Chinese cooking in quarantine

Chinese Cooking in Quarantine: dish made with cabbage, onion, mushroom and pork.

Wall Street Journal has an article on how Shanghainese are currently coping with a city-wide lockdown due to COVID. Among the tools is a website that helps cooks prepare flavorful Chinese food in quarantine with very few ingredients, i.e. what you happen to have at home.

Cookyunyoujin website, in Chinese.

We gave it a look, starting with translating the home page using Google Translate. (In Chrome, the option should appear in a window at top right if your browser is set to English as the default language). You choose your ingredients, specify what cooking equipment you have, and then are served a menu of dishes that can be made with what your have.

We specified cabbage, onion, mushrooms and pork and said we have a wok. We were then served up a video from BilBili that shows the dish being made. You can translate the text on the page but not the audio and the recipe does not appear in the notes as it usually does on YouTube, so a bit of guessing was involved, especially with the amounts of the seasoning:

Napa cabbage, ½ head sliced lengthwise (we had specified generic “cabbage” which should also work)
Shiitake mushrooms, half a dozen whole, fresh or dried
100 g (estimate) pork belly, sliced into ½ inch x 2 inch strips
2 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced thin
1 bunch green onions, including the green part, sliced into matchstick lengths
1-2 T Szechuan red peppers (mild), each cut into 2-3 pieces with scissors
Salt
Grated ginger
Oil for stir fry
Soy sauce, light
Soy sauce, dark

Method: chop the cabbage into strips about ½ x 4 inches (the video shows some nice technique). Divide in two bowls, with the denser pieces from the bottom of the cabbage in one bowl and the pieces from the tops of the leaves in the other, and reserve. Boil water (just enough to submerge the mushrooms) with ½ t salt (or is it sugar?). Blanch the mushrooms so they are hydrated but not fully cooked. (The insides are still white in the video). Thin-slice the mushrooms across the cap and reserve.

Cookyunyoujin home page, translated into English.

Clean out the wok and add ¼ c neutral cooking oil. Stir-fry pork until the fat begins to render and it loses its pink color, then add garlic and ginger and stir-fry briefly. Add the bowl with denser leaves of cabbage cabbage and stir fry until cabbage begins to wilt. Add mushroom slices and stir-fry until they are softened and the white color turns to beige. Add the other ½ of cabbage and cook briefly so it is still crisp. Add 3/4 t salt, 1 T grated ginger, 2 T light soy sauce and 1 T dark soy sauce and toss to combine. Finish the dish by adding the sliced green onions; toss until they are heated through but still crisp. Serve with rice or on its own.

The above is just one random example. Check the ingredients in your kitchen and see what you can come up with!