Asian dishes: healthful, pungent and beautiful

Some people avoid Chinese restaurants, saying the food is loaded with fat. But that’s like eating at a New York steak house and complaining about the calories.

We just don’t eat at home the way we do in restaurants.

And Chinese people don’t either. Home cooking in Beijing, say, is full of vegetables, with very little animal fat, and pungent with seasonings such as Sichuan peppercorns (hot and silvery tasting and totally different from black peppercorns, which are no substitute), garlic, ginger and chile peppers (depending largely on what part of China the cook comes from). And throughout Southeast Asia, the food tends to be lean and beautiful and dense with flavor.

An incredible cookbook titled "Hot Sour Salty Sweet," by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, documents this intrepid couple’s culinary journey through Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and southern China. It is wonderfully detailed, beautifully photographed and, for people who love cooking and eating, it’s a treasure.

And for those who calculate calories and check for fiber, well, this is the food of poor people, low in animal fats, high in fruits, grains, vegetables, and, most urgent of all, delicious, enlivened by the hot, sour, salty and sweet flavors of Asia.

Of course you can eat Kentucky Fried Chicken and burgers in Beijing, and you can devour crispy duck skin and mountains of fried dumplings in restaurants there both grand and humble, but home is different. If you are lucky enough to eat in someone’s tiny apartment in the capital, the cook might serve up a lovely cucumber dish from Yunnan Province in southern China, like this one.

Spicy Cucumber Salad

Layou huanggua

adapted from

"Hot Sour Salty Sweet"

1 large seedless (so called) cucumber

2 tablespoons rice vinegar

1 tablespoon sugar

3 tablespoons peanut oil

3 Thai dried red chiles

7 Sichuan peppercorns

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup cilantro leaves

Peel the cucumber, and slice it lengthwise into eight strips. Cut the strips into 2-inch lengths.

Place in a medium bowl and add vinegar and sugar. Set aside.

Heat the oil at high temperature and quickly add the dried chiles and Sichuan peppercorns, stirring briskly for 20 to 30 seconds and pour over the cucumbers.

Add the salt and mix the cucumbers well. Sprinkle on the cilantro and serve right away.

Oh yes, I forgot to say, Asian cooking can be speedy, too.

The only problem is sometimes you have to search for ingredients.

But dried chiles are available at lots of places, including La Bonne’s and Stop & Shop and Guido’s in Great Barrington. For more exotic fare, Penzeys Spices can provide you with both dried Thai chiles and Sichuan peppercorns. Just go to www.penzys.com.