Cooking "Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking", Day 2: Veggies and Clams

Feeling confident from our wonton making, we moved onto another three dishes from "Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking." This time:

Braised Mushrooms with Oyster Sauce-These were good. We loved that this method transforms dried mushrooms into an incredibly fresh tasting dish.

It is hard to keep fresh mushrooms around, but these are easy to store, and even top quality ones are reasonably priced. The dish was a bit on the salty side, so we ultimately combined it with the bok choy.

Bok Choy with Oyster Sauce-We used "Choi Sum," a lovely little bok choy of sorts. Yin Fei-Lo has you blanch the choi sum first we creates a bright green color as you can see in the image at the top of this post. These were bitter in a wonderful way, and retained their crunch once we stir fried them quickly. The sauce needed a bit more soy, but was best mixed with the braised mushrooms.

Clams with Black Bean Sauce-This was our weak link of the night. We used steamers when it needed littleneckes, but the bigger issue was the sauce. It was so salty that I couldn't even eat it. We wondered if it reflected our choice of black beans, or if we just needed to soak the black beans longer.