Homework

I understand why many people don’t care for okra: it’s slimy.  Or at least it has that tendency.  Even while you’re just trimming it, it exhibits an alarming capacity for oozing a clear sticky substance that sort of splits the difference between Superglue, dog drool, and spider silk.  The bits you pare away often stick quite staunchly to the knife blade.  Or your fingers.  Or the cutting board.  Or the scraps bowl.

When you cook okra with moist heat, as when you put it into a gumbo, for instance, this sliminess becomes more pronounced.  In gumbo, it becomes a thickener, part of what gives gumbo its characteristic texture. In other applications, well, it’s just slimy.  Oozy.  Sticky.  It reminds even me — and I like okra — of the rather amazing microbial cavedwelling life forms known as snottites.

What many folks don’t know is that okra can be prepared to be slimeless.  One way is to pickle it.  The acid counteracts the slime.  I don’t pickle okra myself, I buy it in jars made by the good people at Talk o’ Texas, who are not just whistlin’ Dixie when they claim their pickled okra is crisp.  I like the hot kind, but the mild isn’t bad either.

The other way you can make slimeless okra is to cook it very very fast over very very high heat, with no added liquid at all, in the style of a classic “dry” Chinese stir-fry.  That’s what I usually do.  Sometimes I flavor it in Chinese ways, other times I flavor it in Indian/Bengali/Pakistani ways.  So  I don’t know if this is an actual recipe in Bengali cookery, it may well be. To me, it is the application of a Chinese technique to Bengali flavors and oh, is it tasty. And not the tiniest bit slimy.  It’s all about the intensity of heat and the absence of water.

You must have small, thin okra pods for this to work.  Larger woodier ones will not cook quickly enough and will become slimy from their own internal water being cooked.

About 1 pound cleaned, trimmed small fresh okra pods
2 medium onions, diced
3 Tablespoons or so minced fresh ginger root
about 2 Tablespoons panch phoran
about a half teaspoon ground turmeric
one or two fresh hot chilis, minced (optional)
salt
juice of one very juicy or two not so juicy limes
a couple of handfuls of cilantro, coarsely chopped
neutral cooking oil or ghee

Cook over a high brisk flame at all times. Heat enough oil/ghee to coat the bottom of the pan in a heavy large pan, big enough to accept all the okra in a single layer. WHen it is almost smoking, add the onion and ginger and cook until the onion is thoroughly brown but not burnt. Add the panch phoran, turmeric, and hot chilis if using, and stir-fry until the mustard seeds in the panch phoran begin to pop. Add okra and toss to coat the okra with the oil. Fry, stirring frequently, until okra is just soft, about 5-7 minutes in all. Add the cilantro and toss, stirfry for about a minute, and dump in the lime juice, stirring just enough to deglaze the pan. Salt to taste and serve.

Oh, I took photos.  But would they really express the satisfaction, a long day of writing behind me, an evening’s worth still to go, of spending a half an hour in the kitchen with the cool crispness of bok choy and cucumbers and scallions?  Would they convey the sizzle of the tofu hitting the hot oil in the wok, so loud it made me flinch even though I expected it?  I’m fairly sure they wouldn’t give the remotest impression of how mud-luscious (oh e.e.!) the sensation of mashing soaked fermented black beans with your fingertips can be, or how tantalizing the pungency that rises to the nose when you do it.  And as for the visceral gratification of whacking a peeled whole cucumber with the flat of a cleaver blade until it cracks into chunks, well, I think we can agree that no photograph could do that justice.

We ate a shrimp-broth based egg flower soup, black bean sauce tofu with bok choy, and smacked garlic cucumbers.  No rice, we usually don’t unless company’s in the offing, the better to spare my temperamental metabolic system.  Thumb-thick, winey-ripe blackberries for dessert.  Salutary indeed.

And so, back to work.

Having written out my kimchi fried rice recipe last night, I thought I would follow up with a short list of essential stir-frying tips learned from many years of both excellent teachers and trial-and-error (which is sometimes the best teacher of all).

Equipment:

• Do not stir-fry in a nonstick pan.  Stir-frying requires very high temperatures and nonstick coatings can emit toxic gases (particularly fatal to birds) at high temperatures.
• Stir-fry over gas or live flame.  Period.  If you have only an electric or induction cooktop at your disposal, and you still want to stirfry, go to an Asian market and buy yourself a portable butane burner and a passel of cans of butane.  These are easy to use, safe, inexpensive, and deliver a reasonable number of BTUs for stir-frying.  You may also want one of these even if you do have a gas stove, because many Western home gas ranges have a pretty anemic output even at full blast.
• If you use a wok, make sure it’s stable when you set it on the burner.  Use a flat-bottomed wok, a good sturdy wok ring, or if you are lucky enough to find one, a cast-iron wok grate designed for Western-style stoves.  It’s too dangerous to do otherwise.   Don’t argue with me, you don’t like boiling oil burns any better than I do.

Prep:

• Do your prep first.  All of it.  Everything should be prepared before you heat the wok.  Sauces should be mixed, garnishes readied, every ingredient chopped or whatevered, and set aside in individual bowls.  90% of the time you spend making a stir-fried dish will be prep time.
• Arrange your mise-en-place so that you can reach everything easily from where you stand at the wok.  You won’t have time to go running around the kitchen to find things.
• Part of your prep is to have your serving bowls at the ready.  You won’t have time to go finding them once you start cooking.  Make sure they are in easy reach, clean, and ready to go.

Method:

• If you are afraid of using the highest heat your stovetop can put out, don’t bother stir-frying until you are comfortable with the idea.
• Use as much heat as you have at your disposal.  Every so often you will cook something where you’ll want to bring the heat down, when stir-frying, but traditionally this is done by moving the wok off the heat slightly, not by using a cooler flame.
• Hot pan, then cold oil.  Hot oil, then cold food.  What this means: the pan should be heated until it starts to smoke before you add anything else including cooking oil.  Once you add oil to a pan, it must get hot — not warm but hot — before you add the cold food.  Doing it any other way will lower the temperature of pan and oil too much and you will not be able to stir-fry anything.  Stir-frying requires keeping the pan at a consistently high heat.
• The pan should constantly talk to you.  If at any time after you start cooking there is not some kind of sizzling noise coming from the pan, you have overfilled it or there is too much liquid in the pan.  If either of these things is true you are no longer stir-frying.  (Note: sometimes you don’t want to stir-fry, and that’s okay, but if you are supposed to be stir-frying, make sure that’s what you’re doing.)
• Some things must be precooked before being stir-fried.  Stir-frying is a quick technique.  But not everything cooks quickly, or can.  Sometimes you will need to pre-cook things before you can stir-fry them.  Vegetables may need to be blanched.  Meats may need to be pre-cooked.  Noodles always need to be pre-cooked and well drained.  Things may also be stir-fried initially on their own, then removed from the pan, only to be added back into the stir-fry later on. Westerners often have this idea that stir-frying is invariably one-pot cooking and that stir-frying is the only cooking method that figures into any stir-fried dish.  This isn’t necessarily true.
• Some things must be drained and/or dried before being stir-fried.  Too much moisture in the wok results in a braise, not a stir-fry.  (And again, braises are fine things.  But they are not stir-fries.)  With too much moisture, things won’t cook the way you want them to, and textures will be mushy.  It is easier to add liquid than it is to take it out, so dry and drain things well, especially vegetables after washing.
• Do not expect to be able to clean as you go.  You won’t have the time.  You will finish stir-frying with a stack of dirty dishes from your mise-en-place, a dirty wok, a dirty wok spatula, and a hot meal that is ready to be eaten.  This is as it should be.  Go eat while the food is fresh and hot and good, then come back and clean up after.

To serve one very hungry person or two less-hungry people (perhaps with the addition of some other dish), prepare the following as mise-en-place:

• about a cup of cold leftover rice, broken up with a fork
• about a cup to a cup and a half of kimchi, very well drained, and cut into reasonably uniform bite-size pieces
• one egg, thoroughly beaten
• one half of an onion, diced
• 1-2 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
• 1 teaspoon each oyster sauce and sesame oil, combined
• additional egg
• neutral cooking oil

To make the dish, heat a little bit of neutral oil in a wok or a largish frying pan until it is almost smoking.  Cook the scrambled egg and remove it from the pan, then shred it or cut it into strips.  Set aside.

Reheat the pan and add another small bit of oil if it seems to need it.  Add the onion and garlic and stirfry until fragrant and very slightly browned, then add the rice.  Toss well and continue to stir-fry until the rice begins to color in a few places.  Remove the rice/onion/garlic mixture from the pan and set aside.

Add kimchi to the hot pan and stir-fry several minutes until hot.  While it is cooking, heat a small frying pan on another burner over a medium flame, add a little oil, just enough to put a film over the bottom of the pan, and begin frying the additional egg.

Add the rice mixture and scrambled egg shreds to the kimchi, toss, add the oyster sauce and sesame oil, and stir-fry, mixing thoroughly.  When everything is thoroughly combined and hot — this should take only a minute or two — remove it and put it in a serving bowl.

The fried egg should be just about done by now.  If you want it over easy, flip it for a couple seconds, whatever moves you.  Place the egg on top of your fried rice.

Eat and be happy.  This is a fine and easy dinner that is very good if you are feeling somewhat dented and want comforting.

Among the perks of working at home: Kung pao bison with asparagus.  Betcha you won’t find this on the Lunch Specials at your close-to-the-office Chinese place!

Gearing up for Sunday’s strawberry brunch, so dinner tonight was a bit of an afterthought.

Still, even an afterthought can be well-thought.

Soy tempeh, cubed, fried, seasoned with Chinese black beans and chile paste and a little soy sauce, over a bowl of fresh spinach.

It was fab.

Right now I’m waiting for my batch of granola to be ready to come out of the oven.  Smells fantastico.  Oats, wheat, barley, rye, triticale, almonds, pecans, agave syrup, maple syrup, a little oil, a little salt, and a blend of cinnamon, clove, allspice, mace, and nutmeg.  Kinda like the topping of an apple crisp.

I do love me some green beans.  I love them so much I eat them out of season, which I don’t do with most high-summer vegetables for the simple reason that I know full well they just won’t ever be as good as the ones you get when it’s high summer and the vines are pumping out beans like mad.  These were fairly tough, as is typical for out-0f-season beans, and they weren’t very sweet at all, but there are ways to make out-of-season green beans bend to your will.  Blanching them helps a lot.  That’s what I did with these, before I stir-fried them in a little grapeseed oil.  I finished the dish with a nice rich almond, chili, and garlic sauce.

For those of you familiar with Chinese peanut or sesame sauces, this is along those lines, just made with almond butter instead of ground peanuts (I have learned not to say “peanut butter” or my fellow Americans try to make it with Jif or something else that is hydrogenated and sweetened, which results in a repulsive sauce if you ask me).  Nut butter plus a little ground fermented brown bean sauce plus minced garlic plus chili paste plus some hot water to thin it to the right consistency… and the last few minutes it gets in the hot wok with the hot vegetables takes care of making sure it clings nicely to the veggies.  Pistachio butter works well too, but cashew butter and macadamia nut butter are too sweet and too oily, in case you were wondering.

For our second dish, we had a variation on torn cabbage with black vinegar.  Cabbage loves vinegar; there’s a reason it shows up in so many different cuisines. I happened to have a savoy cabbage in the vegetable bin, so I peeled about half the leaves off it and tore them into bite-size bits.  I cut some smoked tofu into batons and sauteed them until they were getting crispy, and while that was going on I blanched the cabbage briefly just to get excess water out of it and do the pre-cooking so that it would finish quickly in the wok.  Once the tofu was ready, I pulled it out of the wok and tossed the cabbage in, stir-frying it for a minute or two before adding the tofu and a good swack of black vinegar and the tiniest skosh of sesame oil.

A very tasty and satisfying supper, this. It’ll be even nicer when I have fresh green beans from the garden.  All my beans are up and healthy and growing well, both the pole beans and the bush beans, so it’s just a matter of time and sunlight, really.

I wanted protein, and I got it.

Smoked tofu, crisped up by stir-frying it in smoking hot oil, then stir-fried with broccoli and seasoned with black bean-chili sauce.  We ate every scrap.

One of our standbys, eggs with chives.  I had a bunch of leftover egg whites to use up, so I made this with mostly whites plus one whole egg.  I added some oyster sauce to the beaten eggs.  The two ingredients have a remarkable affinity.

One of the reasons I get so fed up with omnivores who trash-talk vegetarianism is that they frequently act as if tofu were a a sort of anti-matter where meat is concerned–or perhaps the Bad Kirk to meat’s Good Kirk–in addition to being a slow-acting poison that turns red-blooded American he-men into chinless girly-men with bad combovers, weak ankles, and a low sperm count.

One of the many reasons I adore this dish, which we ate for supper tonight, is that it puts such tofuphobes on serious notice: You think you know tofu? You know nothing. Watch and learn.

This is a Hunanese dish, a stir-fry of smoked (streaky) bacon, smoked tofu, garlic chives (used here as a vegetable, obviously, not an herbal seasoning), and chiles. The recipe in Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook is a very tasty version; mine usually uses slightly different proportions and is heavier on the greenery and tofu, lighter on the pork, and I have a heavy hand with the chiles.

These are, of course, only stylistic differences. The real artistry here is the marriage of cured smoked pork belly and toothsome smoked tofu. Without the intense savor of the chives and chiles, this dish doesn’t really work: I’ve tried making it without the chiles for friends who don’t tolerate them well, and that dog just won’t hunt, as they say here in Maryland. But with the chives and especially the chiles, something really magical happens. The tofu picks up some of the bacon-grease goodness, but the bacon also picks up some of the firm rooted quality of the tofu, and it’s more than the sum of its parts.

Bacon and tofu, you discover when you eat this dish, do not exist in opposition to one another, at polar ends of some spectrum with bacon at one end and tofu on the other. They are both superstars of the proteinaceous world, and justly so, and if this dish does nothing else, it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are also the best of friends. I mean, just look at them:

The tofu, golden brown around the edges, sliced into thin rectangles so it approximates the shape of the chunks of yielding, steamed-then-stirfried sliced bacon, both of them glowing with incredibly savory oil to which the chiles and garlic chives have lent their essences… if that isn’t a happy couple I don’t know what is. Whoever first had the brainwave to combine tofu and bacon is one of my personal heroes.

To go along with this orgy of protein, I made a simple dish of blanched, briefly wok-tossed Shanghai choi sum. The choi sum were a gift to us from one of the Belovedary’s coworkers, who grows them in his garden, and they were delicious indeed, much more richly flavored than the ones I find in the markets.

I drizzled a little bit of black vinegar over them just before serving. A dish like the tofu and bacon needs a good clean clear vegetable to go with it, to help cut the fattiness and to refresh the palate. The astringency of the vinegar helps with both things, but you don’t want to overwhelm the greens, just spark them lightly with a touch of sour.

Even if you are not a bok choy fan, you should consider trying choi sum. There are many varieties–choi sum is more a description than a name of a particular vegetable, many kinds of “choi” or green leafy vegetables can be said to have a “sum” or heart, meaning the tender sweet inner parts of mature vegetables or the entire things when they are young–but none of them are as big, as fibrous, or as celery-ish as bok choy. They sort of split the difference between spinach or chard and Napa cabbage. I find them very rewarding, and they are versatile, equally happy in stir-fries and in soups.

Oh, one small note: pick the dried chiles out before you eat. They can be eaten, though the texture is a bit unpleasant. But they’re not actually meant to be. They’re just there to flavor the dish. No worries.

We like chiles around here.  We don’t actually like heat for heat’s sake, and couldn’t begin to give one tiny little mouse dropping for the whole “anything you can eat I can eat hotter” routine.  But we do like chiles.  We feel similarly about ginger and garlic.  I find, in fact, that if I don’t get enough chiles, ginger, and garlic in my regular diet, along with green vegetables and especially brassica-family veggies, I soon feel out of sorts.

Tonight’s dinner was all about trying to meet that quota.

Above, green beans first dry-fried (no oil) to blister them thoroughly, then stir-fried with oil and  a salty, spicy, delectable mixture of minced dried shrimp, minced garlic, minced ginger, minced salted Tientsin cabbage, and chili paste. A slosh of black vinegar and a demi-slosh of soy sauce and that was that.

Below, stem lettuce, blanched and squeezed dry, stir-fried with ginger, garlic, pressed spiced tofu, Sichuan pepper, and dried whole chiles, with a little bit of sesame oil.

I’m afraid the descriptions of the dishes are as close to actual recipes as I’m going to get.  If you are adventurous, I’m sure you could approximate.

I will note, for the curious, that yes, this meal was very nearly vegan but for the dried shrimp in the beans, which could have been left out without undue harm.  I’ve had a few people write to me since I posted my “They’re Called Vegetables. Get Over It.” inquiring, sometimes rudely and sometimes just out of curiosity, about my own eating habits.  So I thought I’d point out that I eat what I feel like eating, for the most part. Sometimes that means meat.  Sometimes not.  It almost always means lots of vegetables.

And, as I say, plenty of ginger, garlic, and chiles.