Category Archives: food

Easy Chinese: San Francisco & Chinese Food Made Easy with Ching-He Huang on Cooking Channel

Easy Chinese: San Francisco with Ching-He Huang

UK import Ching-He Huang has a new show on the Cooking Channel called “Easy Chinese: San Francisco”. In her new series, Easy Chinese: San Francisco, the Wok-Star of Chinese cooking, Ching-He Huang, takes the Bay Area by storm to reveal how you can prepare delicious Chinese food at home. She is on a mission to show viewers that they can prepare mouth-watering Chinese dishes using fresh, readily available ingredients. Why order takeout when you can actually make a quick and healthy Chinese meal with what you already have in your kitchen?

Ching explores all that San Francisco and the Bay Area have to offer by visiting local markets, farms and suppliers. She finds the best ingredients and cooks them right then and there at the peak of their freshness. She’ll offer up easy-to-prepare, mouth-watering recipes using fresh, healthy, and readily available ingredients. Armed with her friendly style and vast knowledge, Ching is out to prove that Chinese cuisine can be simple, healthy, fun and delicious.

In addition to “Easy Chinese: San Francisco”, the young food entrepreneur is also the host of the popular cooking series “Chinese Food Made Easy.” Shot in San Francisco, a city known to celebrate Chinese cuisine, Ching explores the recipes and ingredients that are central to authentic Chinese cooking, that any home cook can prepare.

She’s also got her cookbook “Ching’s Everyday Easy Chinese: More Than 100 Quick & Healthy Chinese Recipes” out now. You can get a copy here.

Easy Chinese: San Francisco with Ching-He Huang

Chinese Food Made Easy with Ching-He Huang

More about Ching-He Huang

Born in Taiwan to Chinese parents, Ching was raised on freshly cooked home meals for which ingredients were always bought on a daily basis. Her major food influences stem from the traditional cooking styles of her farming-community grandparents, who lived in the countryside of southern Taiwan.

Alongside their paddy fields and bamboo farms, they also cultivated an orangery, a sweet potato patch and mango trees. For Ching, weekends were a chance to eat meals and snacks which originated from age-old recipes, fresh from the soil.

At the age of five, Ching and her family immigrated to South Africa where she was exposed to an entirely different diet and climate. As the only Chinese children in their school, she and her older brother caused a stir with their packed lunches of fried rice and vegetables with dried meat powder or cucumber pickle with chili.

The biggest change was to come when she was 11 years old. Ching moved again, this time to London. From her early teens, with her parents involved in running their own businesses and her mother often abroad, Ching had to cook the family meals. She was taught the basic philosophy behind Chinese cuisine (the emphasis on balancing yin and yang through hot and cold ingredients), but then was left to improvise alone.
As a self-taught cook, the experience was to be the inspiration behind launching her own food company. A TV presence seemed inevitable and, in 2005, Ching’s Kitchen aired on UKTV Food. Since then Ching has made TV appearances on ITV’s Saturday Cooks and Daily Cooks, UKTV’s Market Kitchen and Channel Five’s Cooking the Books. Ching’s first cookbook, China Modern, was published in autumn 2006, and her second, Chinese
Food Made Easy, accompanies the BBC TV series.

Asian bartender makes 12 martinis with one pour

Asian bartender makes 12 martinis with one pour

This viral video is floating around with an Asian bartender making 12 martinis with one pour. His showmanship for creating the multi colored martinis can be found on the Celebrity cruise ship Constellation. This guys has massive skills. We’re told the bartender is I Gede Agus from Indonesia and he’s got tons flair tricks up his sleeve. You can catch him at the Martini Bar on the ship.

Asian bartender makes 12 martinis with one pour

Jackie Chan in V8 juice & smoothie commercials

Jackie Chan in V8 juice & smoothie commercials
Actor/martial arts entertainer Jackie Chan is in a pair of new commercials for V8. (This should quell those Jackie Chan is dead rumors.) The advertisements feature Jackie Chan swooping into everyday life scenarios using his amazing athletic abilities – and his energetic charm – to switch an unsuspecting person’s drink to a veggie-powered V8 beverage.

The first is entitled “Balcony”. He slides down a pole from and replaces a lady’s cranberry juice with V8 vegetable juice. His quick tablecloth pull flings the bottle of cranberry juice and introduces the drink veggie style. After his drink switch up, Jackie Chan scurries up the pole from whence he came.

In the second one entitled “Sidewalk”, Jackie Chan bounces off an awning and uses his martial arts choreography skills to grab a baby stroller, whack away a “bad” smoothie, replace it with a healthy V8 smoothie, and return the baby stroller in one fluid action. He even puts a straw in the drink. His choice of exit for this commercial is grabbing onto a passing truck.

Expect these V8 commercials to run from October to December. If the campaign is successful, you’ll see Jackie Chan in 3 new spots launching new V8 drinks.

Jackie Chan in V8 juice commercial

Jackie Chan in V8 smoothie commercial

ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen : Chipotle’s Asian spinoff

ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen : Chipotle's Asian spinoff

Chipotle Mexican Grill is slated to open a new restaurant concept today in Washington D.C. The concept, ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen, is inspired by the traditional shophouses found throughout Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Shophouses are classical two or three-story buildings where families live upstairs and run restaurants or fresh markets on the ground level.

The ShopHouse menu will pair the bold and complex flavors of southeast Asia with fresh, sustainably raised ingredients; grilled and braised meats, a variety of fresh vegetables, aromatic herbs, spicy sauces, and an array of garnishes. Ingredients on the menu include garlic, lemongrass, ginger, tumeric, galangal (blue ginger), cilantro, tamarind, and more. Customers will move along a service line and customize their meal according to flavor preference and diet, in a format similar to the one that has become the hallmark of Chipotle’s success. The public will get to choose bowl or banh mi (Vietnamese sandwiches) along with choice of meat like grilled beef, grilled pork, and tofu. We also here that sriracha sauce will readily available.

“Anyone who has traveled throughout Southeast Asia can tell you that food there is served very fast – it’s also full of flavor, nutritious, and affordable,” said Steve Ells, founder, chairman and co-CEO of Chipotle. “This cuisine gives us a great opportunity to prove the idea that the Chipotle model can work with other cuisines.”

Time lapse of ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen setup

Various media outlets have photos of ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen:
DCist:
ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen bowlShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen bahn mi

Wong Fu Weekends : Episode 60

Wong Fu Weekends : Episode 60

Wong Fu Productions heads into the kitchen with the latest episode of Wong Fu Weekends. The cooking challenge is ramen, the food staple found in most Asian cupboards. Phil, Wes, and Ted each have their own style of making ramen to match their personalities. Whose ramen will reign supreme? Be sure to select your favorite to see who the winner is. You can pickup some cooking tips from Rick’s Man Tutorial : Good Cooking Gets Girls.

Be sure to watch their latest short “Shell” they released this week.

Wong Fu Weekends : Episode 60

Extended Footage of Wong Fu Weekends : Episode 60