Traditional Shanghai Soup with Fresh and Salted Pork (醃篤鮮)

This is a very traditional Shanghai soup, with a lively Shanghai-style Chinese name.  The first word, 醃 (curing meat), points to Salted Pork, the second word, 篤 (stewing), talks about the cooking process (stew slowly in covered pot), and the third word, 鮮 (fresh ingredients), refers to the fresh pork.  The soup is supposed to be white, and the flavor rich (湯白味濃).

1. [Make Salted Pork] Get a piece of pork leg meat, with skin (usually in ~3"x3"x 6" size).  Cut into 3 long slices each in ~1" thick, ~3" tall, ~6" long (with skin).  Rub salt and sprinkle Sichuan Peppercorns (花椒) on both sides of each slice. Let air dry (uncovered) in fridge for 5 - 7'days. Store in a plastic bag in the freezer if not used immediately.  For this soup, rinse and blanch half of a slice of the salted pork.  Cut it into bite size (~1/2" x 1/2" x 1.5", keep the skin) and set aside.
2. Cut 4-6 oz of fresh pork (pork butt, pork shoulder, or pork belly, with skin) into similar bite size as the Salted Pork.
3. Get a pack of Soy Sheet Knots (百頁結, see product package to the right).  Use half a pack for this soup.
   
4. Cut 2-3 pieces of Winter Bamboo Shoots (冬筍) into triangular bite size and Spring Bamboo Shoots (春筍) into 1/2" segments.
5. Get 4-6 stalks of Bok Choy ready (pick apart, and rinse)
6. [Make the Stock] Get a bag of beef bone, rinse, blanch for 2-3 minutes.  Place the bones in a fresh soup pot.  Fill the pot with water to 70-80% capacity.  Bring to boil at high heat.  Skim off foams and stuff.  Keep the pot in vigorous boiling state at medium-to-high heat for 30 minutes (cover the lid, make sure the soup does not boil over and spill).  The soup should be turning almost milk white at this point, as the fat content dissolves into water at high heat.  Skim off oil.  Continue to let the soup simmer in covered pot for 2 - 2.5 hours.  
7. [Make the Soup] Add about 3 - 4 cups of the stock (prepared in Step 6) into a fresh soup pot.  Add the salted pork, fresh pork, soy sheet knots, and bamboo shoots prepared in Step 1-4 above into the pot.  Fill the pot with water to cover the ingredients.  Add 2-3 stalks of scallions (cut into 2" segments), 6-8 slices of ginger, 10-12 pieces of dried shrimp (蝦米), 1 tsp of salt, 2 Tbsp of Rice Cooking Wine, 3 Tbsp of Shao-hsing Rice Wine (紹興酒). Bring the pot to boil, and let simmer for 1.5 - 2 hours.  
8. Season to taste with salt.  Place the Bok Choy (prepared in Step 5) in the pot to steam for 1-2 minutes.  Now the soup is ready to serve.  See picture below for finished product (with half of the stock and half of this dish's own clear soup). Note- The flavor of the meat pieces is all in the soup now.  There is almost no need to consume the meat.
   

Hong-Kong-style Turnip Cake (港式蘿蔔糕)

This item has been on the honey-do list for quite a while.  We always order this dish when we go to a dim-sum restaurant.  We can buy it in Phoenix (鳳城) bakery in Southern California a week or two before the Chinese New Year every year, or in Chinese markets in frozen form.  As a result, there are at least 2-3 quality benchmarks for any home-made product to live up to.  Objectively speaking, even though it's not a fancy food item, it's hard to do right, because the texture must be soft, but not mushy, and the taste must be flavorful, but not too rich.  I finally gathered enough courage to try it, based on several online sources, notably a YouTube video in Cantonese soundtrack (for its cooking method) and several online recipes in Chinese (for ingredients and seasoning).  The result seems promising.  Here it is.

1. Get ~3 lbs of Turnip (aka Daikon, 3 larger ones), peel, and rinse.  Cut along it's length into ~3" chunks, then slice into half (careful!), place the flat side facing down, and further cut into long slices of ~1/4" x 1/4" x 2"-3".  Note- Please cut with care.  Form a tightly-held claw in your non-cutting hand to hold the turnip, as shown in the picture in this post.
2. Place the slices of turnip into a large pot (10-12" in diameter).  Add 8 cups of water into the pot,  Set the pot aside on cooktop or stove (don't turn on heat until Step 6 below).  
   
3. In a large mixing bowl, add 4 & 3/4 cups of rice flour (再來米粉, aka 粘米粉, see the left-hand-side image for product package), 1 & 3/4 cups of wheat starch (澄粉, i.e., all purpose flour with gluten removed, see the right-hand-side image for product package), and 3/4 cup of corn starch (粟粉).  Add 3 tsp of salt, 2 tsp of sugar, and 1 tsp of white pepper into the bowl.  Mix evenly.  Gradually add 4 cups of water into the bowl, while stirring the mix constantly with a strong egg whisk until there are no clumps in the mix. 
4. Soften 10-12 pieces of dry mushrooms (soak in water for ~ 1 hr, remove stems, squeeze out water, and dice into 1/4"-square of chunks), and ~20 pcs of dry shrimps (soak in water for 15 - 20 minutes, chop into smaller chunks)  
5. Heat 3 pieces of Taiwanese Sausages (香腸) and a piece of 2" x 3" of Chinese Cured Pork (臘肉) in Microwave (or in boiling water) for 1 minute, such that the pieces are easier to slice and dice.  Cut both types of meat into 1/4"-square of chunks.  
6. Bring the pot with turnip slices to boil, and let simmer in covered pot till the turnip slices are soft (~10 minutes).
7. Place the meat chunks prepared in Step 5 into a dry frying pan, turn on medium heat, and stir for 2-3 minutes.  Add dried shrimps and dried mushrooms.  Now, season with 1 Tbsp of Sesame Oil, 2 Tbsp of Oyster Sauce, 3 Tbsp of Fried Shallot (油蔥酥), and stir for another 2-3 minutes.  Pour all these ingredients into the dry mix (in Step 3), and whisk till thoroughly mixed.  Pour this combined mix into a large stock pot.
8. Pour the burning-hot turnip slices and water slowly into the large stock pot (be very careful!).  Immediately stir and mix the content in the stock pot together thoroughly, by whisking vigorously, until the content in the stock pot is turned into thick paste, with discernible turnip slices, meat chunks, and mushroom bits.
9. Use a heat-resistant spatula to get the still-hot mixed-paste into 2-3 oiled baking containers that are suitable for steaming later. Alternatively, line the bottom of the baking containers with plastic wrap, instead of oiling them. Note- I used two 8"-square and one 4"x 8" containers, all made of glass.  Costco’s Plastic Food Wrap is food-safe, and also safe in a steamer (vs in an oven), where the steam keeps the temperature inside the steamer between 212-degF and 240-degF. 
10. Cover the baking containers with plastic wrap.  Place the covered baking containers into a steamer.  After full steam is built up at high heat, steam at medium-to-high heat for 75 minutes.  Check to see if the steam coming out of the top of the steamer has subsided, if the water in the bottom pot runs low (For a 12"-diameter steaming pot, 75 minutes of steaming consumes less than 1" deep of water.).  Note- The 4"x 8" container was covered in plastic wrap and cooked in the Microwave Oven for 3 minutes x 5 sessions.  Take a look to make sure the content is not boiling over in between sessions.  The result of 15-minute Microwave cooking seems to be the same as steaming.
11. Let the now-fully-cooked turnip cakes cool overnight.  Fry pieces of the cake in a pan with vegetable oil at medium heat till brown and slightly crispy, and serve with a dipping sauce of a mixture of Soy Paste and Sweet and Spicy Sauce.  Here is a picture of the finished product (the pieces seem to be broken down a bit at cutting time).
    
12. Here is a stir-fried turnip cake dish that's worth doing (for dinner).  Cut a chunk of turnip cake into 1/2"-thick slices, and fry them as suggested in Step 11.  Take the slices out, let cool, cut into 1/2" x 1/2" x 1&1/2" chunks, and set aside.  Stir-fry some vegetables, such as carrots and onion (sliced, and saute'd till soft first), add the turnip cake chunks, season with Oyster Sauce and XO Sauce (add a small amount of water), stir for 1-2 minutes, and turn off heat.  Then mix in some thinly sliced scallions, and serve (as shown in the picture below, as to the veggies, adding sliced green peppers and mum bean spouts won't be a bad idea!).