I posted this on Instagram last night but I thought I'd explain it in a short thread here too, as a lot of people seemed to find it helpful in terms of understanding Chinese food. This was our dinner. It probably took about 25 minutes to make all up. 
It was: Prawns stir-fried ginger and spring onion in yellow wine, chilled cucumber with black vinegar, pak choy & oyster sauce and garlic chive omelette. Two dishes done in a wok, one cold and one boiled in a pot.
In total, the whole meal used 12 ingredients (plus oil, salt and sugar): prawns, ginger, garlic chives, spring onion, wine, soy sauce, vinegar, eggs, pak choy, oyster sauce, fish sauce. Each of these ingredients (except oil, salt and sugar) were only used once.
The most common issue I see with people new to Asian cuisines is that they use too many ingredients. They throw every "Chinese" ingredient they can think of into every dish thinking that it will make it taste more "Chinese". This is a problem.
Firstly, it makes everything difficult and time-consuming to cook as there are lots of ingredients to prepare. And secondly, it makes everything tastes the same.
The prawn dish is how most Chinese stir-fried dishes are made. Just 3 ingredients - prawns, ginger and spring onion - plus two seasonings - salt and yellow wine (Shaoxing) and oil.
I fried the ginger in oil and then added the prawns. Seasoned with salt. And when the prawns were nearly cooked, I took them out of the wok. Then I tossed the spring onions in the wok and added the prawns back in. A bit of wine, and then a touch of cornflour to bring it together.
The greens were just boiled quickly in salted water with a little oil added, then drained. I mixed oyster sauce with the water for boiling, and poured it over the top. The cucumbers were salted, then mixed with black vinegar, soy sauce and a touch of sugar.
The omelette was eggs, garlic chives, fish sauce, salt, sesame oil and a touch of sugar just stir-fried together.
One thing that should be obvious is how different these dishes are from the Australian-Chinese restaurant favourites that are meat and 10 different vegetables in a thick, sweet sauce. Those dishes exist in (mainly Cantonese) Chinese cuisine, but are not common for home cooking.
Piling 10 ingredients into a wok will not work at home. Trying to feed a family of 4 from 1 wok-fried dish will not work at home. The whole idea of a wok is that multiple, simple dishes can be cooked in quick succession.
I could have made one big stir-fry of prawns, pak choy, garlic chives, egg, ginger, garlic and spring onion in a black vinegar, soy, oyster sauce arrangement. I might have tasted OK, but it would have been VERY hard to cook in one wok and would have been a meal of one flavour.
By separating 12-odd ingredients across 4 different dishes, I got 4 dishes that took on average 5 minutes to make each, and each tasted different and distinctive. Overall, we had a meal that was balanced - some sour tastes, some salty, fried, boiled, hot, cold.
Some dishes were strong in flavour. Some mild. A home-cooked Chinese meal is about balance and simplicity. Here's just 3 quick takeaway tips you can put into practice...
1. Try to limit your stir-fried dishes to 2 or 3 ingredients, and try not to duplicate ingredients across dishes. The Chinese holy trinity of ginger, garlic and onion doesn’t need to be in everything.
2. Go easy on seasonings and sauces. The flavour of a dish is the ingredient, not the sauce. The most common seasoning I use for stir-fried dishes is just a bit of salt and a touch of wine.
3. Don't try to cook big batches in woks. Woks are made for cooking small, single-plate sized dishes. Even with powerful commercial wok burners in restaurants they’re usually only cooking 1 plate a time.
Oh, and 1 more thing. Try to make a meal from 3 or 5 dishes (usually an odd number in Chinese culture). Not everything has to be wok-fried. Think about cold dishes, boiled dishes, soups etc. They don’t have to be complicated.
(For this meal we actually also had a simple clear soup from the prawn shells boiled in the pak choy cooking water because I was uneasy about having 4 dishes. It’s a death number.)
I hope this was helpful.
If you want more info on simple Asian recipes, you can look at my YouTube channel for recipe videos on things like this Yangzhou fried rice.
