Be Your Own Chinese Takeout

Wanting to undo cooking ruts, I circled back to the two Chinese cookbooks I’ve liked using. The first, Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, is encyclopedic; you can easily get lost in it. The other is Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes From Hunan Province by Fuchsia Dunlop.

I was going through Mastering to get some ideas for Friday night and ended up finding this simple cauliflower recipe for XO Cauliflower (page 334). I had a head of cauliflower and a jar of XO sauce that I hadn’t opened yet, so it seemed obvious. She has you blanch the cauliflower for 30 seconds, which is a nice trick to par-cook it — part of me never thought of that before but another part has stubbornly held on to this notion that you somehow “lose vitamins” when you boil vegetables . . . [googling] . . . the consensus seems to be that sometimes you sort of lose nutrients but it kind of doesn’t matter (glad I looked that up; and yes, we immunize our children). She also has you put baking soda in the water, which is this scent you immediately recognize from Chinese restaurants but could never place (somewhat related, this spaghetti-ramen-baking-soda hack is intriguing). The XO, I realized, is basically the same umami as anchovies — illuminating/demystifying. She adds ginger, too; the whole dish is really good.

For some reason I was craving beef, like the crispy orange beef in the cheap takeout places. I got “some beef that isn’t ridiculously expensive for a stir fry” from the butcher; not sure what he gave me, but it worked. The Beef with Cumin in Revolutionary (page 102) looked like a winner: the dishes in northern China using cumin are so refreshing and interesting and we’ve enjoyed them the few times we’ve eaten them around town. This was super easy, too: marinate the meat with wine, soy sauce and potato flour, fry (or in my case “fry”) the beef in peanut oil, then pull it out, add ginger, garlic, chili and cumin to a small portion of the oil, then add back in the meat, along with scallions and sesame oil. Nice flavor, and obviously much nicer than normal takeout.