Month: April 2020

Grandma’s Red-Braised Pork （红烧肉）

To become a self-sufficient adult, and also to sneak a few bites of food before it’s presented for the masses, I’ve become grandma’s kitchen shadow. While she’s not a gourmet chef, her food brings memories of big, warm family dinners. My favorite dish as a kid was grandma’s red-braised pork. In Chinese: 红烧肉. Tender and glossy, best served over rice, it is the most hard-hitting dose of nostalgia I can find. No surprise, it’s also the first dish I asked grandma to teach me.

The ingredients are pretty simple: 

  • Pork Belly* 
  • Green Onions
  • Garlic
  • Ginger 
  • Light Soy Sauce
  • Dark Soy Sauce
  • Vinegar 
  • Shaoxing Wine
  • Star Anise
  • Rock Sugar

*Other cuts of meat also work. We made this recipe with steak and it turned out nicely.

Notice that there are no measurements for any of the ingredients. Chinese cooking is way more art than science; I’ve never seen my grandma hold a measuring utensil in her hand, and probably never will. Although this makes things difficult for kitchen newbies like myself, I go with it. As much as I love my copy of The Food Lab, I commit to ~ feeling ~  instead of / measuring /. After all, grandma’s teaching me the same way she was taught. 

Green Onions, Garlic, Star Anise, Rock Sugar, & Ginger
The Sauces: Dark Soy Sauce, Vinegar, Light Soy Sauce, Shaoxing Wine
The star of the show: meat!

My grandma usually makes red-braised pork with, you know, pork. This time we used steak. Why? you might ask. My grandma mistook the two steaks thawing in the sink for pork belly. How? you might ask. “In my mind, American meat is completely inferior to the meat I’m used to working with. I thought it was a quality issue that the pork didn’t look like pork.” Grandma’s recipe still holds, though. The red-braised steak turns out scrumptious. 

Chop chop chop. Sliced into one-inch cubes.

With the meat diced, we transfer it to a hot skillet over high heat.

Using a spatula, grandma scoops and slides the cubes, which brown evenly. Meat juices coalesce at the bottom of the pan. We dump the juices in the sink. We return the skillet to the stovetop and it’s time for sauces and spices.

Two splashes of shaoxing wine, vinegar, dark soy sauce, and three splashes of light soy sauce. Light soy sauce doubly functions as salt, while dark soy sauce gives red-braised pork its namesake coloring. Toss in green onions, peeled garlic, chopped ginger slices, rock sugar, and  star anise, then enough water to submerge the meat. When the water boils, we cover the skillet for an hour on low heat. It’s ready when the garlic, pressed with a spoon, is soft enough to dissolve into the sauce. The lid comes off, and we crank the stove up to high heat again. The water vapor fizzes upwards while I wait for the sauce to thicken to my liking. 

It is done.

Well, not quite. In this picture, the sauce still looks watery. I waited a few more minutes, but forgot to capture the final form. 

Red-braised pork belly is the peking duck of Hunan province. There are countless variations throughout China’s provinces, but in the eyes of Chinese history, the Hunan version holds the highest esteem. It has a special name: 毛氏红烧肉, which translates to “Mao’s Red-Braised Pork”. With Chairman Mao’s name, you know something has the official stamp of approval. 

Red-braised pork is often served over white rice, with green vegetables. My family is a big fan of bok choy. Any leafy vegetable works nicely. The crisp, fresh texture balances out the strong, indulgent taste of well-braised pork and makes a well-balanced family dinner. 

Goodbye, hello, goodbye, hello again: Home

In the past year, I’ve called Herndon, Kunming, and Yilan, Taiwan my home. I have lived in Herndon for six years, Kunming for four months, Yilan for three weeks. These places span countries and continents, and are distinct from one another in character and culture, but I’ve found a sense of belonging in each of them. 

On March 18th I returned home. My Herndon, Virginia one. My family welcomed me with dumplings. I ate at the kitchen counter. My mom, dad, grandma, and little sister ate at the kitchen table. I hauled my luggage to the guest room, where I would closet myself for 14 days in self-imposed corona exile. My days were spent reading, catching up with friends (so much easier when we are all in the same time zone), and, most of all, thinking about the past year.

I’m really bad at goodbyes. I always expect them to be more significant than they are. In the end, I taste a cloying disappointment when life goes on normally, without the people who were just recently a part of normal life. At the San Francisco airport, friends I spent the past six and a half months with boarded their return flights, one after another. To Newark, San Diego, Atlanta, Houston. Everyone left with a hug and a “we’ll see each other again in six months”. I rummaged my mind to find something of interest or importance to say, something that will last through those six months. Eventually, I gave up. There’s a 100% chance we see each other in college next year, and what needs to be said will come up naturally. Right now, it was “see you later”. 

We left Yilan, Taiwan on a dime’s drop, which is to say abruptly and sharply. All of Princeton’s Bridge Year programs were cancelled, two and a half months early, because of coronavirus. We had less than a week to say goodbye to the city. I spent my last weekend cruising around Luodong with my homestay parents, eating every item on my bucket list, going home extremely full and content. I watched anime and Taiwanese opera videos with my homestay siblings, then woke up for one final group day, then one final work day. We had only been in Yilan for three weeks. A short time in the grand scheme of things, but the town was extremely welcoming and I wanted to say goodbye properly. Not as a harsh, final thing, but as an open-ended, let’s keep in touch, I’ll be back. Because I will be. I will be back in Taiwan, it’s just a matter of time and circumstance.

I can say the same about Kunming. We had an even shorter amount of time – one day – to assemble our belongings and say goodbye to our homestay families. There was more uncertainty. My last day, I ate lunch with my homestay parents and little sister MiaoMiao. Over sweet and sour spare ribs and julliard salad, products of the spare time that comes with self-quarantine, we said uncertain goodbyes. We didn’t know how the coronavirus would pan out, or if I could return home to Kunming before the program ended. Either way, my homestay family were cheerful and confident that we’d see each other again. I reassured them that I would be back. 

The last night before we departed Kunming for Taiwan, I slept on the window ledge of our twelfth-story program house. That last night, I fell asleep gazing into the cityscape. I felt close and intimate with Kunming, like I was cuddling with a well-worn lover, feeling vertigo and dizziness and above all a sense of comfort.  

That’s the comforting thing about home, you know you’ll always find a way back.