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"one dish wok meals"

Pineapple Fried Rice Video

January 19, 2013 By Eleanor Hoh 2 Comments

Pineapple is what makes this Pineapple Fried Rice so special and sweet!  I partnered with Del Monte Fresh to make this special Pineapple Fried Rice Video, you can watch my short Youtube video, it’s under 4 minutes to learn how to make the Perfect Fried Rice.

When you subscribe and ring the bell to my youtube channel you’ll be notified when I upload new videos.  I’d love to hear your feedback in the COMMENTS there and  give it a thumbs UP if you like it!  To date, over 27,000 views, yay!

Don’t miss checking my blog for step by step method for Pineapple Fried Rice.

It’s an all-time favorite dish in America and the most requested dish I get asked in my Wok Star cooking classes.  Even picky eaters and kids love it because it’s a one-dish wok meal combining tasty flavors, different textures and rainbow colors. The most common complaints I hear are, “why is my rice so sticky?” or “why are my veggies so soupy?” so it’s important to use the right wok and technique to guarantee success and you’ll see it all in the Pineapple Fried Rice video.

You can easily make your own version of ‘fried rice’ from your country, do share it with us!
Check out my version of a tasty Mexican Fried Rice!

Filed Under: "one dish wok meals", blog, Stir Fried Rice, wok cooking Tagged With: 'Stir fried rice", "fried rice", "pineapple fried rice", fried rice video, Wok Star Eleanor Hoh

Gratitude: 5 Minute Wonder Soup

November 9, 2012 By Eleanor Hoh 18 Comments

Gratitude is a very loaded word for me!  The older I get, the more I realize I’ve inherited many traits from my parents.  Good and bad. The good?  Learning to cook from my parents, they had two totally different styles!  The bad, well, we won’t get into it.  My dad is all about using top notch, expensive ingredients.  My mom focuses on homestyle cooking (my kinda cooking).  What they share is not using recipes and it’s such a liberating technique! It’s made me enjoy the challenge of using what I have.  It’s made me tap into my intuition and creative side so I don’t rely on following recipes.  I am truly grateful to my parents for introducing me to this liberating journey to cooking. It’s made me want to tell the world (and I have been), this is how you want to cook if you were stuck on a desert island or not!
After a recent sister reunion, I decided I’d make more of an effort to be grateful for what I have and not take things for granted, be ready to let go when the time is right and be open to new things.  And the most important?  Be grateful everyday because I’ve only got one life, so I need to make everyday COUNT and be the best that I can!  In fact, ‘Gratitude’ is the theme of this month’s #LetsLunch challenge, please check below for more posts from other Lets Lunchers, and  check back for more or get the feed! 
So, with that said, who’s ready for 5 Minute Wonder Soup? I came up with this name because it really takes about 5 minutes from beginning to end.  A dish I learned from my mom.  She came up with this dish because after a hard day of teaching at a boy’s school, she needed to whip something up quickly for a family of 7! It is so easy, fast and tasty, you’ll want to try it immediately.

5 Minute Wonder Soup

Substitutions:
You can substitute other types of meat like pork, beef, lamb, chicken, endless. Use a cut that’s NOT tough and chewy. Slice into thinner bite size pieces so they cook faster. This is the same cutting technique you would use for stir frying.  Good seafood substitutions are baby scallops, fish (salmon, grouper, yellowtail, tilapia), mussels, clams. It’s entirely up to you with vegetables but I want to say Less is More applies here. Otherwise it becomes a 10 minute, not 5 minute wonder soup which is the goal of this dish!  Anything in the cabbage family works, kale (curly or not), napa cabbage, bok choy (white stem or Shanghainese).
Tips for cookware & utensils:
Using a wok of course makes this so much easier because of its wide surface area and depth to work with. Mine is a thin walled, lightweight, round bottom cast iron wok which I use on a portable butane gas stove set on top of my electric stove (click on link to find out why I have this setup!)   But if you don’t have a wok, use the widest pan you have, stainless steel is good.
Accompaniment:
We don’t eat starch like rice or noodles but if you want to, have some red rice or soba noodles, or glass noodles. Make this ahead so they’re ready.

Ingredients:
3/4 lb shrimp, shelled and deveined
1/2 packet tofu puffs, halved into diagonals 
couple of bok choy heads, separate stems and wash well
1 knob of ginger, washed in cold water, dried & shredded
2 cloves of garlic, smashed & diced
1 carton chicken broth (use beef if you’re using beef or lamb)
squirt of tamari
dash of sherry
dash of white pepper
pinch of sea salt 
1 scallion, sliced diagonally really thin or chopped in thin rounds
Few sprigs of cilantro, chopped for garnish (optional or sub with parsley)

3 easy steps for 5 minute wonder soup! 

  1. Fry veggies & tofu first w/half of garlic & ginger, remove from wok to plate. Then fry shrimp with rest of garlic & ginger (just till they turn pink so you don’t overcook them), add to dish of veggies.
  2. Add carton of stock into wok and let it come to a boil, add squirt of tamari, dash of sherry, dash of white pepper and pinch of sea salt. Adjust to your taste.
  3.  Add veggies and shrimp into soup, you’re done!  Serve in big bowls, garnish with scallions and cilantro and ENJOY!

Here are more Let’s Lunch posts, do check back for more…

Gratitude “Plumb” Cake from Lisa at Monday Morning Cooking Club
Gratitude Fried Rice from Linda at spicebox travels
Seafood Chowder from Lucy at A Cook and Her Books
Cracked Black Pepper and Blue Cheese Crackers (gluten free) from Charissaat Zest Bakery
A Thanksgiving tablecloth tradition from Lucy at In a Southern Kitchen
Gratitude Soup from Rashda at Hot Curries and Cold Beer
Pumpkin Muffins with Cinnamon Sugar (gluten free) from Linda at Free Range Cookies
Pumpkin Roll with Pecans from Annabelle at a Glass of Fancy
5-Minute Wonder Soup from Eleanor at Wok Star
Green Tomato Salad from Renee at My Kitchen and I
Asian-Style Pickled Oyster Mushrooms from Joe at Joe Yonan
Pain au levain from Rebecca at GrongarBlog
If you want to join #LetsLunch, just tweet with this hashtag and someone will answer you!  I’ll be sporadically posting on Let’s Lunch due to overload, stay tuned.
 

Filed Under: "one dish wok meals", #LetsLunch, shrimp, soup, toufu, weeknightdinner, wok cooking Tagged With: "wok cooking", shrimp, soup, tofu, weeknightdinner

Remembering Dad on Father's Day!

June 7, 2012 By Eleanor Hoh 31 Comments

When I look back, I realize my Dad was quite eccentric and a non-traditional Chinaman, a strange kind of combination.  I may have picked up some of his traits, hmm.

Dad would be proud of my salmon fish soup!

Let’s start with Dad, the non-traditional Chinaman because he ‘kept’ all 4 girls instead of abandoning us in shoeboxes on the roadside (common in China in the old days.)  He spent quite a bit of money sending us abroad for our education and made sure we all had nice teeth.  Dad, the eccentric was in 2 parts: 1) he loved orchids and put them above our bathing water rations (too complicated to explain but trust me, we were not happy campers) 2) he had a habit of waking up in the middle of the night and cooking up a foodie meal but only ever woke one of us up to share with him!

His cooking goes something like this:

  • buy very, very expensive dried scallops, shred and add as soup base
  • only use stems, no leaves of vegetables
  • use very, very good & expensive cuts of meat, poultry or seafood
  • cook noodles al dente, he loved texture, another trait I got from him, yay.
  • focus on very zen-like dishes. I was lucky to be chosen to share with Dad! I didn’t realize he was such a foodie. He just came up with these dishes.  The 2 I remember are: fried egg on ham with cabbage on the side and dried scallop soup with cabbage and noodles

Well, I think he’d like my very simple dish of Salmon Bok Choy Soup!

It’s so easy and you can use nearly any leafy vegetable you have in your fridge!  I can’t think of anything you can’t use, I used Bok Choy.  Staples are ginger, garlic, ready made chicken or beef broth, scallions.
The basis of this dish is to poach fish in chicken or beef broth while you fry up the veggies with ginger and garlic, shallots and whites of scallions. Use one bowl of broth per person to poach fish in. Keep heat on low so you don’t make the fish tough and dry. Test the fish for doneness by pressing with a ceramic or wood spoon. Remember, fish will continue to cook in the hot broth, so undercooking is advised.
Then all you have to do is ‘plate’ the poached fish with soup in a nice big bowl or coup dish. Add the veggies on the side together with the garlic, ginger and any juice from the wok fry.  All this adds to the flavor of your broth.  Sprinkle chopped green parts of scallions or a mix of fresh herbs like basil, mint or cilantro, if you like spicy like we do, sprinkle chili threads which look BEAUTIFUL and EAT or SLURP!  A side of homemade kimchi went perfectly with this dish. You’ll notice we don’t have starchy carbs but you can have over noodles if you want. It’s good just like it is so you truly savor the simplicity of this dish.
My husband declared he’d like to eat like this for a little while.  I think I ‘married’ my father! I’m so glad they met.
Some other eccentric things I remember about Dad (you don’t have to read all of them, this is for my sisters and I to remember him by!) I do wish I had taken photos of him cooking, tending his orchids or fish. Both my parents were really extraordinary creatives, I guess that’s where my sisters and I got it from.
I was so glad he got to enjoy some time with my brother’s kids who he doted on and actually gave up smoking because of them!  I’ll never forget once we went to see the grandson at some festival and as he spotted him, he said to me, “what a handsome young man!”  I think he meant his grand kid looked like him! Another time, the grand daughter was playing cello, he just nodded and smiled and at the end, he said, “Lovely darling, but it was out of tune!” We all had to laugh because he always tells it like it is.

  • he helped my sister and I build the most beautiful silkworm home with cardboard and toothpicks, I can still ‘see’ it.
  • he bought me an electric blue skateboard when they first came out in the USA!
  • he bought me the cutest aluminium cookware set and we used to wash the pots out together so they sparkled. I think he got me into cooking way before I knew I wanted to.
  • he installed an exotic fish tank inside his and mom’s bathroom!
  • he built greenhouses (see photo below) for his exotic orchids that he had flown in from all over the world.
  • he bought us baby furry chicks and then paid us to catch flies to feed them. We had to put them inside a matchbox and show him so he could count them and pay us.  Well, we showed him the same ones and got paid twice till he found us out.
  • he loved wearing jammies at home and drove my mom nuts. If guests visited, he’d change from cotton ones to silk ones!
  • he always appreciated my mom’s cooking and made sure he told her EVERYTIME! She lived to hear it. Even when he was in hospital, he’d ‘light up’ when mom arrived with dinner, it was endearing to watch (I think my hubby takes after him!)
  • he loved the phrase “quat tse”, literally translated means ‘zen like with style’, he applied liberally to mom’s cooking!
  • he loved cashmere and silks and was quite a dapper dresser, see photos below.
  • he was very tidy and had a place for everything in his desk. I know I got that trait from him!
  • one of his pet peeves was seeing us with wet hair. He’d chase us to dry our hair, something about catching a cold?
  • he’d write some very disjointed thoughts in letters. I think I picked that up from him too, oops.
  • he had to ‘borrow’ cash from my piggy bank once & was so proud when I announced he had to pay me interest.
  • he was very musical, we always had a piano in the house. He also loved the accordion (see photos below.)  He’d say to my sister who also played the piano, don’t worry about getting the notes right, play with feeling!
  • he allowed my sister and I to put a big curtain so we could play ‘house’ under his grand piano. It got quite loud under there!
  • he was a great provider!  With 5 kids and a busy business, he always set aside Sunday to take us out for dim sum or picnic or the beach. I have such fond memories of these.
  • considering he had no background in engineering or metals, he came up with a blueprint for aluminium prefabricated housing and sold it all over the world to governments, wow!
  • he was an entrepreneur all his life started as a farmer, then motorcycle retailer (see photo below), then the prefab aluminum government housing project and he appreciated that I forged out on my own. I’ll never forget he came with my hubby and I when we were ‘sourcing’ my cast iron wok. They were telling me they could weld other metals into cast iron. My Dad had some knowledge of building prefab housing and knew something about metals.  When he heard that, he didn’t say anything infront of the tradesman but when we left, he said to me, ‘Darling, he’s just saying that cause he wants your money.  Cast iron is too soft a metal to weld into, don’t listen to him.” I’m so glad I brought him because I’d probably have 5,000 of the woks with no handles!
  • he was game for anything. When our Japanese neighbors brought my parents kimonos, they got photos taken in them, ha, ha (see below.)
  • best thing about Dad? He got us out of China, enough said.



What a Dad!
Love to hear your memories of cooking with your Dad or what your Dad means to you!

Don’t forget to check out the Let’s Lunchers’ posts on their Dads!  And if you’d like to join Let’s Lunch, go to Twitter and post a message with the hashtag #Letslunch — or, post a comment below.
Here’s a great way to see the round up on Pinterest by Emma, thanks for doing that!
Aleana‘s Homemade Scottish Oatcakes at Eat My Blog
Charissa‘s Grilled Rib-Eye Steaks & Uncle Andy’s Chimichurri Sauce at Zest Bakery
Eleanor‘s Salmon Bok Choy Soup at Wok Star
Emma‘s Ham and Rice at Dreaming of Pots & Pans
Jill‘s Root Beer-Glazed Onion Dip at Eating My Words
Grace‘s Taste of Diversity at HapaMama
Linda‘s Sesame-Ginger Chicken Wings at Spice Box Travels
Lisa‘s Hot Sugary Lip-Smacking Jam Donuts at Monday Morning Cooking Club
Patricia‘s Egg Candy at The Asian Grandmother’s Cookbook
Rashda‘s Beth Howard’s Apple Pie at Hot Curries & Cold Beer
Sonja‘s Spicy Smoked Paprika Lamb Shank Goulash at Foodnutzz

Filed Under: "one dish wok meals", #LetsLunch, Father's Day, soup Tagged With: "Father's Day", "one dish meals", #LetsLunch, entrepreneur

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