Since March at the start of the shelter in place, I've been cooking some cool new recipes with my boyfriend! Here's a few of them.
For dinner one night, we cooked some Mongolian beef, stir-fried tofu, bok choy, and rice. The tofu was super simple to make. The tofu is coated in corn starch, pan-fried, and drenched in a sauce of sweet chili sauce, soy sauce, and sesame oil. We cooked the beef using a similar process, and I stir fried some bok choy with garlic and ginger for some veggies to go with the meal.
This dish is a recreation of a dish that my boyfriend gets every time we order takeout from Tan My, a Vietnamese restaurant in Austin. (I always get the pho which lasts two meals for me.) We don't know what the name is exactly, but we always refer to it as 55C, the number it is on the menu. We bought the uncut block of the rice noodles found next to the tofu and produce at HMart and cut it up into large chunks. We then slowly pan fried them in enough oil on both sides until crispy. Next, we cooked the beef and later added the veggies. We tossed the rice noodles back in along with a sauce of hoisin and fish sauce. It turned out pretty well, but it's definitely not as good as the one from the restaurant.
This egg tart recipe is one of the harder ones that we have attempted. When we visited San Francisco back in February, we had egg tarts at one of the Asian bakeries in Chinatown. Unfortunately, they weren't from the famous Golden Gate Bakery, but we still thought the egg tarts were delicious. We even bought some extra ones for the plane back home! At the start of quarantine, I saw a bunch of people posting the egg tarts they made on Subtle Asian Cooking, so we decided to try it out for ourselves.
The filling was pretty simple to make since we just mixed everything in a bowl, but making the pastry was challenging. Our butter was probably too soft, so our dough felt like it was melting constantly. We struggled lining the muffin pan with the cut pastry, but once it was baked, it wasn't bad! The filling was nice and soft. The crust was also super buttery, We finished them all in a week, but all that butter probably wasn't good for us.