02.03.07
Breath of a Wok, Meal 3
Tonight’s dinner was Uncle Sherman’s Home-Style Chicken and Vegetables (BoaW p. 69) and Virginia Yee’s Dry-Fried Sichuan String Beans (BoaW pp. 160-161).
My comment about homestyle Chinese dishes having very different meat-to-veg ratios than banquet or restaurant (and especially American restaurant) cooking? Well, I meant what I said, and if you want proof, look no further than Uncle Sherman’s chicken recipe, which produces a really mainstream, really tasty, really just textbook Cantonese dish. Ginger and garlic are both present in sizeable quantity, the meat is small in quantity and marinated in ginger and garlic and very little else, and a variety of fresh green veggies (plus the suave velvety meatiness of mushrooms for contrast) are put into play to carry the chicken along.
It’s pretty much the sort of dish that is comfort food for a lot of Cantonese: a simple stir-fry, lots and lots of green veg, plenty of ginger, plenty of garlic, nothing fancy at all. The bean sauce grounds it, a gentle, well-rounded bass to the treble of ginger and garlic and the great green chorus of broccoli, bok choy, mushrooms, and so on. Also, thanks to the high vegetable-to-meat ratio, it makes quite a lot of food. It was the first dish I’ve made from this book where I thought “gee, I hope it’s good, ’cause we sure do have plenty of it!” And it is.
Virginia Yee’s recipe for Sichuan-style string beans was a little weird. The title of the recipe actually calls it “Sichuan,” but I have to insist on adding the “-style” part, because the recipe calls for no fiery or numbing spice at all, and one or the other (if not both) are traditional in this dish in every Sichuanese recipe I’ve ever encountered. I confess I read the recipe three or four times trying to figure out where the chiles or Sichuan pepper came in, and only when I had gotten over my disbelief at not seeing them anywhere did I finally decide that no matter how well-meaning Ms. Yee may be, I could not bring myself to eat a dish of Sichuan-style green beans without any fire at all to them… I had been looking forward to it all day.
So, Ms. Yee, I apologize: I added a liberal quantity of crushed dried Aleppo pepper and a bit of another sort of Mystery Chile I had sitting dried in a jar in the cabinet, as well as substituting red chile oil for half of the sesame oil, and it was delicious. I am grateful to know that the green beans for Sichuan style beans need not be deep-fried for their first cooking. Dry-frying them (I used a heavy, huge cast-iron pan) is genius. I also concur that the splash of Chiankiang vinegar at the end is a great idea.
And speaking of Sichuan…
In preparation for the excursions we’ll be making into Sichuan and Hunanese cooking around these parts, one of my jobs today was to start the process of making salted chiles, which are used in a number of different ways. They need to sit for at least several days, and preferably longer, before you use them, so that the salt has the time to do its magic with the water in the peppers. My Belovedary took some pictures of the process and I will put them up eventually, but right now I am having trouble getting that to happen so it’ll have to wait. Suffice to say that it involved chopping a pound and a half of wicked, but gorgeous, long hot red chiles! Things are gonna be getting nice and hot here at the Little Purple Rowhouse That Could, just in time for a predicted cold snap. Excellent.