Growing up, my mom or dad cooked almost every of our meals at home, take-out or restaurant dinners were rare. I’m lucky they were both good cooks, I miss some of their dishes but don’t possess any of their recipes. It just didn’t seem to be our tradition to keep family recipes written.

If I’m asking my dad about how to cook a dish, he will probably give instructions like this:”when the wok is hot, add oil, when the oil is hot add chopped leeks, then add meat, sauté until meat is half cooked then add the vegetables A and B, put a little bit soy sauce, salt and sugar, taste to adjust accordingly. It would be nice if you add spice C too. Don’t over cook vegetable B…” There is no precision, no one tablespoon of this, one teaspoon of that. Most Chinese seem to learn how to cook this way, from their parents or other family members.

Back when I just moved to Paris and cooked a lot, Le Monsieur would take pictures of many of my dishes and ask me to write the recipes down, but I never took it seriously. Then one day he bought a Asian dish cookbook, after checking out a few pages I was like:”those are pretty simple why do you need a cookbook for that?” I didn’t realize that not everyone had the chance to learn some basic cooking skills while growing up. Myself have started cooking from high school, but have never bought any cookbook or followed any written recipes up until 4 years ago, when I started to learn baking.

We Chinese don’t have measuring cups, if there is 茶勺 “teaspoon” or 汤勺”soup spoon” mentioned in a Chinese recipe, they are just normal spoons used for eating, and you probably don’t have the same size spoon as the cook who wrote the recipe.

Now and then when I want to cook a traditional Chinese dish, I check Beidu (Chinese equivalent of Google) to see what are the recipes out there already. I’m not surprised to find out that most recipes are very approximative: there are a lot descriptives like 少许(a little bit) soy sauce (is that a quantity?), cut xxx into “small pieces” (how small it should be?), “a piece of” ginger (how big a piece?) and very few mentioning about how long an item should be cooked, etc…  So I tell myself I have to make my recipes more precise and replicable. I’m not sure my girls will be very into cooking when they grow up. But if they need some recipes from me, they’ll be able to find them here.

So here is a recipe I cooked many times. I now noted all the measurements so you can try to recreate the same dish at home. Those organic chicken wings are from Costco (2.99/lb). I buy them regularly since they taste good, are not too fat and it’s very convenient: each package include 3 packs of already sectioned chicken wings that you can freeze individually. We brown the wings at the beginning of the cooking to render some fat, so it will be easier for them to take on the sauce later on.

I used rainbow carrots this time since that is what I got from my CSA this week. The pointed red pepper look vegetable is indeed the end of a red carrot. You can use also a 1lb bag of baby carrots. There is a whole sliced onion in there, but at the end of cooking, almost all the onion slices will be dissolved into the sauce, a few strips that remain are almost like onion confit. We use star anise often in Chinese cooking, its flavor is unique but not overpowering. The sauce is especially good to eat with rice.

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