Chinese Cooking Made Easy: With Simple Sauces and Dressings (Wei-chuan°s cookbook)

Rating:
Summary: take it from an American born Chinese
Review: Chinese Cooking is traditionally a little complicated, at least here in the states. It seems you need so many ingredients to do the simplest things. But this book really broke that barrier for me. Each dish is shown in splendid Restaurant Menu color. You are able to find that special dish that has a different name at each restaurant. The book is split into chinese and english sections top/bottom respectively. Very simple ingredient lists organized by order of addition to the pot. Most of the recipes only had 4-5 steps. And even my wife and I were able to come up with some incredible dinners together.

Rating:
Summary: Somewhat disappointing.
Review: I was hoping to replicate many of the dishes I buy at my local chinese restaruant: Kung Pao Chicken, chow mein, chow fun dishes, and a variety of veggie and lamb dishes. This particular book though is full of heavier meat recipes; roast chicken, stewed duck, peking duck, smoked duck, various preparations of chicken legs and breasts, pork chops, and beef steaks. There ARE a few dishes like I was looking for: chicken w/ black beans, curry beef, ground meat in lettuce, spicy shrimp w/ cashews, but they are fewer than I'd hoped. The soup selection has only 3 choices and does not include Hot & Sour soup. "Fried Noodles" are the only noodle recipe. There are no Chow Fun recipes. There are almost no vegetable dish recipes except for detailed info on boiling or stir frying specific veggies (which is good info, but it's not a dish, it's just prep).

More minor problems are: they don't use english abbreviations for quantities even in the English text. They use "T." for tablespoon instead of "tbsp". Many recipes reference "wine", but so far I have not found what kind of "wine" they actually mean listed in the intro How-To section.

Overall I find it lacking in terms of common "chinese lunch special" type dishes, or Szechuan dishes (as best I can tell from reading anyhow). Some of these dishes may be in here, but they're called "spicy" this or that instead of the names you'd see them listed on a menu as. This may or may not be more accurate, but I'd rather have commonly understood names instead of technically accurate names.

I'm caucasian. I'm also Californian and near San Francisco so I've been eating chinese food all my life and love it, but I'm far from literate in what differentiates Szechuan from Mandarin, etc. Therefore I find this book a little less informative than I'd hoped. I would probably not buy it again for the relatively few recipes in it I will ever cook, but the section on squid dishes and a couple others is enough to keep me from trying to return it.

Rating:
Summary: Made me hungry!
Review: The recipes in the book made it seem easy to cook your own Chinese dishes. I'm 47 years old and have never tried making my own Chinese dishes (and I'm Chinese). Even after I thumbed thru the book, the only thing it made me do was order take out 3 nights in a roll!
One day, I will try one of the recipes in the book!

Rating:
Summary: Made me hungry!
Review: The recipes in the book made it seem easy to cook your own Chinese dishes. I'm 47 years old and have never tried making my own Chinese dishes (and I'm Chinese). Even after I thumbed thru the book, the only thing it made me do was order take out 3 nights in a roll!
One day, I will try one of the recipes in the book!

Rating:
Summary: It really is easy
Review: This book is one of a series put out by Wei-Chuan Publishing from Taiwan. I bought this particular title while living in Taiwan in 1992 and have used it continuously since. Part of the draw for me is that this book (like most of the Wei-Chuan publications) is bilingual (as I was studying Chinese in Taiwan). More importantly, the recipes are easy to follow, have good pictures of what each finished dish should look like, and has a front section on mixing various sauces that can be used with whatever you want to stir-fry.

Rating:
Summary: Must have book for authentic Chinese food
Review: This book is one of a series put out by Wei-Chuan Publishing from Taiwan. I bought this particular title while living in Taiwan in 1992 and have used it continuously since. Part of the draw for me is that this book (like most of the Wei-Chuan publications) is bilingual (as I was studying Chinese in Taiwan). More importantly, the recipes are easy to follow, have good pictures of what each finished dish should look like, and has a front section on mixing various sauces that can be used with whatever you want to stir-fry.

Rating:
Summary: Simple, delicious Chinese recipes
Review: This is an excellent cookbook for those who are not familiar with cooking Chinese dishes. What I like most about this book is that the majority of recipes don't call for ingredients that are hard to find. Since I don't live anywhere near an Asian food store, this is a big plus for me. In addition, I'm a vegetarian and my husband is a big meat eater. This book has several vegetarian recipes in the back, so it satisfies both of our palates. To date, I have 18 Wei-Chuan cookbooks and I put this one in the top 5.

Rating:
Summary: Simple, delicious Chinese recipes
Review: This is an excellent cookbook for those who are not familiar with cooking Chinese dishes. What I like most about this book is that the majority of recipes don't call for ingredients that are hard to find. Since I don't live anywhere near an Asian food store, this is a big plus for me. In addition, I'm a vegetarian and my husband is a big meat eater. This book has several vegetarian recipes in the back, so it satisfies both of our palates. To date, I have 18 Wei-Chuan cookbooks and I put this one in the top 5.