Chinese New Year Turnip Cake Recipe

makes about 24 slices

2 1/2 to 3 cups daikon, peeled and julienned or shredded (about 1 1/2 to 2 lbs.)
1 Chinese sausage, finely diced
2 cups rice flour (do not use glutinous rice flour)
1 3/4 cups water, divided
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon white pepper
Vegetable oil

Stir fry Chinese sausage in a large frying pan or work for 2 to 3 minutes. Add daikon, 3/4 cups water, salt, and white pepper. Bring to a boil, then remove from heat.

Grease a square cake pan or loaf pan and start the steamer.

Mix rice flour with 1 cup water. Add the daikon and sausage mixture and spread into the greased pan. Steam for 50 minutes.

Cool overnight in refrigerator. After cooling, cut the cake into 1/4" slices and pan fry in a liberal amount of oil until both sides are golden brown.

Serve with soy sauce paste (or oyster sauce or hoisin sauce).

You can also add shitake mushrooms and/or small dried shrimp, but I didn't have either and, as Annie said, you can't really go wrong with Chinese sausage.

The hardest part about making this was finding a dish to steam the cake in. Since I was using my stock pot and pasta insert to steam, I needed something that would fit, and none of my square (or even circular) cake pans were small enough. So I improvised with a large serving bowl, and it did the trick.

Another hard part? Reading the recipe correctly. For some reason, I thought it said 1 1/2 to 2 cups instead of lbs. so I only had about half as much daikon as I needed in there. The result was a drier cake than you get in the restaurants, but still edible, although boys will eat anything.... So learn from my mistakes and read the recipe correctly, okay?