Chinese home cooking

Surprisingly, I don’t make a lot of Chinese dishes at home. Chinese dishes are generally easy to execute, but require a lot of ingredients and can be time consuming after a long day of work. This recipe only uses a few ingredients that most home cooks already have at home, maybe with the exception of the Chinese five-spice powder. If you don’t’ have this in your pantry, you definitely should, it gives that special savory spice to any Chinese meat dishes! This recipe is for a classic Shanghai-ese dish, five spice pork chop with veggie (bok choy) rice.

Pork Chop is a staple at our household, the second most consumed meat besides chicken! Pork chops are easy to cook and very versatile I always prefer bone-in chops, they are way more moist and flavorful (not to mention fatty! YUM!). Each chop is slight hammered out with a meat tenderizer, and quickly marinated before frying. The rice is super easy, all done in the rice cooker!

Five-spice pork chops (serves 4)
4 pieces of  boned-in pork chops

Marinade

2 tbsp of soy sauce

1 tbsp of cooking wine (optional)

1 tbsp of sugar

1 tsp of Chinese five-spice powder (this spice is magical!)

2 cloves of garlic, chopped

Seasoned Flour

1 ½ cups of all purpose flour

1 tsp of Chinese five –spice powder (more magic!)

Mix all the marinade ingredients in a medium bowl, mix with pork chops and marinate for 15 min or overnight if you have time. Lightly cover each pork chop with the seasoned flour, shallow fry each chop until golden brown. Viola!

Veggie (Bok choy) rice (serves 4)

3 cups long-grain rice

4 cups of Chinese bok choy, chopped into 2 cm lengths (or roughly)

1 tbsp of chicken bouillon powder (or salt)

Wash the rice, mix the chicken bouillon powder into the amount of water you usually use to make 3 cups of rice (I used 3 cups of water for 3 cups of rice). Add the veggie into the rice, and pour the stock into the electric rice cooker. Stir and set it to cook. Stir the cooked rice with veggie well before serving.

This is a very simple recipe and can be done in a very short amount of time, perfect for a weeknight dinner. There can be different variation to this recipe; you can serve the rice with chicken and also Chinese sausages steamed over the rice.