I really liked the noodle dish served at the 71st Birthday Party for Bill Ristau on Friday evening and we had about a cup of PPI spaghetti and a large mushroom and a head of bok choy in the fridge, so I decided to try to replicate the dish.
I split three stalks of bok choy in half lengthwise and chopped up about two cups of bok choy, separating the white thick portion from the leafy green portions. Then I minced two cloves of garlic and two tsp. of fresh ginger, one stalk of scallion and about four ounces of fresh rib eye steak.
I then heated the wok and added about 2 Tbs. of peanut oil and 1 tsp. of Sesame oil and threw in the garlic, ginger, and white portions of the bok choy and stir fried them for a couple of minutes. Then I threw in the meat and sliced mushroom (about 2 Tbs.), chopped scallion and 1 tsp. of garlic chili paste and cooked the whole mixture until the meat’s red color turned grey.
Then I tossed in the spaghetti and about 1 Tbs. of rice cooking wine, 2 tsp. of normal soy sauce and about 1Tbs. of oyster sauce. The oyster sauce is the secret to giving the noodle’s sauce its silky, thick brown texture. I let the dish cook until the noodles were heated thoroughly and served the plate full of light brown colored dish with a cup of green tea.. The interesting thing is that since the dish is mostly vegetables, you need to make sure that you do not under or overcook the bok choy. When the sauce starts to get watery, you know that the bok choy is breaking down because it is yielding water to the dish. That is when I stopped cooking it. I could have also stirred and fried an egg and throw it in, if I had wanted to get closer to Friday night’s recipe. Also, this is a great vegetarian dish if you just leave out the meat or substitute tofu for the meat.
Before Suzette left for work in the morning, we discussed dinner and tentatively agreed upon grilled steak with asparagus, but as I rode home at the end of an18 mile ride around 3:00 p.m. the wind was blowing about 20 miles per hour and the weather looked as if it would soon snow, which made me think about our visit to Prague in November about ten years ago, so since Roast duck is the preferred Sunday evening dinner in Czeckoslovakia, I decided to cook duck.
When Suzette came home we decided to eat dinner while we watched 60 Minutes, so she made us a small appetizer of avocado creamed with sour cream and chips around and w started cooking about I had thawed out a package of 2 duck halves (Costco $13.95 for two cleaned and roasted leg, thigh, breast and wing sections with two pouches of duck l’ orange sauce), brought in a head of red cabbage from the garage fridge and a bottle of Cellier du Rhône Chateauneuf du Pape 2007 (Trader Joe’s ) from the wine celler; my favorite wine with roasted Duck.
I gathered up the bottle of ground cumin and broke off the tough part of the stalks of 14 stalks of asparagus and put them into the steaming basket and water into the steaming pot and put it on the stove. Suzette sliced and chopped up ½ of the head of cabbage and heated olive oil in a large skillet and threw in the cabbage with about 1 Tbs. of ground cumin and braised the cabbage. She then got out a broiling pan and put the duck on it and pricked the fatty parts of the skin to release its fat and put it in a °F.oven for about minutes to heat the duck (the duck halves were pre-cooked). Then Suzette turned the heat up to °F to crisp the duck’s skin for several more minutes. Suzette had added apple cider vinegar and some sugar to the cabbage so that the flavor was both sweet and sour. A really successful braised cabbage.
After a few minutes of the duck cooking, we started the asparagus were steaming. I then dumped a 10 ounce bottle of PPI duck sauce into an enameled sauce pan and took one orange and zested its peel into the sauce and then sectioned the orange and put the sections into the sauce with about 1 tsp. of fresh lemon juice and then heated the sauce slowly to a simmer and let it simmer for a couple of minutes. I then uncorked the wine and poured a bit into each of our wine glasses to taste. The wine was smooth and had all the usual complexity of Chateauneuf du Pape, but not much character.
When the duck and asparagus were ready, we plated the duck, asparagus and cabbage and garnished the duck with the Sauce L’ Orange and sat down at to watch 60 Minutes. We turned on the fire in the fireplace, pulled the table up near the fireplace, poured glasses of the wine and loved our dinner; especially how simple it was to cook. In about forty minutes of joint effort we had produced a fabulous duck dinner exactly like the one we ate at the Two Blue Ducks in Prague Czeck Republic
Bon Appètit
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