02.05.07
Farmhouse Pork and Green Peppers, Gai Lan in Ginger Sauce
Wow, that makes a really satisfying dinner.
Tonight I used two cookbooks, Breath of a Wok and Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province (hereafter RCC). The pattern we’ve been using, of two dishes to a meal for two people, with one of them being a meat-inclusive dish and the other being a vegetable-only dish, has been working out very well for us and even for our needs in terms of leftovers for lunches and so on. I knew I wanted to try the pork dish, since both my belovedary and I adore black beans, and since Dunlop characterizes the dish in question, Farmhouse Pork and Green Peppers (RCC p. 85) as being one of the homestyle classics of Hunan cuisine. Hard to go wrong with something so beloved, I figure.
I needed a strong, stand-alone vegetable dish to stand up to the pork and peppers. Gai lan, sometimes called “Chinese broccoli” but really a lot closer to rapini — eaten primarily for its stems and leaves, rather than the buds or flowers as with regular broccoli — seemed like the perfect thing, and since I had the Hong Kong style gai lan recipe (BoaW p. 140) in the list of recipes I’d shopped for over the weekend, I fired it up, with (I confess) a little extra ginger for the joy that’s in it.
It was a good pairing, the astringency and mild bitterness of the greens cutting the unctuousness of the pork perfectly. Watercress with garlic would’ve been another nice option for the same reason. The pork and peppers is deservedly well-loved. It’s rich, but not overly so, with the small quantity of pork belly providing moments of melting savory fattiness (with just a hint of bacony crunch) among the languid, sweet just-cooked-enough peppers and the nice lean pork loin I used for the main portion of the meat for the recipe. And oh, man, the black beans! The preparation was a far cry from the usual Cantonese mode of using them mashed into a paste for sauce, and it is really out of this world if you like black beans (but might, I caution, be a little offputting if you weren’t prepared for them or didn’t like them).
We’ll definitely be making this one again. Chances are good I will also try it with other meats. I think it’d be swell with turkey. And, in another direction, with shrimp.