Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Chinese New Year Dinner, the Final Post

Wow I've got the memory of a tick. I totally forgot to fill you in on the last three dishes of our big Chinese New Years Dinner we had last month.

I've already told you about the Snow Peas with Garlic, and we all drooled over the Deep Fried Tofu. Next up, the Spring Rolls.

This is the one non-Kylie recipe that graced our table for the dinner: Spring Rolls from Epicurious.

It's been a long long time since I made spring rolls from scratch, but since we got that deep fryer we figured why not? We've shallow fried spring rolls in the past, but I think that they need to be deep fried to be really good.

Here's the recipe.

We made the filling in the morning, then put it outside to cool down and drain. About an hour before we wanted to have them for our appetizer we rolled them up.


Because it was around 0'C outside, once the rolls were rolled we put them back outside.

We fried them up in the new fryer and drained them on paper towel. We served them with sweet chile sauce.


These turned out pretty good, but I wish they had some garlic or ginger - or both in the filling. If I make them again, I would do that for sure.

My second favorite dish after the tofu was the Dry Fried Sichuan Beef. Thinly sliced beef was briefly fried in the wok, and then removed. Chile peppers, ginger and garlic are quickly cooked, then the beef goes back in, along with hoisin sauce, green onions and some of your roasted salt and pepper. The beef is moved to your serving plate and is sprinkled with shredded lettuce. It was so good. I love hoisin on anything, and the crisp lettuce with the hot beef (dirty!) was a nice combo. I cut back on the amount of oil used to fry the beef and aromatics, and upped the hoisin. Dee-lish.


To make our evening easy we did almost all of the prep in the morning. We chopped, sliced and diced all the ingredients, put them in containers and grouped them together in the fridge. Then when it was cooking time, we just had to grab our totem pole of plastic.


Last was the fried rice. We made this right before my parents showed up, and dumped it into a heavy dish, covered it well and left it in a warm oven. It didn't suffer at all and made the cooking of the dinner go that much smoother.


That was not the first time I'd made Fried Rice, but it was my first time making fried rice with eggs and sherry. I cut back on the number of eggs I used (the recipe calls for 4, I used 2) and added more Sherry (whooooooo!) and it was probably the nicest fried rice I've ever made. Nicer apparently, than the fried rice I made last week, as evidenced by Scott's comment - "did you lose that other fried rice recipe? that one was good" while we were eating. Guess I've learned my lesson about experimenting with fried rice.


I'm not in the mood to type out the last two recipes. If anyone wants them, email me.

7 comments:

MyKitchenInHalfCups said...

That was certainly a deep fried Happy New Year!
I like the plastic tower. I've done prep ahead like that, I just don't do it often enough.
Once I've got a recipe Gorn likes, he never wants me to experiment again. Men;)

Chef Erik said...

Those eggrolls look terrific, can't wait to try it. I love anything fried :)

Peter M said...

I guess it's belated Gung-hey Fat-choy to you, Sara!

I've been dabbling at home Chinese too, not too bad considering how intimidating it is stepping out of your norm.

Sara said...

Tanna, well there was some frying, but I'd like to think that the tofu and veggies somehow negated the oil.

Erik - add some garlic or ginger if you make them. Also, try the deep fried tofu!!!!!!

Peter - If I could only choose one cuisine to eat for the rest of my life, Chinese would be in the top 10 I chose from.

test it comm said...

Those spring rolls sound tasty. I have not tried to make spring rolls yet but with my recent success at deep frying they are on my to try list.

Valerie Harrison (bellini) said...

Everything looks amazing Sara, thanks for posting:D

Sara said...

Kevin - they are so easy to do, only the rolling takes a bit of time.

BV - Thanks!