Heinz Ketchup Shrimp and Other Authentic Chinese Dishes

My first food-related blog entry is about a dinner that I cooked last Friday.  It's only first because my friend Serenity who came over took some pictures with her iPhone, and I think it's good to include pictures with my blog entries.  (Note to self, from now on, take pictures of everything I eat).

On the menu for that night were my world famous ketchup shrimp, Chinese long beans with ground pork, and jalapeno beef with Chinese sacha sauce.  Dinner wasn't ready yet when Serenity and J. came over, and they wanted to help out, so I put them to work assembling some vegetarian dumplings (I had some filling and store-bought wrappers left over from dinner the night before; my friend Maggie is a vegetarian).  As you can see, they did a pretty good job with the dumplings:

I, however, was having a hard time in the kitchen.  I was stir-frying the jalapenos for my beef dish, and I wanted to get them really caramelized so they could be eaten and not be too spicy (I had taken out the seeds and membranes before stir-frying).  Apparently, I got them a little over-caramelized (ie, burnt) because spicy pepper smoke started permiating the air.  I have no ventilation in my kitchen, so the smoke just lingered there for a while.  I opened the door to try to air out my apartment a bit, but it didn't really do much good.  J. started having a coughing fit and had to stick his head out the window in order to breathe.

The smoke eventually settled, and I was able to work on my other two dishes.  It was my first time cooking with Chinese long beans, which I love but for some reason have never used.  They're similar to green beans except they're about 12-18 inches long and have a slightly dryer texture.  One reason I like them over regular green beans is that, because they're so long, you use fewer of them, which means you save time because you don't have to cut the stems off a million little green beans.  They're also tastier, I think, especially since the dryer texture means they can absorb more of the delicious sauce that they're cooked in.

The last dish I made was one of my favorite dishes.  It's a sweet and tangy shrimp dish.  I put lots of garlic, ginger and scallions in it, along with soy sauce and sesame oil.  But the secret ingredient that makes the dish is Heinz ketchup.  It adds a sweet Chinese flavor that you can't get from anything else.  My grandmother made this dish.  (She also taught me to use ketchup in my fried rice, which I think is pure genius).  BTW, Laurent Tourondel uses Heinz ketchup in his cooking too.  Oh, I usually add some Concord Grape Manischewitz to it, for some extra sweetness (something tells me that ketchup shrimp isn't exactly Kosher for passover).  But I was out so I made do with Franzia instead.

All in all, a pretty tasty meal.