Mei Ning, 30 Minutes or Less: Ultimate Chinese Recipes (Kindle 2016)
Easy basic recipes that don’t require a lot of special ingredients
Here are super-easy recipes for your favourite Chinese dishes: eg. Cashew Chicken, Kung Pao Chicken, Pineapple Shrimp, Shrimp Lo Mein, Beef and Broccoli, Beef and Snowpeas, Orange Beef, Shrimp Fried Rice, etc. All these use either chicken, beef or seafood, and they literally take less than 30 minutes to prepare.
One tends to think unfamiliar cuisines will be difficult to cook, but not in the slightest. Each recipe is straightforward and easy to follow. Most require little special skill—just bung them into a wok in the right order, and Bob’s your uncle.
Another potential stumbling block is ingredients. If you need special unfamiliar ingredients which you need to get from a Chinese supermarket and may not even recognise on the shelf, it can put an amateur chef off. These recipes require nothing more exotic than rice vinegar, bamboo shoots, soy sauce, chili sauce, hoisin sauce, oyster sauce or fish sauce. Many of these you can even get in a regular supermarket.
If you don’t have or don’t want to invest in rice wine, I’m sure a white wine could substitute.
I have never before seen a recipe for Fortune Cookies, but this has one.
It suffers from a lack of colour illustrations, probably the main attraction for a cookbook, I believe.

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