An easy and cheap way to enhance your homemade Chinese Meal-Scallion Pancakes

It is yet again one of my favorite days, Pancake Day! This year I learned why Shrove Tuesday, which is the day before Lent, is also called Pancake Day. In most traditions the day is known for eating pancakes before the start of Lent because pancakes are made out of the main foods available, sugar, fat, flour and eggs, whose consumption was traditionally restricted during the ritual fasting associated with Lent. Now I don't participate in Lent but I have no problem participating in Shrove Tuesday by eating pancakes.

But one thing that also love to do is to find a different way to celebrate instead of the traditional sweet pancakes. So today I decided to highlight a delicious, savory pancake that I use to enjoy when my family lived in China, Scallion Pancakes. This was always a favorite of mine when we would go out, but sadly I haven't had a lot of success finding a Chinese restaurant that serves them. I never thought about making them myself because I imaged that it would be a difficult task. I am here to say that it is incredibly easy! And it uses such simple ingredients that it is an easy and cheap way to compliment your home cooked Chinese meal. I found the inspiration for this recipe from a blogger that I deeply respect and admire, Nicky from Delicious Days. If you are a food blogger you really need to read her blog, not only is the photography and writing wonderful but she has a lot of good advice about how to grow and develop your food blog.

Learning new tricks to cook up Tofu-Stir Fry when you are a busy mum

Sorry for the sudden absence. We just moved into our first home here in the UK and things didn’t work out very smoothly for us to get Internet. Plus it was also very difficult to get all that I needed to get done with a small baby. Funny how life has so quickly changed, things take so much longer to get done now. For example I put together an Ikea dresser, pre-baby this would have taken tops an hour, today it took three and a half hours. But no matter how crazy it is with a baby life presses on and it is up to us to find a way to keep going. I will be the first to admit that it has been a lot harder to get back into cooking then I had hoped it would be. So I have had to come up with little tricks to make things easier. One of those tricks is using times during the day that she is napping to do any prep work. For this Tofu Stir-fry I went ahead and prepped my tofu, veggies and even my sauce during the two short nap breaks I got one after lunch and the other one later on in the afternoon. Then when it was time for dinner I was able to just saute it all together. Now if I could just master the trick of getting my daughter to not be fussy at dinner time so I can eat it when it is hot, oh well re-heated dinner is also apart of a mum's life.

Recreating my favorite Crispy Beef recipe from the Pearl Restaurant in New York City

After discovering this dish in New York I knew I had to at least attempt it on my own. But I have to say I was very nervous, I had never attempted such a dish before and it seemed like it would be a hard one to duplicate. But after enough convincing both from myself as well as my husband, who was determined to have me try to make this, I took the plunge.  The key with crispy shredded beef is making sure that you have all of your ingredients prepped and ready to go before hand.  This is a very quick cooking dish so having the ingredients ready is a must. It is fun to be able to create dishes like the ones you have in restaurants, especially when it is from a restaurant that you can't go to very often.

Chinese Green Beans

Personally I don't like serving a meal to my family that doesn't have a vegetable with it.  Whether there are vegetables in the main dish or on the side I try to make sure that it is always included.  So the other day when I made my General Tso Chicken I tried to come up with a nice veggie dish to serve up along side.  One of my favorite dishes in Chinese restaurants in the States was a Dry-Fried Green bean so I thought I would give it a try and see if I could come up with something similar. It turned out to be an incredibly easy dish to prepare and equally delicious.