Homemade Chinese Food Buffet: Family Weekend

Chinese food buffet weekend with the family. Three households all chipping in to make the our favorite Chinese food!

You can always start your preparations as early as you like, in my case I am spending Thursday through Saturday over at my sisters house for our buffet, and some of my preparations actually began today.

2/14/2018 Preparation:

Chinese Five Spice is a spice that is used regularly to make Chinese food, and is a spice that you need to have in your kitchen if you want to make Chinese food on a regular basis.

I have never used, let alone made, Chinese five spice before and you will be surprised how many people make it different ways; some where there are more than five spices!! Because I wish to learn to cook as close to traditional Chinese as possible I went on the hunt for a Chinese Five Spice recipe that I felt looked right.

Traditional Chinese five spice has five ingredients: Cinnamon, Clove, Star Anise Seeds (or ground Anise), Fennel Seeds, and Szechuan Pepper. Yes, there are even substitutes that you can use instead of some of these spices, but since I was trying to stay as close to traditional as possible I got the ingredients mentioned. The recipe I chose to use is here: Chinese Five Spice

In our area, of Texas, I was unable to find Szechuan Pepper or Star Anise, so I finally gave in and ordered them on Amazon. I enjoyed roasting the Szechuan Pepper on the stove in a small cast iron pan, and I finally got to use my mortar and pestle! But, if you use a mortar and pestle only use it on the fennel seeds and Szechuan Pepper, they are very easy to crush. If you buy star anise instead of Anise ground, which I do not suggest, then you will be taking out the seeds and use them in a spice grinder, I couldn't crush them to save my life. I would suggest buying the Anise ground, you get more for your money than buying the Star Anise and taking the seeds out yourself, and it will save your fingers a lot of pain!

When you look at the recipe for the Chinese Five spice in the link above, you are going to have to crush at the very least the fennel seeds and the Sichuan peppercorns, it says to use one tablespoon of the fennel seeds, then you crush them. Two tablespoons of the Sichuan peppercorns, uncrushed, is not enough. You are going to need to use three to four tablespoons of the seeds themselves to get the amount of spice that you need for the recipe.

This is what the Chinese Five spice looks like when you are finished mixing all of the ingredients together. It smells absolutely amazing, but it's strong so you never want to use much of it at a time!

Our menu for the weekend is:

Chinese BBQ Pork Buns w/Chinese BBQ Pork (Roast Pork Cha Siu) as the filling

Terriaki chicken on a Stick

General Tso's Chicken

Sweet and Sour Chicken

Vegetable Lo Mein

Chinese Fried Rice

A Chinese Fried Potatoes (Something my mom mentioned)

Chinese Doughnuts

I will be posting how each of these recipes go, which recipes I am using (with links), and if I changed anything. I'll also give my advice on what could make it better, if needed! I look forward to sharing that with all of you!