A Chinese Restaurant Favorite

About author / Pamela Chester

Mom of two; graduate French Culinary Institute; kids cooking program instructor; Master's degree in food studies. Creates kid friendly foods and loves her slow cooker.

My family and I have been enjoying more than our share of takeout and restaurant meals lately and one of our go-to choices for a meal out is Chinese food. Our local Chinese haunt really is one of the only restaurants we can take our toddler son to and not have to worry about bringing along a bunch of toys or crayons to keep him busy. From the meal’s start to finish he entertains himself between sampling the free appetizers of peanuts and spicy cucumbers, to trying to eat with chopsticks that have been strung together with a rubber band, to anticipating fortune cookies for dessert. And we even get to take home a little favor – a paper drink parasol.

This love affair with Chinese food spans multiple generations in my family. When I was a kid, our family paid a weekly visit to the local Chinese restaurant, mostly eating there but sometimes getting takeout. Back then the most widely available type of Chinese food was Cantonese style. That is the style most of the Chinese-American restaurant classics come from: Chow Mein, Egg Rolls, Spare Ribs, Fried Rice and Won Ton soup. Occasionally, we would also venture out for other regional Chinese cuisines – Hunan, Shanghai and Schezwan style. These types of restaurants are all pretty common to find nowadays.

Whenever we went to Philadelphia to visit my dad at work, we’d have lunch at his standby place in Chinatown. He ate there so often that he came to be on a first name basis with the owner, Tommy Lee. He has sadly passed on and the restaurant has closed, so unfortunately my sons won’t get to try Tommy Lee’s place. I remember getting a tour of the kitchen, full of clanking woks, billowing steam, sweating Chinese cooks, and the resident cat.

My mom also loved to experiment with her red enamel plug-in wok and make Chinese dishes from scratch. The key to successful Chinese cooking is a good wok and very high heat. But I think it's difficult to pull off a good Chinese meal at home; it almost never tastes like what you get in the restaurants, where they cook with up to 100,000 BTUs (As a comparison home gas ranges top out between 12 and 16,000 BTUs on average). That distinctive Chinese food flavor is known as “wok hay” among aficionados.

But the “Chinese” dish that us kids thoroughly enjoyed was the pu pu platter, a Polynesian inspired appetizer sampler (In Hawaii the term pupu means appetizer). It consists of a revolving dish with a mini hibachi grill in the center, where you can heat treats like skewered beef, wontons, and shrimp toast. These are really more Americanized treats than true Chinese, but for kids they are delicious and fun. I would love to find a restaurant in the area that serves this classic dish but I don’t see it on too many menus anymore.

It’s easy to make a pu pu platter at home with a bunch of Chinese appetizers. The appetizers can be assembled on a chip and dips platter with the bowl in the center filled with a soy dipping sauce. Or you can actually purchase a pu pu platter dish on the line if you don’t want to skip the fire. While not all that healthy, this appetizer sampler could be a once in the while treat that is a fun departure from the everyday. You can find frozen dumplings, egg rolls, and spring rolls in the freezer section of specialty grocery stores or Asian supermarkets. Follow the cooking directions on the packages and add in a few homemade treats like the shrimp toast below and you can create the Chinese restaurant experience for your kids at home!

Serves/Makes: 24

• 2 pounds raw shrimp, peeled and minced
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 4 eggs, beaten
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 1/4 tablespoon grated fresh ginger root
• 1 loaf thin sandwich bread, crusts removed