With this recipe, I’m realizing I’ve never had moo shu pork, because I’ve never had mandarin pancakes before and apparently that’s how the dish is served. Now that I’ve had it at home, I’d really like to try it at a restaurant!

Both the Moo Shu Mushrooms and Mandarin Pancakes recipes were straightforward, but doing them together made me wish for a helper in the kitchen. I got the pancake dough made and resting half an hour before starting the rest of dinner. Prepped everything for the moo shu mushrooms and then rolled out and cooked the pancakes.

The Mandarin pancakes are rolled out, then one is brushed with oil, another is placed on top, and then they’re rolled out together. The pancake stack is then cooked on a skillet until it blisters, flipped until the other side blisters, then the two pancakes are peeled apart. The result is two very thin pancakes.

The moo shu mushrooms is typical for what has been covered in the cookbook so far: stir fry the ingredients in batches, then combine at the end. The recipe called for a new-to-me ingredient and an ingredient that I’ve purchased once before but don’t keep on hand. The new-to-me ingredient was daylily buds. Happily, my local Asian market had them, but I did have to ask for help. They were in a completely unlabeled bag, just a picture of two Chinese lanterns. The ingredient that I’ve worked with once before was wood ear mushrooms. Both are purchased dried and then soaked in hot water before cooking.

The dish is eaten like a taco with a bit of hoisin sauce on the pancake and the moo shu mushrooms as the filling. The wood ear mushrooms have a rather distinct toughness to them. I found the daylily buds to not carry a whole lot of flavor on their own. They blended right into the rest of the dish.

My wife and I both enjoyed it. My daughter ate some plain pancakes. My son picked out some pork and egg from the moo shu mushrooms, rolled them in a pancake, and dipped that in soy sauce. He said it was good.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.