Lunar New Year

Lo mein is a noodle dish that often is confused with chow mein, and many Chinese restaurants further the confusion by using the two names interchangeably. The dishes are similar, both featuring noodles mixed with stir-fried meat and vegetables and a savory sauce. But whereas chow mein refers to parboiled and stir-fried noodles, lo mein refers to noodles that are fully cooked separately and quickly tossed with sauce in the wok. The roast pork in this recipe is char siu, the same gorgeous reddish-brown pork often displayed and sold in Chinatown shop windows. Instead of buying the pork ready-made, you can also roast your own at home. For the egg noodles, you can use any that are thin and round; spaghetti will also work.

Buddha's Delight is traditionally served on the first day of Chinese New Year, a practice stemming from an old Buddhist custom of spiritual cleansing. In fact, the recipe's Cantonese name is simply jai, meaning "vegetarian food." Some ingredients, such as lily buds and bean thread noodles, may require a special trip to a Chinese market.

Around the Chinese New Year, Chinatown bakeries fill up with tins of butter cookies, waiting to be given as gifts to relatives. Of course, they're still sold and eaten year-round, and once you have just one of these bite-size cookies, it's hard to stop. They're a tad less sweet than American cookies, but their rich butteriness makes them irresistible.

Of all Chinese dumplings, wontons are the simplest to make, if you buy ready-made wrappers. They cook in minutes and have a delightfully slippery mouthfeel. In Sichuan, the source of this recipe, they are known as "folded arms" (chao shou). Some say this is because the raw dumplings look like the folded arms of a person sitting back in relaxation; others that it's because of the way they are wrapped, with one corner crossed over the other and the two pinched together. The basic wontons can be served in a host of different ways and this Chengdu version is one of my favorites, with its sumptuous, heart-warming sauce. Wonton skins can be bought fresh or frozen in most Chinese food shops; they should be very thin and supple. If you want to take the easiest option in wrapping the dumplings, you can simply fold them in half, on the diagonal, to make a triangle. Otherwise, wrap into classic "water caltrop" shape, as professional cooks and market vendors do across China. (The water caltrop is an exotic-looking aquatic nut with a pair of horns.) This recipe makes 15-20, enough for four as an appetizer, or two for lunch. If you use fresh ingredients and make more than you need, the surplus can be frozen and cooked straight from the freezer.

The first Chinese recipe I ever cooked was a version of this dish from Yan-Kit So's Classic Chinese Cookbook. Years later—and having eaten it countless times in the Sichuanese capital Chengdu—it remains one of my favorite fish dishes, and everyone else seems to love it too. The fish lies in a spectacular sauce, a deep rusty red in color, sumptuously spicy and aromatic with ginger and garlic. In Sichuan, they tend to make it with carp. Back home in London, I've made it with sea bass, whole trout and fillets and, more recently, with organic mirror carp. They all taste delicious. (As with many Sichuanese dishes, the soul of the recipe lies in the combination of flavors and you can be flexible about the main ingredient, which is one reason why Sichuanese cuisine travels so well.) I'm particularly happy that the recipe works so well with mirror carp, one of the most sustainable fish and ripe for revival in places such as Britain, where it has long fallen out of favor. You will probably find that the fish disintegrates slightly during cooking. Don't worry: you can arrange it neatly on the serving plate and pour the sauce over it. And when your guests taste it, if my experiences are anything to go by, they'll be so overcome with rapture that they won't care what it looks like.

Red-braised pork may be one of the most common of all Chinese dishes, but it is also one of the most glorious: a slow stew of belly pork with seasonings that may include sugar, soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, and spices.

If you forget to thaw the shrimp in the morning, set the bag in a large bowl filled with cold water. It will defrost in minutes. One cup of dry rice will yield 3 cups cooked; leftover rice, which is slightly dried out, makes the best stir-fries.

Holiday spiced nuts meet the candied street-cart variety. Send any extra home as gifts for your guests.

This is a simple way to prepare whole fish, yet one that few Western cooks have mastered. In the Vietnamese culture, a properly steamed fish is a benchmark for chefs, and those who can't do it right are considered to be bad cooks. A perfectly steamed fish has flesh that is just cooked at the bone, never dry. Typically, whole fish are not served with the liquid in which it was steamed, which is too fishy tasting, and any sauce is added at the end, after the fish has been cooked. In this classic Chinese preparation, the fish is topped with scallions, cilantro and ginger, then doused with hot oil, which releases the flavor of the aromatics into the flesh of the fish.

This dish conveys the grandeur of formal Chinese dinners, but there's nothing intimidating about its preparation. The balance of flavors is sublime, and the presentation is striking — ruffled Napa cabbage is arranged around large pork meatballs to create the appearance of the lionlike Tibetan dog.

A lot of commercial red bean ice creams are just your basic, junky, mass-produced ice creams made with inferior ingredients like gums and thickeners, with a little of the red-bean paste called anko stirred in. Not so the following: a custard-based, from-scratch ice cream, enriched with enough anko so that you really get both its flavor and the extra creaminess contributed by its starch. The vanilla is optional; some feel it detracts from the red- beaniness, but I think it enhances it. If you want to go to town with this one, serve it in scoops sprinkled with a little matcha (brightly colored powdered green tea), and offer matcha-flavored meringues alongside; you can make them from the egg whites you'll have left over from the ice cream. Those who are allergic to dairy products can make this using canned full-fat unsweetened coconut milk: substitute 4 cups for the milk and cream.

Similar greens—such as yow choy, also known as choy sum (which looks almost identical to bok choy but bears small yellow flowers), broccolini, or even regular broccoli—will work well in this dish if you can’t find Chinese broccoli. You can buy wide rice noodles at Asian grocery stores, or use the narrow rice noodles (often labeled “pad thai noodles”) that many supermarkets carry.

In the annals of folk medicine, watercress soup is said to be good for soothing a dry throat or for when a general system-cleansing tonic is needed. Here, the nip and pep of watercress infuses chicken broth made rich with slivers of shiitake mushroom and plump sausage-filled wontons to produce a new take on wonton soup that is both healthful and delicious. Hydroponic watercress, meaning watercress grown in water and without soil, closely resembles watercress you might pick alongside a running stream in spring, but it has finer, more delicate stems and far less dirt and sand on its leaves. It is often available year-round in supermarket produce sections.

This Chicken Lo Mein recipe is extremely simple to make and has a nice peppery flavor from the red pepper flakes, white pepper, and ginger.

These are simpler than traditional scallion pancakes, which are made from a breadlike dough, and they taste more like scallions, because the “liquid” is scallion puree. The flavor is great, the preparation time is cut to about twenty minutes, and the texture is that of a vegetable fritter.

This traditional Chinese dish is simple to make: You boil the soy and wine along with some water, ginger, and crushed sugar and add star anise and scallion for flavor. The chicken is boiled too—not simmered, really boiled—but only for ten minutes; it finishes cooking in the liquid with the heat turned off. There are unusual but inexpensive ingredients that make this dish slightly better: mushroom-flavored soy sauce, which is dark and heavy; yellow rock sugar, a not-especially-sweet, lumpy sugar that must be broken up with a hammer before use; and mei kuei lu chiew, or “rose wine,” a floral wine that smells like rose water and costs two bucks a bottle. But don’t knock yourself out looking for any of these—I give substitutions in the recipe. But if you can easily acquire them, do, because this sauce can be used time and again, as long as you freeze it between uses (or refrigerate it and bring it to a rolling boil every few days) and top up the liquids now and then.

Egg drop soup is best flavored with soy sauce, plenty of chopped scallions, and a bit of sesame oil. Starting with a good chicken stock will yield the best results, but purchased stock can be substituted in a pinch.

A classic stir-fried noodle dish, just about the paradigm. You can make this with pork, chicken, shrimp, or any other bit of meat or fish you have or keep it entirely vegetarian; it’s eminently flexible and an important part of every home cook’s repertoire. The variation that follows is a traditional dish for New Year’s celebrations and wedding banquets. E-fu noodles, which are long, thin, flat egg noodles, symbolize long life. Most Asian groceries carry them, but if you cannot find them, regular egg noodles are fine too. The meat will be easier to slice thinly if you freeze it for 30 to 60 minutes first. (This is always the case with any boneless meat or poultry.)