Welcome to Cooking With Cassie, a new feature that introduces some of my personal home-style Chinese recipes you won't find anywhere else on the web, but which you might have had on your family's dinner table, when visiting your grandparents or ordered in a casual Chinese restaurant. Bear in mind that I am not a gourmet chef, and somewhat conservative with a couple of American born children, so you won't see too many dishes with exotic meats or internal organs. My recipes are meant to be part of a simple family style meal, which is tasty, satisfying and healthy, and uses no MSG.

My family and I love to eat, so naturally, in order to feed this habit (no pun intended), I learned to cook. I never tried until I first started dating my future husband. During one of our first dates, I surprised him one night in his graduate student dorm kitchen with watercress soup, Cantonese style stir fried lobster and Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce, while the rest of the grad students were eating ramen noodles slathered with chili sauce, and eyeing our meal ravenously. That was my very first attempt, and I'd have to say it was a success because we were married four months later, and have been for almost 20 years.

Most of my exposure to cooking was from watching over my mother's shoulder when I was a kid. I observed how she washed, sliced, chopped, cut, marinated, boiled, braised, stir fried and steamed all the ingredients that would blend together and become our nightly meal. And there would always be Hong Kong pop music playing from the cassette recorder that was permanently perched on the shelf under the rice cooker, and that is where my love for listening began. Thirty years later, I have a wireless laptop playing HKVP Radio on my desk in the kitchen, listening to the same music, hoping my kids will follow in my footsteps... but that's another story.

If I really enjoyed a new dish after trying it in a Chinese restaurant, I make note of the ingredients and attempt to re-create it at home. This is a great way to do some testing in the kitchen and add to your own repertoire of homemade dishes. I also get a lot of inspiration from the renowned queen of Hong Kong cookery Lisa Yam (a.k.a. Fong Tai). She has published many cookbooks for sale that are printed in Chinese and English.

Chinese cooking is labor intensive, but the results are nutritious and delicious, and there are such a wide variety of tastes and flavors that I think only Chinese food can deliver. I will introduce recipes for everything from appetizers, meat/seafood/vegetarian dishes, as well as soups, rice, noodles and desserts. Since I quit my job last year, I've been able to try quite a few dishes, and those published here have been taste tested by my family and many friends. We love to entertain, and I'll spend many hours cooking for dinner parties, but it's a lot of fun, and our guests usually bring their own creations to share.

I don't consider cooking to be a chore but a labor of love. I cook because I relish in creating a meal that appeals to one's palate, and it brings me great satisfaction that I am nourishing my family with healthy foods they enjoy. I won't cook for just anyone, and I won't cook just anything. When I do, it is something I do from my heart, using the freshest ingredients and taking the greatest care to make sure it comes out perfectly. It was like that when I cooked my first meal for my boyfriend, and it's still like that for my family and friends. So if you have the opportunity to visit me and I invite you to stay for a meal, then you know you have my trust and friendship, or perhaps you were just recruited to be a guinea pig to test out a new dish :)

Recipes will be updated weekly and available here on the HKVP Radio website. I hope you enjoy my dishes, and if you have any suggestions or would like to contribute one of your favorite recipes for publication, please email it to me at cassie@hkvpradio.com.