Stir Fry!

I am posting today on my post-Christmas obsession with stir fry.  Though I will discuss a specific dish, I am not going to post the recipe since it is an un-deviated-from duplicate of that in my stir fry cookbook.  Instead I am going to talk about the process and equipment.

First, let me describe the first recipe I cooked:

For Christmas my husband bought me a wok, my sisters bought me a mushroom farm, and I bought myself a cookbook.  So I decided to make chicken with carrots and shitake mushrooms.

Here are the mushrooms, both in all their farmed glory and sliced beside carrots:

 



I have really enjoyed the farm.  It will send out 3 crops over a few months and is fun to watch grow.  They can be bought at the S.F. Ferry building from Far West Fungi.


And here is the completed dish:


The spice level and flavor complexity in this is very low, but the earthy  umami of the mushrooms combined with sweet carrots make it addictive and comforting.  I repeated it recently in a meal for two friends, but using dry mushrooms (which is what the recipe calls for, and found them far inferior to the fresh option, but still good.

















To make stir fry at home you really only need 4 things:

1. A 14 inch carbon steel wok that has been thoroughly cleaned and then seasoned.  These are cheap and can be found at Asian markets or in china town or online.
2. A metal spatula
3. A cookbook (I use "Stir Frying to the Sky's Edge"and like most of the recipes)
4. A trip to Ranch 99 or a similar store where you can buy the ~10 condiments needed to cover basic stir fry.

The process is pretty easy and quick.  The big points are to treat your wok like any other seasoned iron cooking vessel (no soap, clean with scrubbing and hot water or a salt oil rub) and to prepare all ingredients ahead of time because the actual cooking process is often <5min, with a lot going on.  It does require a somewhat good eye for vegetable cooking stages.  Sometimes on my small residential gas range the suggested times in the recipes are off (1min becomes 2) and I just have listen to the sizzle and watch the coloration.

I have found that stir fry combined with a pack of frozen chicken breasts from Trader Joes and a rice cooker  yield's reliably tasty, low fat, high vegetable content meals that can be done in <30min from first slicing vegetables to cleaning the wok.  Because I already enjoyed Chinese food, this has become my normal weeknight meal / next day's lunch.