Healthy Bok Choy Recipes

Sichuan peppercorns give this brothy slow-cooker chicken dish a distinctive lemony, mouth-numbing flavor. Unrelated to peppercorns, they're the dried berries of the prickly ash tree. Look for them in specialty markets and online. If you've never had them before, try one first and add more or less to taste. Serve with sesame baby bok choy (which takes just a few minutes to prep) and Chinese noodles for an easy, healthy dinner that'll get you out of your same-old-chicken-dish rut.

This healthy pepper and pork stir-fry recipe has a citrusy mojo sauce. Because stir-fries cook up quickly, have all the ingredients prepped and next to the stove before you turn on the heat. Serve over brown rice or rice noodles.

Searing the chicken before roasting at high heat ensures super-crispy skin. Combine that with mandarin oranges and you've got a healthy orange-chicken dish reminiscent of the favorite fried one at the mall food court--but without the fryer.

Oyster sauce and rice wine give this speedy stir-fry a rich flavor that balances the clean, sweet crunch of bok choy. Make It a Meal: Rice noodles or brown basmati rice and a Tsing Tao beer will make you feel like you're eating in your favorite Chinese restaurant.

Serve this spicy pork-and-vegetable lo mein for Chinese New Year or for dinner anytime. While some cooks like to cut the noodles into 6- to 8-inch lengths to make them easier to combine with other ingredients, for the New Year the noodles can never be cut because that symbolizes bad luck. The longer the noodles, the longer your life! Be sure to thinly slice the pork and mushrooms so they cook through. And thoroughly dry the bok choy to avoid creating a braise instead of a stir-fry. Read more about this recipe.

Chinese five-spice powder, a blend of cinnamon, cloves, fennel seed, star anise and Szechuan peppercorns, adds a hint of warmth and the suggestion of sweetness to this healthy chicken recipe. It's great on just about anything you grill or roast, so it's worth keeping in your spice cabinet.

Transform your leftover holiday brisket into a warming soup. Coating the brisket in a savory, glossy sauce before adding it to the broth gives this soup extra chutzpah.

These Chinese vegetable buns are filled with a savory blend of cabbage, bok choy and onion and seasoned with garlic, ginger and basil. They are then pan-cooked until puffy and crisped on the outside. Serve them as part of a dim sum spread with dumplings and other small dishes. These buns are great on their own, but to amp up their flavor, serve them with soy sauce with a splash of black vinegar for dipping (rice vinegar will also work in a pinch).

In China it's common to serve stir-fried greens with a dollop of oyster sauce often mixed with a little bit of mild vinegar. This riff doubles down on the sour by adding Zhenjiang black vinegar, which is full-bodied and pretty puckery.

Ben Bebenroth, chef and owner of Cleveland's farm-to-table Spice Catering, likes to make this sauté with Ichiban eggplant, which is a long, slender variety with thin skin that he grows on his farm.

In this healthy Chinese tofu stir-fry recipe, the bok choy is cooked first, then removed from the pan so its juices don't dilute the sauce. Pressing tofu helps extract liquid so it cooks up with a bit of a bite. Look for plum sauce--a sweet-and-sour condiment--near other Chinese sauces in most supermarkets. Serve with steamed brown rice.

All the ingredients for this easy beef stir-fry recipe are cooked in one wok (or skillet), so not only is the meal-prep fast for this healthy dinner, cleanup is quick too. Look for Lee Kum Kee Premium oyster-flavored sauce in the Asian-foods aisle of your grocery store. It has the most concentrated oyster flavor.