Like Shao's Lo Mein with Beef and Broccoli , the noodles here are first blanched in hot water. Even though lo mien typically comes pre-cooked, this step will help soften them back up and separate the noodles so they don't clump or break when you stir-fry them.

Shao's recipe suggests you cook the noodles for three minutes, then shock them under cold running water. This works just fine, but I prefer to take the easier route: I blanch them until just tender (about a minute), then transfer them to a bowl and toss with a little oil to keep the noodles separated. The residual heat from the water will keep cooking them until they're perfectly al dente and ready to stir-fry a few minutes later.

Once the mushrooms are ready, I add a handful of chives. These particular ones are flowering Chinese chives, but you can use regular Chinese chives, yellow chives, scallions, or even thinly sliced onions. Stir-fry them just long enough to tame their raw bite, but leave them nice and crisp. The shrooms and chives join the cabbage in the bowl on the side.

This recipe applies a Chinese technique to two decidedly Western ingredients, kale and frisée, with surprisingly good results. We cook them like any other hearty greens—adding the stems to a hot wok, followed by the leaves. There's no need for blanching, which makes this recipe super quick and leaves you with one fewer pot to clean.

The next step is frying the cabbage. Even with the aid of a tool like the Wok Mon, your home burner still has a severely limited heat output, which means the best strategy for getting nice charring and smoky wok hei at home is by cooking in batches.

I've had noodles on the brain (in my noodle, if you will), ever since I read Shao Zhi Zhong's fabulous series on how to cook Chinese noodles. The arrival of my Wok Mon home wok kit served as the perfect catalyst for some recipe testing.

The Portuguese soup of caldo verde (literally "green broth") is about as simple as it gets when it comes to vegetable soups, yet its simplicity is the key to its comforting success. At its most basic, starchy potatoes are simply simmered with onions and kale until the kale is tender and flavorful, the onions have melted into the broth, and the potatoes completely disintegrate, thickening the soup into a rich, thick stew. Some really good olive oil drizzled over the top, and you've got a great, filling lunch or dinner. Here, the cauliflower gets charred, taking on a meaty taste, and the addition of chipotle chiles echoes that smokiness.

As tempting as it can be to reach for a jar of ready-made curry paste, nothing you'll get in a store compares to what you can make at home. For this Thai dry curry, we use a mix of fresh and dried chiles, galangal, garlic, shallots, lemongrass, and makrut lime leaves to make a chile paste, which we then use to flavor crispy tofu and blistered green beans.

To make the roasted chile oil, just toast a handful of whole Chinese chiles (or if you want, red pepper flakes) in a dry skillet until fragrant and ever-so-slightly smoking (about 30 seconds). Transfer them to a food processor with a cup of neutral oil, like canola, and whiz the whole thing up. Let it sit in a sealed container in the fridge for a week or so, and you're good to go. You can even top up the jar with more oil and toasted chiles every time you seem to be running low. Make some, have it on hand at all times, and it will revolutionize your mapo tofu, ramen, dumplings, stir-fries, and countless other dishes.

Remember that article Mark Bittman wrote for the New York Times a few years ago recommending that we flip the script on pasta, and serve it with a ton more sauce? I like to think of this dish in a similar way, though instead of extra sauce, it's extra veggies. While stir-fried lo mein is typically noodles with some vegetables for flavor and color, this version comes out with veggies and noodles in almost equal proportions. That means it's packed with more flavor, in this case cabbage charred until sweet, along with meaty shiitake mushrooms, and big stalks of chives.

Wipe out wok. Add remaining 1 tablespoon oil and heat over high heat until smoking. Add noodles and cook, tossing and stirring, until hot. Add cabbage, mushrooms, chives, and minced garlic. Cook, tossing, until garlic is fragrant, about 30 seconds.

Water-velveting isn't just for chicken—you can use it to give the same silky texture to pork loin. That's how we start our take on sweet-and-sour pork, adding onion, bell pepper, and canned pineapple to complete the stir-fry. We use pineapple juice in the sauce, but balance it out with acidic rice vinegar and aromatic sesame oil.

It's not as popular with the U.S. audience as it is with the British (yet), but it seems that as palates are shifting and folks are becoming more and more accustomed to spicier foods, jalfrezi is getting primed to win over this side of the pond as well. With its origins in China, jalfrezi is more similar in its cooking method to dry-fried Chinese dishes rather than the typical wet Indian curry. This one incorporates chickpeas, potatoes and spinach, noodleinsight.Com and a simple chutney of cilantro, garlic, chile, and lime juice finishes it off.