Homemade Chinese Five Spice Powder

Homemade Chinese Five Spice Powder - one of my favorite spice blends. Sichuan peppercorns, star anise, cloves, fennel, and cinnamon combine to create a wonderful and uniquely flavored seasoning. 

Why should you make your own Chinese Five Spice? First, one of the cool things about making your own spice blends is that you can control the ingredients in the blend, and customize the spices to your taste. 

Pork and Cabbage Egg Rolls

These pork and cabbage egg rolls are super crispy and filled with a wonderfully seasoned ground pork and cabbage mixture. 

These Chinese-American style egg rolls (meishi chunjuan) are extra large (burrito-sized) and packed with filling. Just one egg roll with a side salad is enough for lunch for me (although you may catch me shaving off a slice or two from the leftovers). 

Cold Sesame Noodles

This cold sesame noodle recipe is a tasty version of the Chinese-American restaurant cold sesame noodles sold in New York City's Chinatown starting in the 1960s. 

These sweet and savory cold noodles will call your name late at night from the refrigerator when the hunger pangs strike. If you make these, you may find yourself grabbing a few noodles from the bowl and dropping them into your mouth when no one is looking. 

Chicken and Corn Soup

This chicken and corn soup is easy to prepare and takes less than 30 minutes to make, start to finish. 

This chicken and corn soup is a delicious combination of Asian and American ingredients. It can be found on the menus of Chinese restaurants and is thickened by an unexpected ingredient, canned cream corn. 

Pan Fried Pork and Scallion Buns (Shēng Jiān Bāo)

These pan fried pork and scallion buns have a delicious crispy texture on one side and are soft and fluffy on the other side. Plus, they are filled with a tasty mixture of seasoned pork. 

I like to make a big batch of these buns and freeze them for later. 

Beef and Sweet Onion Dim Sum Pandas

Beef and sweet onion dim sum pandas: a sweet bread dough filled with a delectable beef and sweet sautéed onion mixture and steamed until the bread is puffy and the filling is succulent.  

These little dim sum buns with panda faces were so fun to make and totally delicious to eat. I had originally wanted to fill them with char siu (Chinese barbecue pork), but I decided to try this hearty combination of bef and sweet onions. 

Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup

Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup is a delicious way to warm you up when you're feeling a bit chilly. The flavors are complex, with star anise, garlic, and ginger.

The fragrant spices, along with a bit of brown sugar, chili bean sauce, soy sauce, and crushed red pepper flakes or, if you have them, Sichuan peppercorns, combine to create a pretty amazing and flavorful noodle soup.

Mandarin Pancakes with Moo Shu Pork

These Mandarin Pancakes are meant for wrapping Moo Shu Pork. They are soft, thin, and flavored with sesame oil and totally fun to make.

Making these Mandarin Pancakes, the traditional wrapper for moo shu pork, is much easier than you would expect. It's similar to making homemade flour tortillas, except that you mix the flour with boiling water, and you sandwich two layers of the dough with sesame oil before cooking the pancakes in a wok.

Sesame Scallion Bread

This Chinese-Islamic Sesame-Scallion Bread (zhima dabing) is crunchy and chewy on the outside and soft and loaded with sesame oil flavored scallions on the inside. 

This sesame scallion bread, with origins as a street food in northwestern China, is "baked" in a skillet on the stovetop. This bread is a distant cousin to the Chinese scallion pancake, or Cong You Bing, but it's yeasted flatbread rather than a pancake.