Editorial Introduction

Wayne Keyser has taught cooking classes to literally thousands. His extended series of classes for Open University of Washington in the 1970s led to engagements with many retailers and local school departments, and to a successful series of CDRom books-on-disk. His publications include works on topics as diverse as sushi and carnival fun foods, with more to come. His philosophy, making it easy for the average person to do a respectable job with the basic elements of a new cuisine, has not been popular with "food snobs" who feel that the basics aren't worth teaching, or that people shouldn't be taught to try to do something unless they intend to excel. But thousands of people have learned the basics of pizza making, Chinese and Southwestern cooking, and more from Wayne, and he intends to keep on teaching this way for another thirty years.

Do you love food? So do I (clearly, if the photo is any indication)! And when I've found a dish I'm really fond of, my very first instinct is to learn to make it at home. I'm sure you've felt something like that before. True, at any restaurant you really enjoy (whether it's an elegant showplace or [my preference] an little "hole in the wall" only I and a few immigrants know about), the service and the atmosphere enter into the equation, making the total experience much more than just the food. Still, a great dish is a great dish, and there's no reason not to make it at home!

I'm shooting, here, for the American favorite Chinese dishes, ones you've grown accustomed to at your favorite Chinese restaurant. That's not to say "inauthentic" … I'm not going to give you Chun King® Chop Suey just like you find in a can. But neither am I trying for dishes so exotic that they are served only in China, or the ones you see written in Chinese characters at the back of the menu in little out-of-the-way restaurants that, when you ask the waiter what they are, he says, "Not for you."

So you're looking for Egg Drop Soup and Beef with Broccoli, maybe General Tso's Chicken. You can easily find plenty of recipes on the internet, but THERE'S ONE BIG PROBLEM! Sometimes the authors of those recipes seem never to have actually cooked them (or they may have been sampling the cooking wine really hard)! The results sometimes bear almost no resemblance to what you get in "your favorite Chinese restaurant."

Additionally, there is no single "authentic" Chinese recipe for any dish. For instance, you'll find Kung Pao Chicken recipes, good ones, in versions that produce sweet and thick sauces, tart and light sauces, almost no sauce at all, etc. They're all "authentic," but your local restaurant has gotten you used to just one style.

Friends, some of these are recipes I've been using and teaching for decades. Others were great just exactly the way I found them. Others needed a LOT of tweaking or even complete re-working. I don't claim to have actually tested every one of these, but I DO know a serious mistake when I see it, and there are a lot of them out there! See the page on "Are these the real recipes used by the restaurants" for more details.

Give some of these a try and see how they work for you! And don't be afraid to tackle, carefully, a recipe a bit beyond the level you have tried so far. Your first effort will no doubt look worse than you had hoped, but it should taste great ! And your second and third meals, and on and on, should be better-looking. And you don't need anyone's permission to try it out, to learn, to make it yours, to occasionally fail, and to succeed in the long run! You're not competing on "The Iron Chef" (a Food Network show imported from Japan, dubbed like a bad Godzilla movie, in which expert restaurant chefs compete) and you're not being given a grade, except by the people you feed your dishes to — and I guarantee they'll love what you accomplish!