Chinese for Dinner!

I’d not had Chinese in a very long time, having taken a sudden dislike to it after a bad experience in Goa last year. But, the other day, my brother prepared Chinese fried rice, or at least Indo-Chinese fried rice and it was delicious. Since then I’d been craving a full-fledged Chinese dinner.

Now, my lil brother’s a Chinese food freak. There was a time, when he’d order food from Yo China! once a week! So, it was obvious who I’d need to go to for worthwhile suggestions on what to include for this China-inspired meal.

After endless discussions on what we could recreate as close to the original as possible, my brother decided we couldn’t do without the ubiquitous Honey Chilli Potato and the fried rice (he’d taken to the fried rice after everyone proclaimed his dish was very good). Dozens of google searches later we decided a Chinese-style vegetable stir-fry would complement the rice well.

We’d originally included Hakka noodles in the list, but left it out when we realised we’d forgotten to buy the noodles! I prepared the Vegetable Stir-fry and chopped up veggies according to my bro’s instructions while he took care of the other two dishes. We cooked enough for those of us as home plus a couple of our friends. The quantity proved quite insufficient and my dear ma stepped in with filler foods! For dessert, we had mango ice-cream with chopped bananas.

Chinese Stir-Fry Vegetables

Chinese Fried Rice with Stir-Fry Vegetables

Honey Chilli Potato

Vegetables are only lightly cooked in Chinese food, which ensures that its fibre content remains intact. Thus, compared to Indian food, where vegetables are cooked till soft, in Chinese food they are stir-fried in very little oil on high flame for just a few minutes, resulting in crunchy vegetables. I never thought we’d be able to pull off an entire Chinese meal, but we did, and all of us had a really good time preparing and digging into this meal.

I referred to this recipe for the Vegetable Stir-Fry. Here’s how I prepared it…

Chinese Vegetable Stir-Fry

Ingredients:

Assorted vegetables chopped into long broad fingers – 2 cups

(We used carrots, beans, cabbage, spring onions, yellow and green capsicum and baby corn. Other typical vegetables are bok-choy, broccoli and Chinese cabbage)

Spring onion greens (chopped) – 1tbsp + 1 tsp

Chilli-garlic paste – 1 tbsp

Dry red chillies – 3

Garlic – 3 cloves

Ginger – ½ inch piece

Soy sauce – 1 tbsp

Corn flour – 1tbsp

Vegetable stock – 1½ cups + ¼ cups (can use water also)

Oil – 1 tbsp

Salt

Method:

Soak red chillies in 1 tbsp of water for 15 mins and grind into a coarse paste with garlic and ginger

Heat oil in a big shallow pan and add ground paste

Once the aroma of garlic comes through, add onions and capsicum

Sauté till onion turns transparent and add all other vegetables

Sauté on high heat for 2 mins

In the meanwhile, add corn flour to ¼ cup water and mix thoroughly

Add soy sauce and 1½ cup stock (or water). Mix well and cook for 1 min

Add corn flour paste and mix well

Keep stirring and cook for a minute (Don’t wait for the sauce to thicken. It will do so after you remove it from heat)

Remove from heat and garnish with spring onion greens

Serve hot with fried rice or Hakka Noodles

Click here to see what the other members of BM#16 are doing. 

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