drumstick, or pork rib, or oxtail round. Combined with beans, and a bit of polish sausage and cooked slowly in the oven, occasionally stirring down the skin that forms on top, the cassoulet turns leftovers into a gourmet dish.

You’ll find more recipes on my blog at http://island-epicure.blogspot.com