Chinese Food: inexpensive, nutritious, delicious... and fun!

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Finding a full range of CF seasonings and vegetable always easy unless you live in a city large enough to have a Chinese shopping district. On the other hand—surprisingly enough—you may find that certain smaller towns offer a better selection of CF ingredients than a medium-sized city. I live in a thriving metropolis of 250,000, for instance, and can't locate much of what I want for my Chinese dishes . . . so I do most of my shopping in a university town of 40,000 where the supermarkets cater to foreign students and faculty.

Although it is possible to prepare acceptable CF in ordinary North American pots and pans, sooner or later you're sure to both want and need a wok if you expect to do the job right. Matter of fact, since the wok is the all-purpose Chinese cooking utensil, you'll probably want more than one (every Chinese kitchen has at least two.)

The wok was originally designed to fit into the top of a cylindrical wood-burning cook stove and the traditional design has a completely round and spherical bottom. In order to use real wok on a western stove, then, an adapter ring is needed . and most traditional woks sold in this country come equipped. Some manufacturers, however, do away with accompanying ring and modify their woks to fit our stoves slightly flattening the utensils' bottoms. My woks have be so flattened and I honestly don't know whether or not the squared-off bottoms counteract any unique cooking features the traditional design.

Department stores in larger cities seem to be the place to get woks unless, of course, you have access to a Chinese shopping district. You can pay as much as $30 each for the traditionally designed vessel, although I forked over only $2.00 for mine. Then again, I'm not very fancy.

Most woks come with a lacquer coating on them and usually, instructions for removal of the film. I stripped the lacquer from mine with a good boil in baking soda and water and—when the pans were clean—heated them on the stove and rubbed them with peanut oil. That was just the start of the seasoning, as far as I'm concerned and every meal now cooks in the utensils mellows them just a bit further.

The surest way to destroy this seasoning process is by using soap or detergent to clean your wok . . . so don't. When the pans are new, they're shiny and nice . . . but that doesn't last long, so don't worry about it. I'm sure the Chinese have a special brush for cleaning their woks but I just run hot tap water into mine and scrub them with a plastic Tuffy dishwashing pad. When the pans are clean, I dry them quickly on a stove burner to protect them from rust and my woks are now both well seasoned and very black.

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