Why hello there, and welcome back to our ever-teetering on the edge of oblivion blog, Kitchen Catastrophe, where one man continues to fail to realize the simple math of “if you used to spend 15-20 hours a week on this, it’s going to be impossible to fit it in with a social life, full-time job, and mental well-being without scheduling”. ESPECIALLY when your life is a parade of hilarious tragi-comedic timing. I’m your obtuse author, Jon O’Guin, and when last we spoke, I was excited, right at the start of July, that after months of dental work and painkillers, that I was back to a sober state of mind, and was looking forward to having free time back to maybe get more proactive about posting.  And then, STUPIDLY, I didn’t knock on wood, throw salt over my shoulder, or do anything else to protect myself from the obvious self-jinx I was inflicting. If you want to skip that story (and some light Chinese media criticism), you can click this link to jump straight to the recipe. For everyone else, let’s dig in. 

Putting my Foot into my Mouth. Or Close Enough. 

So, as noted, I started the month of July writing about how, after months of dental work, and a brief bout with a kidney stone, I was going to try to do some more social media stuff, and post more often. I even, in a twist I didn’t discover until just now, and have started laughing like a maniac at, ended the post like this: 

Today on “Things you should be smart enough not to say.”

So.

Guess what I did 12 days later. 

Go on. Guess. 

What’s that? “Break your leg, literally the first time in your 35 years of life that you’ve EVER broken a bone?” 

Yeah, kind of!  Specifically, I broke what’s called the ‘lateral malleolus”, which is the very tip of the tibia, which is a leg bone, but by that point, it’s technically considered part of the ankle/foot. The first doctor I saw said I had broken my foot, and it wasn’t until I read the X-ray notes later and looked up the bone that I learned that technically I could say “I broke my leg/ankle/foot” basically interchangeably. 

How? Well, I went to a state park to see the Tree of Life while on my annual vacation/reunion, and slipped basically while leaving the parking lot. Specifically, the tree of life is next to a beach, so there was a light dusting of sand over a concrete walkway, and my foot skidded into a rut in the concrete, where, for half a second, my body tried to support 300+ pounds of moving Jon on an ankle now tilted at about 45 degrees, with roughly the amount of success you’d expect.

Rather than show you what that looked like, here’s the tree I was going to look at! Look at how resilient it is!

At first, we thought I had just twisted or sprained my ankle, as I could walk on it if I tried, it just sucked to do so, so after a couple hours of hobbling through some sight-seeing we’d planned for the day, I mostly spent the rest of the weekend sitting on the edge of the various gatherings and hang outs, icing my ankle 2 or 3 times a day.. Then I went home, spent 2 days trying to get into urgent care before finally getting into the emergency room at around 10 PM for a doctor to say “yeah, that’s broken, buddy.” Before handing me a boot and sending me on my way. 

This Boot was made for limping. And that’s just what I’ll do.

So, obviously, that made…EVERYTHING harder to do until it came off around early October, and I’ve just “finished” doing physical therapy for it. So that’s been fun. Now that I’m back in action, what’s our goal for this post? “Watch a dull show and make a confusing dish from it?” Yeah, that sounds about right.

The Hua-Cha can Fire 200 Rocket-Powered Pancakes to Decimate Her Foes

I see Title Jon has lost his damn mind, in a very specific way. Alright, let’s get to this. Our Patron asked that I try and replicate the “buckwheat pancake” made in episode 1 of Chef Hua. Chef Hua is a Cooking Historical Wuxia C-Drama from 2020, and that is a DENSE genre designation to unpack. Let’s start from the easy part: C-Drama, like K-Pop, is just a conveniently pre-labeled letter of origin. This is, of course, Croatian.

Balkan Music starts playing.
Is Croatia technically part of the Balkans? Google says yes, so 50-50.

No, of course, it’s Chinese. And while I’m sure I’ve rambled on about it before, wuxia is a genre of Chinese literature and cinema that, for the moment, is probably best summarized as “low fantasy, typically medieval”. The lines are a little hazy for me, but basically, if doing martial arts can let you do some magic stuff, it’s wuxia. If ALL forms of cultivation/kung fu let you do magic, that’s closer to a xianxia. (to parse that a little further: Kung Fu, while thought of as marital arts in the west, really means something close to “with effort”. If you study hard, practice for hours, and try to perfect ANY skill, you are doing it “kung fu”.)  For this show, we’re in your typical “everything is normal except the guys who do martial arts can jump 20 feet.” 

However, importantly, those kung fu guys aren’t the main character of the show. As the title suggests, that is a Chef named Hua Xiaomai. Or, well, not technically a CHEF, at the start of the show, I don’t think. Let me explain. One of the things about C-Dramas is that they have a different understanding of pacing than western cinema. For instance, here is a nigh-exhaustive summary of the first 3 “scenes” of the show: 

In the rustic wilderness of medieval China, Hua Xiaomai is gathering ingredients and singing near a waterfall. She proceeds to cook her harvested goods over a small campfire using a large flat stone as a grill for some fish, shrimp and mushrooms, as well as a soup for herself in the woods, when she spots some rare mushrooms on a nearby cliff. She tries to get them, but slips, and is caught mid-fall by a handsome passing stranger who jumps into the air to catch her, the two landing in a somewhat intimate pose. Momentarily stunned, Hua makes light of the situation. He drops her. After a brief argument, he jumps up the cliff and brings her the mushrooms. Spotting smoke, he dashes off, to stomp out a campfire that had been left burning unattended, cooking fish and mushrooms. Chef Hua yells at him for destroying her lunch, he yells at her for starting a fire during a dry season, and then he finds his hose off-screen, and rides off, with Chef Hua noting that he was a bit overly stern, but very handsome. 

That takes ~7 minutes out of the 40 minute episode. Another 4 of which are the opening and closing credits, which include clips from the entire run of the show. Like, spoilers, but you see shots from the WEDDING of these two characters before you actually meet either of them. IN the first 5 minutes of run-time, there are about 100 words spoken, 60 of which are from Hua singing the song to herself. 

This doesn’t count as communication. At least Disney princesses have animals to hear them.

This is a show BUILT to be half-watched while doing something else, because every scene takes longer than it needs to. Here’s everything else of importance that happens in the episode:

-We learn Xiaomai is living with her sister and brother-in-law, which is something of a scandal for the time. We do not learn why. Either why she’s living there, or why it’s a scandal. (From one line, and a relative understanding of the culture, it’s one of those “unmarried women are burdens on their male relatives' ' things, with it being considered inappropriate to rely on a non-blood relative in that way.) 

-We learn Xiaomai’s sister is a loud and overprotective woman who is completely unaware that she cannot cook worth a damn. 

-We learn her brother in law is the town blacksmith, and Xiaomai discovers him working with the handsome Kung Fu guy, who then gets invited to dinner.

Which prompts the only important scene in the show, and the one I was called on to replicate: XIaomai watches her sister make the first dish for the dinner, and decides she cannot abide such terrible food being served to the hot dude, so she throws her sister out of the kitchen, and demonstrates that actually, she’s an amazing cook, because she understands how to chop up food. (That’s only kind of a joke: while multiple references are made to the sister being bad at cooking in various ways, for this specific dish, she’s mostly just not chopping the filling of the dumpling enough)

This is the GOOD chop, for context.

The dinner goes well, so Xiaomai has established a useful task for her to help out around the house with, and things look like they’re going well, but with some tension that the hot guy might tell the story of Xiaomai falling in the wilderness, which would set her sister into a tizzy and potentially ruin this progress.

So, 40 minutes to learn 5 plot points out of the way, what are we making today? Well, It turns out, all of THAT was the EASY hurdle to clear. (which, to be fair, I am currently whining about WATCHING TV) Oh, and as a reward for making it through it with me:  the explanation of TItle-Jon’s madness is that the Korean huacha or hwacha is a sort of early rocket launcher/cannon system. It has the same first syllable as the chef’s name. That’s it. I just remember the huacha very well because the name is fun to say, and because it looked rad in Age of Empires.

Technically, the “200 shots” version is later than this, where it’s a gun with bullets stacked in the barrels, but I’M THE PEDANT HERE, BUCKO.

I Cantonese Read That 

FOR OUR SECOND CHALLENGE, it turns out  the specific recipe my mother wanted cooked was the only one not given an official or clear name in the show. Like, they call the meat they serve with it “Dongpo Pork”, which is easily Google-able. But the English subtitles built into the episode just call this a “buckwheat pancake”, or “pancake”, and using Google translate on the Chinese subtitles right under them give me ‘bing”. Which is a bit of a pain, because “bing” is just, like, the Chinese word for bread. Or more specifically, “flat bread”. Like, in Cantonese, a pizza is a type of bing, as are Mexican tortillas, crepes, all Indian flatbreads, etc. 

It’s also used, like in this instance, for dishes like a South American arepa or pupusa, or the stuffed Naan of indian: a flat bread with FILLING.  Which makes it kind of hard to research, because searching “pork bing” is like typing in “sausage pizza”. Even before AI bullshit consumed SEO based searches, that’s a search that will get you 9 billion results, with no way to find the 90 you need.

Eventually, after comparing to all the varieties I knew, and researching different types,  I came to the conclusion/assumption that the dish is closest to something called “Xian Bing”, named after one of the oldest cities in China, and former capital. As far as I could tell, while it’s more common to make them with beef now, there isn’t a hard-and-fast recipe everyone follows, and I would be safe if I riffed on the ingredients a little. Which was good, because in the show, it’s definitely pork, and visually, they don’t season this dish AT ALL on the show: it’s just the minced pork, minced tofu, chopped scallion, MAYBE some shredded ginger or garlic…

That looks like ginger, right? Because otherwise, I’ll have to watch more episodes to figure it out.

And, most dauntingly, egg. Why is egg a problem? Because, in the show, the construction of this dish goes “make a pork and tofu mix, make a dumpling around it, press it out, fry it on one side, flip, PIERCE THE FRYING BING WITH A FUNNEL AND POUR IN EGG.” After a quick check-in with my mom, we decided to skip that step because that sounded like too much work, and ever since I broke the funnel cake machine, we don’t have a funnel that’s good with thick liquids, 

Once the hard step is taken out, of course,, it’s a fairly straight forward system. Step 1 is to whip up a quick hot-water dough. Get about 4 cups of flour, a bit of salt and a cup of hot water. Not boiling, but like, over 90-100 degrees. You need it hot because that gelatinizes some of the starches in the dough, while inhibiting gluten. This is why dumplings are chewy when cooked with steam, while normal bread dough would get goopy and weird.  Mix until the dough starts to form, and then add some more room temp water, and some vegetable oil. Work until it becomes smooth, and then let it rest for 30 minutes. The dough needs time for water to hydrate and the gluten to chill out.

Tragically, I didn’t take a picture of the dough. So please accept this doughball instead.

Meanwhile, make the filling. The recipes for more modern Xian Bing are predominantly beef-based, so I just kind of riffed with my own ideas here. ½ a pound of pork, ½ a pound of tofu, some scallions, soy sauce, black pepper, some chinese five spice. Just figure out what you like, and scram it in that sucker. I picked the Chinese Five Spice because I was making this the day after Christmas, and thought the Cinnamon and Anise would play well, and because one of the recipes I was cribbing off of suggested brown sugar for some balancing sweetness, which I thought would be a bit of a hard sell to my family, while sweeter spices would be accepted. 

The filling is almost Christmas Colored! That’s relevant, because I actually made this recipe the day after Christmas, and then got SADD for January.

The next step is a CLASSIC “easier said than done” kind of simple recipe issue. You made the dough, you made the filling, now just portion out the dough, and make the dumplings. So just make 20 portions of dough, 20 poritions of meat, roll each thing of dough out, and form it into something that kind of looks like a respectable soup dumpling kind of vibe…and then immediately squish it into a kind of heinous looking flattened pancake.

The meat is trying to escape. Imprison it further.

Slap them in a hot pan, fry for like, 2-3 minutes a side (less for thinner ones, more for thicker ones), and boom. You got some Bing, baby. I served mine with a little mix of Chinese Black vinegar, soy sauce, and I think chili oil? I normally put in chili oil, but I’m not seeing the oil slick in the picture, so maybe i was worried about getting heartburn. THE RESULTS?

FOOD!

Have I had dumplings this poorly made from Chinese restaurants? I would say yeah, these are pretty on-par with, like, the cheap dumplings the less-popular Chinese place next to the middle school in my home-town makes. Though theirs are weird in a different way: With theirs, they’ve been a little over-steamed, and the internal meat a little overworked, so it’s a kind of bouncy meat texture in a disintegrating wrapper. Here, we clearly didn’t make the wrappers thin enough, so it’s a slightly overly doughy layer to bite through. You get like, the initial crunch of the fried exterior…and then have to KEEP BITING to push through the rest of the wrapper.  The meat and tofu mixture inside is fine. The Five Spice is a little weird, and I honestly think I should have doubled down and tossed in the brown sugar, because that would have unified the identity here a little better. It’s by no means the worst thing I’ve ever made. Hell, since making them, I picked up a box of Costco Pho Soup Dumpllings, and one of them got trapped in a cold spot while I was cooking them in the microwave so it was only like, thawed out, but not cooked enough where the soup had re-melted, and that was worse than these. It’s clear I’m more of a…shit, I have already forgotten the sister’s name. Rou? DId I write it down earlier? Nope. Anyhow, clearly I’m more of a loud mouth than a fine chef. But if you wanna try these and one up me, here’s a recipe, and I wish you the best of luck.

NEXT TIME: JON MAKES YOU LEARN ABOUT SCRAPPLE, DAMNIT.

CHEF HUA’S HALF-ASSED PORK XIAN BING

INGREDIENTS

DOUGH

4 cups all-purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

1 cup hot water over 90°F

1/2 cup room temperature water

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

Pork-Tofu Filling

½  lb ground pork

½ lb firm tofu, torn into chunks

1 cup scallions diced (4 green onions)

3 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp sesame oil

2 tsp Chinese Five Spice

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

3 tbsp cold water

Preparation

1. To make the dough, in a stand-mixer (or mixing bowl, but it’ll be more work) add all-purpose flour & salt. Make a small well in the center and pour in the hot water. Using a dough hook or spatula, stir until dough starts to come together. 

2. Pour in the room temperature water, oil and roughly knead to form a dough. Add a tablespoon or two of more water if needed and knead for 3 minutes. Dough should be smooth. Cover and set aside for 30 minutes

3. Then mix up the filling: in a bowl, mix everything except the water.. Keep stirring until you feel the mixture getting thick and a little bouncy. Add in the water, mixing in 1 tbsp at a time, until it’s fully absorbed and  emulsified.

4. Cut the dough into 20 portions. Traditionally, you’d roll it into a 20-inch long snake and cut into 1 inch chunks. Roll the 1 inch chunks into 6 inch wide disks, pop in a little more than 2 tbsps of filling per dumpling. 

5. Pull the sides of the dumpling together, pinching to form a little dumpling, and then re-flatten the dumplings into bing. 

6. Fry over medium heat in about 2 tbsps of oil. Cook on the first side until golden brown and crispy (ours took about 4-5 minutes), then flip and cook on the other side for 1 minute, then flip again and cook another minute (so 6-7 minutes total. 

7. Serve with dipping sauce of your choice (I used a standard soy-sauce, black vinegar, chili oil mix.)