A wok is designed to allow you to flip and toss whatever you're cooking with ease, but fish isn't as sturdy as chicken or beef. The water-velveted cod in this recipe needs to be treated more gently—turn each piece carefully so it doesn't fall apart. For your restraint, you'll be rewarded with a light, elegant dinner of bright, colorful vegetables and tender chunks of fish.

While you might not know the name, you've probably eaten lots of dishes that fall into the category of ding, a type of stir-fry made with diced chicken and vegetables. A ding also needs something crunchy, such as the nuts in the takeout classic cashew chicken. Jicama adds even more crunch, and we round out the assortment of vegetables with mushrooms, celery, and sweet bell pepper.

Fish sauce adds saltiness and umami depth, and dried red chiles add spice to these garlicky, crowd-pleasing grilled chicken wings. Plan ahead—they need to marinate for 12 hours before hitting the hot grill.

One of the secrets to making a restaurant-style stir-fry is water-velveting —marinating meat with egg white, wine, and cornstarch, then blanching it, allows it to achieve an almost unnatural level of silkiness. This recipe shows off the technique, pairing water-velveted chicken with savory oyster sauce and both fresh and rehydrated dried mushrooms.

Our original attempt at real-deal Chinese kung pao chicken , adapted from a recipe by a Sichuan chef working in Boston, gets its mouth-numbing heat from Sichuan peppercorns. So does the kung pao chicken from Kenji's book , based on the version he tried in Sichuan Province. This Chinese-American take, meanwhile, is much less spicy, with cubes of chicken in a thick, slightly gloppy sauce, permeated by a gentle heat. It's a quick and easy recipe, too: Just stir-fry marinated diced chicken with roasted peanuts, diced celery and peppers, ginger, and red Chinese or árbol chilies, then coat it all in a mixture of soy sauce, chicken broth, vinegar, sesame oil, sugar, and cornstarch. Dinner's on the table in 30 minutes.

Squash and carrots go very well together. They're both orange (duh), both have a great sweet-and-savory flavor profile, and both take well to conversion into creamy soup form. This soup, which calls for roasting the squash and juicing the raw carrot, is a little deeper, a little more complex.

This Chinese-Peruvian dish combines ingredients from both cuisines with the deep, smoky flavor provided by stir-frying. Tender slices of beef are cooked over a high flame along with red onion, tomato, and a sauce of ginger, garlic, and soy sauce; allowing the contents of the wok to briefly catch fire (if you're daring enough!) will bring even more of that smoky wok hei flavor to your food. Serve the stir-fry with a mound of rice and a pile of crisp French fries .

Brush watermelon wedges with a mixture of honey, lime juice, and cayenne pepper, then grill quickly, just till the wedges show grill marks. It's so simple and such a creative way to enjoy the most summery of fruits, the juicy watermelon.

While mushrooms are cooking, combine soy sauce, vinegar, tahini, sugar, chili oil (with its sediment), and broad bean chili paste in a medium bowl. Set aside. Bring 1 quart of salted water to a simmer in a medium pot and keep hot.

This hearty white bean soup with spinach flavored with garlic and rosemary is a great winter warmer, perfect for those evenings when you've just come home from a day on the slopes or from romping with the dogs in the park or taking photos of majestic snowy owls, or whatever it is that active winter folks do in this day and age. The real magic of the recipe is the way the starch released from the beans helps the extra-virgin olive oil (and do use your best extra virgin for this) to emulsify with the liquid, creating a rich, spoon-coating texture in no time at all.

Once you've mastered our technique for a crispety, crunchety coating on takeout-style fried chicken, you can easily replicate a number of favorites on the buffet line. To turn our General Tso's recipe into sesame chicken, we simply change the sauce, adding extra sugar and sesame oil and omitting the chilies. Be sure to toast those sesame seeds before adding them, and sprinkle them both throughout the sauce and over the finished dish.

Transfer noodles to serving bowl and top with pork mixture. Stir vinaigrette and spoon over and around the noodles (you may not want to use all of it). Sprinkle with roasted peanuts, Sichuan peppercorn, grated garlic, and scallion greens. Serve immediately.

Preserved mustard root like this (often labeled "Sichuan Preserved Vegetable") can be found in cans or global noodle Recipes|https://noodleinsight.com/ jars in your Chinese market. Once opened, they'll last for months in a sealed container in the fridge. You don't need much to add big flavor to dishes.

Anyone who's spent a significant amount of time in or around New York City should be intimately familiar with scallion pancakes, the flaky, savory disks studded with chopped scallions and fried. We use a laminated dough here (much as you would if making puff pastry) to create layer upon layer of very thin sheets of flavorful pastry. Frying them in oil is traditional; for a puffier, crispier experience, try cooking them on the grill .