which_chick | (no subject) (Reply)

This evening was bok choy evening due to the lack of collards at my grocery last night. (Stupid grocery.) As I mentioned yesterday, the bok choy looked good and, of the non-salad greens, it was the only one I was willing to spend money on. Now, my mom's been on about the delights of bok choy for the last two weeks or so in email. Seems her grocery (mom lives in Baltimore, where there are groceries that probably have really nice collards EVERY week) has something called "baby bok choy" which is apparently all that and a bag of chips. I don't know about that, but it's sure as hell not collards. Anyway, I wound up with bok choy, the grownup kind, because I didn't see any baby bok choy in my defective collard-less grocery.

What to do with bok choy? It's an excellent stir fry veggie, so that's what I did with it. Persons who have gas stoves and wok rings and so forth can be all authentic. I don't have that stuff. I have an electric stove. It doesn't really lend itself to cooking with a wok ring and a traditional hammered wok. I do my stir frying in a large well-seasoned cast iron pan with a flat bottom. I'm well aware that this is not authentic.

Anyway, on stir-frying. I told mom the other day in email that having too many kinds of ingredients makes stir fry that sucks ass. I've only recently figured this out, see, so I figure it might be news to people other than me. Sometimes I'm way off on what other people consider news, but what the hell. (Example: At this past New Year's, I determined that everyone on the planet but me knew that MC Hawking's song Entropy was a riff on Naughty by Nature's song OPP. News to me, not news to anyone else. It happens.) The number of stir fry ingredients should not exceed five, including the meat used (if any) but that number does NOT include the flavor base (any combination of the following items: sesame oil, soy sauce, peanuts, hot peppers, ginger, garlic). Tonight, stir fry was four flavor base (sesame, soy, garlic, and ginger -- I eat this rather a lot) with a handful of gracefully aging mushrooms and six stalks of bok choy, rinsed and chopped all the way up until all gone, not skipping out on the green bits. I LIKE green bits and that's where the vitamins live anyway. I'm not a fan of overcooking my bok choy, so I put it in, cooked it lightly until hot through, declared it shupperdime, and had the lot with cold leftover sushi rice.

As collards, it was pretty crappy. However, I'm trying to look past that because it is not the fault of bok choy that it is not collards. As bok choy, it was pretty good.