Preparing Homemade Asian Meals

In Rome, I tend to cook Italian food at home more frequently than Asian meals.  For whatever reason, I just find it easier to cook Italian meals as I feel there is less prep work.

Nonetheless, I would occasionally prepare Asian meals and did so the past two weekends when we had guests over for dinner.  With the snow in Rome for two consecutive weekends and my three weeks of not feeling well, we are finally trying to make the rounds to meet up with friends and have them over.

Besides preparing the dishes I am familiar with, I have also been experimenting with a few recipes which have turned out surprising well and glad they did as they satisfy some of my cravings.  As I have mentioned before, I rarely go to Chinese restaurants here in Rome, max once or twice a year, as the food they serve is too oily and not quite the Chinese food I am familiar with.

For both meals, I made Chinese dumplings and on both occasions, they were all went quickly. Either they were good or as starters, the guests were just hungry.

Last week we just had a simple meal of chicken curry with rice and dessert was haupia (coconut) cake and mochi ice cream. The desserts were both a touch of Hawaii.

As you can see, the mochi ice cream doesn’t look great but it was really good.  They were all eaten up.  Mochi was an experiment which took me two tries to get it right. I understood what I did wrong the first time and the second time it turned out pretty well.

This weekend, I made some rice noodles with some chicken, carrots and cabbage . With that we had teriyaki chicken and soup.  We had our 4-year old godson over together with his family and I decided not to do a spicy dish.

I am glad that the children enjoyed their meal and I think I have lived up to their expectations as they had told me before dinner that Chinese dumpling is their favorite dish (they are Swiss-Italian and tried everything that evening, even using chopsticks – bravi!).

When it came to desserts I experimented again. This time a fusion dessert of black sesame panna cotta and another azuki mousse. The azuki mousse turned out better than expected and I was thrilled.

The black sesame panna cotta was good too but with black sesame seed, a better dessert is tang yuan, which is glutinous rice flour filled with grounded black sesame seed. I made tang yuan a few weeks back and loved them! I decided not to serve them as desserts as I feel it that it maybe too “out of the field” for my guests.

Tang Yuan served with Ginger Syrup

I have been experimenting with Asian dishes lately and that’s because I was able to make a trip to the Asian grocery store near Piazza Vittorio to stock up on some of the ingredients. There are others near the area but I mainly go to this one as they have fresh produce such as napa cabbage and Chinese pear.

The store I go to usually has everything I need but for Japanese ingredients, such as green tea powder or frozen grilled unagi, I go to the Korean store near Via di Santa Croce di Gerusalemme. (Hint: Since I have a lot of green tea leaves, I went ahead to ground them with my mortar and pestle, used a fine sieve and got green tea powder).

The last experiment I did was more a snack than a dish.  One morning I got up and wanted curry puff.  As usual, I checked for some recipes online and found one that I could make based on the ingredients I had at home.  Luca loved them too but I doubt I will make them often as it requires frying and I just don’t like frying food in general.

It has been a week of preparing Asian dishes and knowing that I am able to make them has helped me reduce a lot of cravings.  The other few things I would like to try making, not necessarily this week, are azuki mochi, green tea panna cotta and siu mai. Let’s see what happens with those attempts.