China Moon Cookbook [antikvár]

First Thoughts T^ This book is a private cooking I I school. Its curriculum is the world of traditional Chinese flavors combined with exclusively fresh ingredients, a corner of the good-cooking universe I call California-Chinese cuisine. This is a world where cans and bottles are banished in favor of fresh foods, and the tyranny of MSG and cornstarch holds no sway. It is the world of a traditional, albeit slightly eccentric Chinese home cook, who shops a daily market with intelligence and passion, and who would sooner use a fresh American ingredient than a canned one from China. This book is also the culinary record of a small restaurant called China Moon Cafe, which I opened in 1986 in downtown San Francisco, in a 1930s art deco coffee shop. The setting was small and my goal was equally modest: I wanted to introduce fresh Chinese home-style cooking to a city that adored good food. My eyes on fire with missionary zeal, waving fresh water chestnuts in each fist, I found myself with a roaring restaurant beast and no cage in which to put it. China Moon consumed me, and somehow in the process, I became a professional chef. What I am, at heart, however, is a cooking teacher. My subject is Chi- nese cooking, but my passions are the alchemy of food and flavor, and the way we nurture ourselves. The food I cook is colorful, light, and wildly flavorful, and while traditionally Chinese at the root, it is contemporary at the branches. Here, then, are the recipes. Though China Moon in origin, they've all been tested in a home kitchen to ensure that they will work for a home cook. I've included every ingredient and every single worthwhile technique. You may need some gutsiness in the face of the seemingly exotic in addition to a good market to speed you on your way, but everything else is here—including the confidence of a teacher who says, "Just cook it. You'll love it!" Reality Check D This is an odd moment in American history to be writing such a cookbook. The Fear of Food is upon us with a vengeance. If we're not eating in order to lose weight, we're eating in hopes of fending off fatal disease. Supermarket real estate is clogged with aisles of frozen dinners, and i E