gok wan: gok cooks chinese

so if you read my previous post you'll know that me and aaron done some cooking saturday night.
when i first got with aaron i never cooked a thing! but when we got our own place i had to learn to cook and i really started to enjoy it. now i cook everything and let aaron do the washing up ;) lol.

we got gok wans book - gok cooks chinese and after sitting and looking through it together we couldnt wait to try out some of the dishes!



at the front of the book, gok shares which 7 sauces/oils to use and explains what they do and why he uses them.. i like that he explains what it brings to the dish so you know why and when to use it so you could experiment with it and not always have to refer to the book.
he then tells you over a few pages about some of the main ingredients he uses and lets you know what you can use as a substitute if you cant get hold of it - which i thought was great as some of the ingredients you may not find in normal supermarkets.

next he tells you about the 5 pieces of essential equipment to use. i have a wok, ladle and wooden chopping board but i dont have a cleaver or bamboo steamers. to me, the last 2 arent essential like the first 3 - a wok is just brilliant to cook with and you wouldnt be able to do certain dishes without one. a ladle is very handy for dishes like soup and a wooden chopping board is definately essential for your knives. if you use a glass chopping board or hard plastic you'll blunt your knives quickly.
i decided against getting a cleaver because i have a good set of knives. gok uses a cleaver for everything so if you dont mind switching between a couple of knives then you deffo dont need to go out and spend more money. i also decided against a bamboo steamer for now.. i just use tin foil (shiny side down!) or a saucepan lid and it does the same job and saves a few pennies :)

anyway!
we were so hungry so we decided to do chicken and sweetcorn soup first, eat it and then do the rest!
the recipe was for crab and sweetcorn but we prefer chicken so just swapped it for that.
it turned out looking like this..

it was absolutely delish! the light floaty bits are egg. it was so tasty and easy to do so we'll deffo be having it again!

after that we done egg fried rice (cooked the rice before the soup so it had a chance to cool down which you're meant to do) garlic chicken and soy-glazed chicken. mmmm mmmm mmmmmm!

the garlic chicken was my favourite! but also the least healthy as its shallow fried in groundnut oil. but the taste was out of this world. it was seriously so, so tasty and had so much flavour. i mostly done the garlic chicken and egg fried rice and mostly aaron done the soy glazed chicken although we did help each other out too :) the soy-glazed chicken was really tender and also very tasty and full of flavour.

everything we cooked tasted like a chinese person had cooked it. thats how tasty it was! the only difference is that gok has made the dishes as healthy as possible whilst still keeping all the flavours in. so its not gloopy and full of fat and you can see yourself whats going into it.

we made sure we got all the sauces/oils and used every single ingredient that he said to use (except when we swapped crab for chicken for the soup)

we found everything in asda apart from shaoxing rice wine which we nipped to waitrose for.

i 100% recommend this book to anyone that loves chinese food and want to enjoy it guilt free!

if you follow the recipes 100% i promise you will not be disappointed :)

so what do you think? - will you be going out to get it or have you had a go already? xxx