Chinese Home Cooking: Four Dishes and Wooden Steamer Rice

What this video shows

Liu, a home cook in China, prepares a multi-dish family meal from scratch. She begins by cooking rice the traditional way, parboiling it and then finishing it in a wooden steamer, and preps vegetables in the waiting time, including picking green onions from her own supply. Over roughly twenty minutes she cooks four dishes: pork and cabbage soup, a sweet corn and pork stir-fry, stir-fried pork with chili peppers, and a spicy version of tomato and egg stir-fry. She then sits down to eat with her daughter, while her husband and son are away at work.

At a glance

What stands out

The rice method is the least familiar element for most outside viewers: rather than a rice cooker, the grain is boiled first, drained, then steamed in a wooden vessel, a two-stage process that takes far longer than pressing a button. The meal is built around pork in three of the four dishes, with vegetables and egg filling out the table, and even the tomato-and-egg stir-fry is done in a spicy style rather than the sweet version usually associated with that dish. Green onions are picked fresh rather than bought cut. The eating arrangement is also notable: the meal is shared by whoever is home, with the two working members of the household absent and served separately.