Every Filipino family has its own version of lumpia, a fried roll that’s often filled with meat and vegetables and served at parties. Accordingly, this recipe yields a lot of pieces and takes some time, especially if it’s your first time rolling them, but if you’d like to cook a smaller batch, assembled, uncooked lumpia freezes well and can be fried from frozen. My favorite wrappers are the lumpia wrappers from Simex, but in their absence, I like Spring Home’s TYJ Spring Roll Pastry or any other thin wheat-based wrapper meant for spring rolls.
This hot and fiery soup is seen only in the Indo-Chinese restaurants of India. When the weather is cold or I’m feeling unwell, I often make this soup. To boost the protein, you can add bits of leftover rotisserie chicken or tofu. Serve this with rice wine vinegar, Chilli-Soy Vinegar Sauce, or Indo-Sichuan Sauce on the side.
Similar to red-braising (紅燒 hóngshāo) , when you cover and slowly cook an ingredient in a flavorful liquid, smother-braising (燜 mèn) is simpler and shorter and often relies on more delicate, lighter-colored condiments instead of dark soy sauce, allowing the color of the vege- table to shine through.
In this dish, the squash’s natural sweetness is complemented by the salty, savory fermented black beans, and the squash is cooked until buttery and tender, on the verge of falling apart. My favorite is kabocha squash, which has a velvety, starchy softness and flavor rem- iniscent of roasted chestnut, but any firm-fleshed winter squash, like red kuri, butternut, or Hubbard, will work.
Ground beef gets a bad rap from snobby foodie types, but since it’s something I grew up eating, I prefer to see the positive—it’s an incredibly affordable and versatile starting point for families looking to save money (aka, all families). It’s all about what you do with it. In this recipe, we’re using it to prepare a version of bulgogi, one of the most popular dishes in Korean cuisine, both in restaurants and in homes. Typically prepared with fancier cuts of beef, bulgogi rests in a mild, balanced marinade for hours (ideally overnight) before getting crispy and caramelized on the grill. This recipe delivers all that flavor on a hamburger budget. Sweet and salty, it’s a flexible base that can be served with lettuce wraps, rice, noodles, or rolled up into homemade Kimbap
This is it. My favorite dish in the world and the grandmother of Sichuan cuisine. Translated literally as “pockmarked grandmother’s tofu,” its totally apocryphal origin story is identical to a half dozen other food origin stories: it starts with hungry crowds and a cook with few ingredients but plenty of creativity. The result is an inexpensive stew that uses simple ingredients—soft tofu, ground meat (traditionally beef, but frequently pork), fermented chile bean paste, a handful of Sichuan peppercorns, and plenty of red-hot chile oil—to create simple, soul-satisfying fare.
This is a hearty, filling salad to pack in a cooler or bring on a picnic. It’s also an easy dish to prepare in a rental home if you bring along some cooked, canned lentils. I sometimes put this over a bed of salad greens to make it more of a meal.
I love okonomiyaki—large Japanese cabbage cakes made in a skillet and then cut into wedges to serve. But trust me, flipping one of those babies is not bare minimum. Instead, I make smaller cakes; they cook more quickly and are much (much!) easier to turn. Use a cast-iron skillet here if you have one.
This beauty is garlicky, gingery, and as spicy as you dare—it’s best when it bites back just a little. Most of the prep time for this East Asian–influenced pan-fried noodle dish is spent slicing (have your chef’s knife ready). Once that’s done, the dish comes together in minutes.
There’s nothing new about marinating chicken with herbs and citrus, but the addition of fish sauce takes this tried-and-true technique to something seriously next level. The fish sauce works its way deep into the chicken to impart its funky, salty flavor all the way through. This recipe also shows off the special relationship between fish sauce and sugar (in this case, honey) and how they work together to create caramelization without tipping the scales of flavor into something too sweet. If you’d rather not mess with a whole chicken, feel free to swap in chicken thighs or breasts.