My old friend Carol came to visit me from Winnipeg and we decided to recreate one of our long standing traditions - starting in 1984, we used to go to the old Szechan Restaurant on Pembina Highway and order the chicken with cashews (with chilis and baby corn) and the muu shuu pork. If you've never had muu shuu, it's a crunchy stirfry that you mound onto sesame oil infused pancakes, slathered in hoisin sauce and a dab of hot sauce, eat like a mini burrito - sweet!
Rather than simply finding a restaurant that serves this dish, we decided that we should try and make it ourselves. I found this
Fine Cooking recipe which started with a hunt for unusual ingredients in our local chinese grocery store... cloud ears (dried mushrooms),
golden needles (dried lily buds) and bamboo shoots all added interesting flavours and textures to this complex dish.
Unfortunately it was a crazily complicated recipe - lots of chopping and soaking and stir frying... We even went as far as handrolling the
mandarin pancakes and making the
mandarin sauce - exhausting!
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| making the pancakes... |
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| Spread on the mandarin sauce |
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| Pile on some of the stir fry |
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| Don't forget the hot sauce! |
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| Roll it up - like a burrito |
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| Enjoy! |
I'd suggest looking for an easier recipe....or just eat out!! The pancakes were delicious, but super labour intensive. The crunchy texture was there, but sadly, after all of that effort, the flavour of the stir fry was a bit underwhelming... of course if you slather on enough hoisin sauce, anything tastes good! (Thanks to Donald, the dishwasher....)
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