The Joys of Chinese Cooking: Sweet & Sour Pork and Bamboo Shoots with Spinach and Mushrooms (1982)

Happy Lunar New Year! It’s the Year of the Ox!

I wasn’t planning on having some Asian cuisine on the blog for the holiday, but I had this dinner in the queue, so here we are.

These recipes are from The Joy of Chinese Cooking by Lo Mei Hing, Giulia Marzotto Caotorta and Sun Tzi Hsi (1983). It’s a beast of a book–oversized and clocking in at over 300 pages.

This is a perfect Chinese cookbook for people who have never cooked Chinese before. It’s full of bright and shiny step-by-step illustrated directions and very few recipes call for specialty ingredients that you would not find in your local supermarket. The dishes are a mix of very standard spring rolls and won ton soup to more exotic items like squid flowers with leek and chicken gizzard salad.

It also includes this dish:

Which I totally need to make because:

So onto the Chinese food!

This is Bamboo Shoots with Spinach and Mushrooms:

This is Sweet and Sour Pork:

I want you all to admire my mise en place:

Yeah, it dirties a bunch of dishes, but It does make the actual cooking so much easier.

The results:

The pork was really good. And so pretty! The recipe was very easy. Tasted like the restaurant dish, but without all the breading, deep-frying, corn syrup and red dye. #nailedit

The bamboo shoots were a little too light for my liking. Quite bland. So just ignore those.

Now go eat a Good Fortune Fruit (orange, pomelo, kumquat, tangerine)–they are believed to bring good luck and happiness. Here’s hoping that the Year of the Ox is a helluva lot better than the Year of the Rat (2020)!!!