Chinese New Year Dinner

It's ironic that while I lived in China for 18 months I did everything I could to not eat Chinese food, and now in my first month of new recipes 2 meals have been Chinese. 
I had to do something special to celebrate the year of the dragon.  So I pulled out my Chinese food cookbook and made egg rolls, crab rangoon, hot and sour soup and garlic beef and broccoli.

I love that every Chinese recipe requires green onion...it really makes things easier.  

I broke my own rule and bought special ingredients for the meal.  Thankfully these are ingredients I will use in other Chinese food recipes.  I am also really excited that I was able to find bamboo shoots without any issues (I figured it would be a hard to find item...but they had it in a special display and on sale...SCORE).

I did most of the prep (innards for rangoon and spring rolls and made the soup) during Zack's naps.  When he woke up he played with my Tupperware while I finished up.  I heated the soup, wrapped the rolls, baked the rangoon and sauteed the beef after Adam got home to distract little man.

 My rolls may not look like they do in the book (notice the first one I wrapped was exploding).  But they sure did taste good.

Yumm....I hardly ever make appetizers!

 I think I was most impressed with the hot and sour soup...doesn't it look like the soup you would get at PF Changs?  It was my first time cooking with tofu and it tasted AMAZING!  What makes homemade Chinese food better than going out...I left out the mushrooms and added extra chili oil to make it more our taste.

 All in all...a great meal.  However the book said to saute the beef for 12 min...I took it off the stove after 6 and it was still overcooked.  This is why you have to do what you know is right.  Next time I will listen to my gut and not even cook the meat that long...it's tricky though because you do want the broccoli to be soft.

I love this cookbook.  It's great because it uses ingredients even found in my own little grocery store.