Oyster Sauce Chicken with Spinach Noodles

Recently my husband has been pushing me to prepare something different for this website so I decided to have a go at making my own spinach noodles but I also used a kind of sauce that I don’t normally use.

I don’t normally use oyster sauce to cook as I’ve found most oyster sauces are a bit too salty taste. So, I rarely use them to cook dishes. Back when I lived in Taiwan Lee Kum Kee was a really popular brand for sauces and I’ve noticed their sauces a lot more in Chinese supermarkets here so I decided to give the Lee Kum Kee panda brand oyster sauce a go.

I bought a bottle of this sauce from my local Chinese supermarket and I also picked up a bottle of their Hoisin sauce as I recently went to a friend’s home for dinner and they used Lee Kum Kee’s Hoisin sauce which tasted great. My friend made some delicious chicken wraps with the hoisin sauce so I decided to make some dishes with these two delicious Chinese sauces.

I’ve always been a big fan of Lee Kum Kee’s products. I love their chili bean sauce and light soy sauce. I remember the first time I used Lee Kum Kee light soy sauce was because I didn’t have time to go to a Chinese supermarket to shop, so I went to my local supermarket bought a bottle of Lee Kum Kee’s light soy sauce and it tasted great! Now I have discover another two products from Lee Kum Kee and I was over the moon!

I used LKK’s oyster sauce and hoisin sauce to marinade the diced chicken thigh fillets. You can just marinade for 30 minutes but if you want to marinade longer for stronger flavours that’s up to you. LKK’s hoisin sauce tastes a bit like Chinese sweet bean sauce with a bit of a garlic flavour. So it’s sweet, salty with a bit of a garlic aroma. It’s perfect for stir-fries, duck wraps and marinated BBQ spareribs. It goes really well with pork, chicken and other kind of meat.

I use skinless chicken thigh fillets for this dish but you can also use diced chicken breast, mini fillet, pork mince, beef mince…etc. I made the spinach to go with this oyster sauce chicken. But if you think make noodle is way too much of hassles then use Chinese dried noodles, egg noodle, linguine, tagliatelle pasta, zoodle instead.

You can also use different vegetables to accompanies this dish, for example, if you are not a fan of mung bean sprouts then you can replace them with bok choy, chopped napa cabbage, snow peas, broccoli…etc. Please feel free to swap the vegetables yourself.

I have to use tinned bamboo shoot as we don’t have fresh bamboo shoot in the UK. So if you use tinned bamboo shoot remember to rinse it few times under cold water and soak it for 20 minutes and drain it well. This will stop the bamboo shoots tasting like they have just come out of a tin can. If you are using fresh bamboo shoots, please blanch before stir-frying.

This is a nutritionally dense dish as you can easily consume so many different vegetables in this dish. If you have any left over oyster sauce chicken and noodle. Store them properly in a clean dry container and next time when you want to reheat it. Just heat up a wok without any oil in it and stir-fry oyster sauce chicken first and add the left over noodle into the wok. Stir-fry for a couple minutes to heat, it will taste like chow mein! You can also add a couple tablespoons of water if you find it’s too dry while cooking!

oyster sauce chicken with spinach noodles
oyster sauce chicken with spinach noodles
oyster sauce chicken with spinach noodles
oyster sauce chicken with spinach noodles
 

 

Oyster Sauce Chicken with Spinach Noodles

Course Main Dish
Cuisine Chinese
Prep Time 2 hours
Cook Time 25 minutes
Total Time 2 hours 25 minutes
Servings 4 people

Ingredients

Ingredients for Oyster Sauce Chicken

  • 500 g Chicken Thigh Fillets skinless and cut into small dices
  • 140 g Tinned Bamboo Shoot rinse with cold water then soak for 30 minutes. Drain and cut into small dices
  • 5 Dried Shiitake Mushrooms rinse until soft then cut into small dices. Keep the water
  • 2 slices Ginger thin slices, finely chopped
  • 1 pieces Chili remove seed and finely chop
  • 2 cloves Garlic chop finely
  • 1 Spring Onion chop finely for garnish
  • 4 tbsp Shiitake Mushroom Water
  • 1 Mung Bean Sprouts handful, no exact amount
  • 1 Carrot julienne

Marinade for Chicken

  • 1 tbsp Lee Kum Kee Panda Brand Oyster Sauce
  • 1/2 tbsp Light Soy Sauce
  • 1 tsp Dark Soy Sauce
  • 1/2 tbsp Lee Kum Kee Hoisin Sauce
  • 1 tsp Sugar
  • 1 tbsp Rice Wine or Shaoxing Rice Wine

Ingredients for Spinach Noodles

  • 280 g Plain Flour
  • 280 g Bread Flour
  • 100 g Spinach
  • 375 ml Water
  • 1 tsp Salt

Instructions

Procedures for Oyster Sauce Chicken

  1. Marinade chicken for at least 30 minutes
  2. Boil a pot of water and blanch the mung beans sprouts and carrots. Cool down immediately in cold water and drain. Leave aside.
  3. Heat up 2 tablespoons of oil in a wok and stir-fry the ginger and chili first until aromatic.
  4. Add chicken into the wok and stir-fry for 1-2 minutes until the chicken looks cooked on the outside.
  5. Add bamboo shoot and shiitake mushroom and stir-fry for couple minutes.
  6. Add shiitake mushroom water into step 5 and cook for 3 minutes.
  7. Check the seasonings and you can season it with some salt if it’s necessary.
  8. Serve with spinach noodle, blanched mung bean sprout and carrot. Sprinkle some chopped spring onion on top as garnish!

Procedures for Spinach Noodles

  1. Mix plain flour, bread flour and salt in a big mixing bowl.
  2. Add spinach and water in a blender jar and blend all the ingredients together until smooth puree.
  3. Pass the step 2 spinach juice with a sieve. We only use the juice.
  4. Pour the juice into the step 1 and mix with a spatula first and after all the flour and spinach juice combined then use your hand to knead the dough.
  5. You can add some flour into the dough if you found it’s too sticky.
  6. Knead the dough for 3-4 minutes and cover it with cling film and leave it for 10 minutes. Repeat this procedure 3-4 times.
  7. Separate the dough into 4-5 portions and flatten them a little bit with a rolling pin. This procedure will make the dough easier to pass through a pasta machine. You don’t need to flatten the dough paper thin.
  8. Use a pasta machine to flatten the pasta dough to around number 4 setting or about linguine pasta thin.
  9. Then use the other end to make the flatten dough into pasta/noodle shape.
  10. Add some flour on the noodles if you afraid they will stick together. Boil a pot of water and boil the noodles for 2-3 minutes then it’s ready to eat!

Dan Bing Taiwanese Egg Crepe

Recently I had a discussion wih Chris about my food blog and what sort of food we should cook next. That’s the moment I realized I have never made any breakfast dishes before for my blog. I was a little shocked about this so for the next few weeks I’m going to focus on breakfast recipes that I like for my food blog.

Dan Bing is a really popular Taiwanese breakfast dish. 99% of Breakfast cafes, restauants and vendors in Taiwan sell dan bing in their shops. I must admit I’ve probably eaten dan bing a thousand times in Taiwan but until now I’ve never cooked it. So with a bit of advice from back home and a little research I came up with this recipe. What you see below is my first ever attempt at making dan bing and it was really easy to make, which hopefully you’ll see in the photos.

Below are some cooking tips for making this dish:

  1. Please don’t use any extra flour when you try to flatten the dough because extra flour will make your dan bing too hard after cooked.
  2. You can make dan bing dough the night before and store it in the fridge. Roll it and flatten in the morning. That’s totally fine.
  3. I saw many chefs and bloggers put the dan bing dough into a plastic bag or put it in between two layers of cling film and flattened it. I was doing the same way and then I found out it’s so difficult to take the flattened dan bing out. In the end, I ended up wasting a couple balls of the dan bing dough.
    Because you can’t use any extra flour to stop the dough sticking to the worktop or your hands, I brushed some cooing oil on the worktop and on top of the dough. Then I flattened the dough and because there is this oil it was really easy to separate the dough from the worktop. I discovered this tip when I was young and saw a chef in a Taiwanese breakfast café in Taipei use this method. The result was great.
  4. Please don’t season the egg. This is because dan bing is usually eaten with soy sauce or thick soy sauce.
  5. Don’t put too many spring onions in the dan bing dough because too many spring onions will make it easier to burn the dan bing. You need to cook the dough first then add the eggs and other ingredients after but if you do want to add more spring onions I would recommend you put them in the egg.
  6. You can make so many different flavours of dan bing! I only demonstrated 1 basic flavour of dan binsg with ham and cheese but you can also use sweetcorn, tuna, bacon, frankfurters, tomatoes, etc.
  7. How to store the dan bing? You flatten the dan bing first then you put a sheet of parchment paper on either side of the dan bing. Then you stack them together and cling film them. When you want to cook it then you just need to take them out and pan fry with some oil at medium-low heat until both sides have turned a nice golden colour. You don’t need to defrost the dan bing before cooking.

I remembered some of these tips from my past but most from making dan bing for the first time. I hope these tips make it easier for you to try to make your own dan bing at home.

dan bing taiwanese egg crepe
dan bing taiwanese egg crepe
dan bing taiwanese egg crepe
dan bing taiwanese egg crepe
dan bing taiwanese egg crepe
dan bing taiwanese egg crepe
dan bing taiwanese egg crepe
 

Dan Bing Taiwanese Egg Crepe

Course Main Dish
Cuisine Chinese
Prep Time 45 minutes
Cook Time 5 minutes
Total Time 50 minutes
Servings 12 dan bings

Ingredients

Ingredients for Dan Bing

  • 280 g plain flour
  • 140 g strong white bread flour
  • 320 ml water 65 degrees celsius
  • 2 spring onions
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp sugar demerara or caster

Other ingredients

  • 1 egg to each dan bing
  • 1 cheddar cheese can be other cheese, grate it
  • 2 ham 2 slices of ham to 1 dan bing

Instructions

  1. Mix plain flour, bread flour, salt and sugar in a mixing bowl.
  2. Slowly pour the 65-degree C water into step 1 and stir with a fork or chopsticks at the same time.
  3. After the flour and the water have totally combined together use both of your hands to knead the dough for 3-5 minutes then make it into a ball. Leave it in a mixing bowl, cover with a couple sheets of cling film and leave for at least 30 minutes.
  4. After 30 minutes, divide the dough into 70g small balls.
  5. Beat an egg and leave it aside.
  6. Heat up a thin layer of oil in a frying pan at low to medium fire.
  7. Brush a thin layer of oil on the worktop. Then place your small ball of dough on top and brush a thin layer of oil on the top of the dough. Use a rolling pin to flatten the dough to as thin as possible.
  8. Fry step 7 in the frying pan and make sure both sides are slightly golden in colour.
  9. Use a spatula to lift the step 8 crepe up and pour the egg in and put the crepe on top.
  10. If you make basic Dan bing then all you need to do is flip the dan bing again, which is egg side on top and you can just use spatula to roll it, then that’s ready to serve. Once it’s cooled down a little bit then slice it before serving. You can serve this dan bing with soy sauce or thick soy sauce.
  11. If you want to make ham and cheese flavour of dan bing then you need to flip it to become egg side on top and put ham in the middle and then sprinkle grated cheese on top of ham. Then roll it with spatula. Once the dan bing has cooled down a little bit then slice it before serving.

Stir Fried Beef with Thai Chive Flower and Bean Curd

Stir Fried Beef with Thai Chive Flower and Bean Curd. Flowering chive (韭菜花) is also known as Thai chive flower, garlic chive flower or chive flower buds. This vegetable has a very strong smell and some people think it’s utterly stinky. Even though it really smells, it tastes really delicious in dishes. It’s very popular in China, Taiwan, Thailand and other Asian countries.

In Chinese cuisine, people make all kinds of different and delicious stir-fry dishes with this vegetable. When I was really young, I travelled around China with my parents. We took a train from Xian to Guangzhou and on the train the chef cooked this dish and made all of the passengers on the train literally drool from the smell of this dish.

I personally stir-frying with pork, beef, chicken and sliced bean curd but this is dish that can be easily adjusted to make it either vegetarian or vegan. You can use more bean curd and flower chive but leave out the meat and it will still taste delicious.

You can also add other vegetables like mung bean sprouts, mange tout and different coloured peppers to accompany this dish. This is entirely up to you.

How to prepare flowering chive?

  1. Trim the bottom part of the flowering chive and cut into 3cm long sections. The bottom part of the flowering chive can be quite woody and tough in both texture and taste.
  2. Wash it with cold running water. I will soak it in water for 15 minutes then drain the water. It’s then ready to cook.

Because this is a stir-fry dish, I would recommend you to have a look at an article I wrote for about.com “ Chinese Stir-Fry Tips”, especially if you’re not too familiar with the this cooking methods.

This dish is a great “weeknight dinner” or “life saver recipe for the working mum” as this dish is packed with nutrition, it’s very easy to make and it’s quick to make as well.

If you marinade the beef the day before, when you come home all you need to do is cook some rice, wash and slice vegetables and cook it. This dish will be ready within 15 minutes and it’s also delicious!!

For the seasonings, I won’t put any extra seasonings into this dish. The reason is all the beef marinade sauce and the chili bean sauce will be strong enough. Chili bean sauce is quite salty hence not needing extra seasonings but if you want it to taste stronger by all means add to the seasonings.

Stir Fried Beef with Thai Chive Flower and Bean Curd
 

 

Stir Fried Beef with Thai Chive Flower and Bean Curd

Course Main Dish
Prep Time 25 minutes
Cook Time 5 minutes
Total Time 30 minutes
Servings 4 people

Ingredients

Ingredients

  • 280 g lean beef julienne
  • 140 g flowering chive slice into 3cm lengthways
  • 180 g bean curd
  • 1 chili
  • 1 clove garlic

Marinade for beef

  • 2 tbsp light soy sauce
  • 1/2 tbsp dark soy sauce
  • 1/2 tbsp demerara sugar or caster sugar
  • 1/2 tbsp potato starch or corn flour
  • 1 tbsp rice wine or Shaoxing rice wine
  • 1 tbsp water

Seasonings

  • 1 tbsp chili bean sauce also called Doubanjiang
  • salt to taste

Instructions

  1. Marinade the beef for at least 15 minutes.
  2. Heat up 1-2 tablespoons oil in a wok and stir-fry garlic and chili first until the aroma comes out.
  3. Add chili bean sauce into the wok and stir-fry for 20 seconds.
  4. Add beef into step 3 and stir-fry for another 30 seconds.
  5. Add Thai Chive Flower and stir-fry for 10 seconds then add bean curd.
  6. If it’s too dry then you can add a little bit of water, check the seasonings and ready to serve.

Mango and Beef Rice Noodle Salad

Rice noodles are a very popular ingredient not only in Chinese cuisine but also in many other different Asian countries. You can stir-fry them, add them into a soup and you can also make a delicious rice noodle salad with all kinds of different ingredients.

So today I’m sharing with you this delicious sweet and sour “mango and beef rice noodle salad” recipe. This recipe is not an authentic “Chinese” recipe as such but I was inspired by the flavours of South Eastern Asian cuisine for this dish. If yu’re not a fan of beef then you can replace it with chicken, pork or even different kinds of seafood including mussels, prawns, fish, crabmeat and more.

I soak the rice noodles in cold water for around 15 minutes to soften them before I blanch them in boiling water. This will help the rice noodles to cook better. If you like your rice noodles a bit softer then just cook them a little longer in the boiling water. Equally if you like your noodles a little al dente, cook for less time. You can also have a look at this article to get information on how to cook different kinds of Chinese/Asian noodles. “Asian Noodles-types of Asian noodles and cooking time”.

You can also use different vegetable for this dish. You don’t have to stick with carrots, mung beans sprouts or bok choy. You can add pepper, napa cabbage, spring onion, salad leaves or different kind of bean sprouts. I would personally stick with using mango for this dish rather than other kind of fruit. Because this dish needs the smell and taste of mango to give it a kick.

I will use lean beef for stir-fry or minute steak in this dish. You can also use sirloin or other parts of the beef if you fancy. You can also adjust the amount of seasonings to suit your personal taste.

This is a dish I make very often at home because it’s just so easy to make. It’s also delicious and full of nutrition from all the vegetables, meat and fruit.

A bit of update with my life:

Since I graduated from university and quit my part time job, I have been super busy. My illustration business has turned really busy and I literally have never been this busy before. For example, this month I’m working on 6 projects with 2 projects at the beginning of the month, 2 projects are my regular monthly work and I have another 2 projects to work on at the end of the month. So I’m juggling all of these projects, this food writing job, family and of course my food blog. This is why, especially now, that I’m focusing a lot on “weeknight dinners” and “life saving recipes for a career mom” type of recipes. Chris, my husband, is out almost all the time with either work or college so he never has time to cook so right now we’re having ready meals and takeaways at least a couple nights each week.

But I’m not complaining at all! I love being busy and I love working in my dream job! I love working as an illustrator and I’m over the moon with my illustration business booming as it is now. I feel like all the hard work, studying and looking after my family in the past 5 years is finally paying off. Now I just need to find more time to cook for my food blog, so wish me luck!

mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
mango and beef rice noodle salad
 

mango and beef rice noodle salad
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Mango and Beef Rice Noodle Salad


Course Main Dish
Prep Time 20 minutes
Cook Time 15 minutes
Total Time 35 minutes
Servings 3 people

Ingredients

  • 280 g lean beef julienne it
  • 125 g rice noodle
  • 140 g mango julienne it
  • 85 g carrot julienne it
  • 85 g mung bean sprouts remove the roots
  • 85 g bok choy julienne it

Marinade for beef

  • 2 tbsp light soy sauce
  • 1 tsp sugar
  • 1 tsp potato starch or corn flour
  • 1 tsp rice wine
  • Pinch ground cumin
  • Pinch ground black pepper

Ingredients for dressing

  • 1/2 tbsp mint chopped
  • 1/2 tbsp basil chopped and preferably Thai basil
  • 1 clove garlic
  • 1 chili remove seed and finely chopped
  • 3 tbsp fish sauce
  • 2 tbsp water
  • 1/2 lime juice only
  • 1/2 tbsp demerara sugar or caster sugar

Instructions

  1. Mix all the ingredients for the dressing in a small bowl and leave aside.
  2. Soak rice noodles in cold water to soften them first.
  3. Marinade beef for at least 30 minutes.
  4. Boil a medium saucepan of water and blanch carrot and mung bean spouts. Cool down in ice water immediately. Drain and leave aside.
  5. Use the same water to blanch the rice noodles for 3-5 minutes. You can adjust the time in which you blanch the noodles if you want them softer or more al dente. This is entirely up to you.
  6. Soak the rice noodles in cold water to cool down immediately. Drain and leave aside.
  7. Heat up 1 tablespoon of oil in a skillet or wok and stir-fry the beef for 30 seconds. Turn off the fire and leave aside.
  8. Mix all the ingredients with some dressing evenly. Season with some salt if need it. Ready to serve.

Stir Fried Beef with Mung Bean Sprouts

Stir-fries are one of the most popular and common cooking methods in Chinese cooking. I like serving stir-fried dishes during busy weeknights because you can make a nutritionally dense meal in 15 minutes with a Chinese stir-fry. You can check out this article that I wrote about stir-fry cooking tips here before you start cooking.

I added mange tout into this recipe to make this stir-fry dish more colourful. You can use other vegetables instead of mange tout or you can just only use mung bean sprouts and beef to make a delicious stir-fry dish.

Mung bean sprout is one of my favourite Chinese / Asian vegetables. It contains barely and fat or calories and it’s full of nutrition and has multiple health benefites. It also tastes delicious and I love their crunchy texture and light sweetness in flavour. Mung bean sprouts contain lots of Vitamin B and C are are full of folic acid as well as being full of protein.

You can click here for more information and recipes about mung bean sprouts. I wrote this article about mung bean sprouts for About.com’s Chinese food page a while ago.

For food photography purposes, I remove the roots of the mung bean sprouts before I cooked the but in reality removing the roots takes a long time to do. If you’ve had a busy day and just want to quickly cook your dinner and take a rest then you really don’t need to both removing the roots of the the mung bean sprouts. It won’t affect the taste of the dish either way.

You can also replace beef with pork or chicken. I’ve used beef in my recipes quite a lot recently because I’ve suddenly found out I haven’t made enough dishes recently with beef. My husband and I are also come through a big fitness push and beef is full of protein so great for weight loss. So I’ve decided to focus on beef recipes recently.

I put a little bit of bicarbonate of soda in the beef when I marinade it as this can make the texture of the meat a bit softer. Another tip for cooking lean beef is not to cook it for too long. 20-30 seconds is more than enough time but you need to make sure your sliced pieces of beef ar similar in size and also not too thick. Sometimes I’ve seen supermarkets sell stir-fry beef and the beef often isn’t sliced thin enough but again adjust cooking times to suit the thickness of the meat. You can use either beef sirloin or fillet for this dish.

Recent Update Of My Life:

Chris and I have started looking for a new property but it’s so difficult in Edinburgh as the prices have shot through the roof in the last several years. Now if you want to rent a 2-bedroom flat in a nice area in Edinburgh you need to pay in the region of £900 a month. Some areas are cheaper but can be awful and there are other areas where you can pay two or three times that amount for the same amount of bedrooms but these are way out of our range. We are desperately trying to move into a good catchment area as our daughter is going to start school in 2017 and our current local primary school is statistically the worst in Edinburgh. While we know primary schools aren’t the be all and end all of a child’s education, the local secondary school is also the worst in Edinburgh, so, we have to move!

So if anyone knows of any two or three bedrooms properties in Edinburgh (three is preferable as we really need an office space at home) with a good size kitchen please contact me. My current kitchen is the size of a pigeon cage and for a chef and food writer it’s driving me absolutely nuts. A big practical kitchen in our next property is an absolute must and it will allow to cook all kinds of extra things like Chinese buns, pastries, home made noodles etc which I don’t have space to do now.

Stir Fried Beef with Mung Bean Sprouts
 

 

Stir Fried Beef with Mung Bean Sprouts

Course Main Dish
Prep Time 10 minutes
Cook Time 30 minutes
Total Time 40 minutes
Servings 3 people

Ingredients

Ingredients

  • 450 g lean beef julienne
  • 280 g mung bean sprouts rinse under water and remove the roots
  • 30 g mange tout wash with running water, drain and leave aside
  • 1 spring onion slice 3cm lengthways
  • 1 chili remove seeds and julienne

Marinade for beef

  • 1 tsp ginger finely chop
  • 1 clove garlic mince it
  • 3 tbsp light soy sauce
  • 1 tsp dark soy sauce
  • 1/2 tbsp potato starch or corn flour
  • 1 tbsp rice wine or Shaoxing rice wine
  • 1/2 tbsp demerara sugar or caster sugar
  • 1/4 tsp coarse black pepper
  • 1/2 tsp bicarbonate soda

Instructions

  1. Marinade beef for at least 30 minutes
  2. Heat up 1 tablespoon of oil in a wok and stir-fry beef for 20 seconds. Turn off fire and place beef on a plate. Leave it aside.
  3. Clean the wok and dry it. Heat up ½ tablespoon oil and stir-fry spring onion and chilli first until the fragrant comes up. This will take about 10 seconds.
  4. Add mange tout and mung bean sprouts into wok and stir-fry for 20 seconds.
  5. Add beef back in the wok and stir-fry for another 20 seconds. Season with salt (or not) then it’s ready to serve. You can serve this dish with cooked warm rice.