We have been eating much more from the garden lately. For lunch I typically pick five types of
lettuce and greens: Romaine, leaf lettuce, mburna, mustard greens and radicchio. Today I added palm hearts, tomatoes, green
onion and cheese to the salad mix and dressed it with my constantly reconstituted Cesar Salad dressing.
We went to Costco after work so Suzette could shop for Santa
Rosa and we bought olive oil, lamb chops, green castelverano olives, a box of baby
portabella mushrooms, a case of beer and a bottle of Gruet Blanc de Noir
champagne for ourselves.
When we came home around 7:00 we started dinner. We went to the garden and I picked some of
kale tops that had bolted in our absence, a handful of snow peas and sugar snap
peas and six or seven garlic scapes. Then I started two cups of water cooking with
a bit of Knorr dehydrated chicken stock and a few sprigs of Senche sea weed and
when it came to a boil I added 1 cup of basmati rice and reduced the heat to its lowest setting and simmered the rice for thirty minutes.
I then chopped 1/3 of an
Anaheim chili pepper, five of the garlic scapes, 1 Tbsp. of ginger root, one head of broccoli into halved flowerets and the
leaves of kale I had picked, one shallot, and three mushrooms, while Suzette de-stemmed
the peas. I separated the ingredients
based upon cooking time: in one bowl the shallots, chili and scapes, in another
the broccoli and snow peas and in a third the kale and mushrooms. While the rice cooked for thirty minutes and
I was chopping, we watched the amazing Carol King Gershwin Music Award ceremony
concert from the White House on PBS. I was
blown away with Billy Joel came to the piano and played and sang “Loco-Motion” and
more blown away when a wonderful black woman named “Saba?” sang and played “Natural
Woman”). I never knew Carol King wrote “Loco-Motion”
or “Natural Woman”
When the Carol King concert ended at 8:00 and the rice was
cooked, I removed the rice from the heat and heated the small wok with 2 Tbsp.
of peanut oil and a few dashes of sesame oil and then added the chopped garlic scapes, ginger
and chili and shallot. After a couple of
minutes I added ½ lb. of ground pork and sautéed that for a minute and then added
the broccoli and peas and some Chinese Rice cooking wine and mushroom soy sauce. After a few more minutes, Suzette said the
dish needed liquid and needed to be covered to steam the broccoli, so I added
oyster sauce and hoisin sauce and more cooking wine and a dash of soy and Suzette
added water and I added the kale and mushrooms and covered the wok. We let this cook for about ten minutes, while
I made a thickening sauce with 3 Tbsp. of water, 1 Tbsp. oyster sauce, 1½ Tbsp.
soy, a dash of sesame oil and about 1 Tbsp. of rice cooking wine. After the ten minutes the ingredients looked softened
and we added the thickening agent and I immediately realized that it was too
thick, so we started adding water at the rate of about 1/8 of a cup at a time
several times until the sauce thinned into a smooth sauce from the congealed
mass that it was. It was dark brown and
coated all of the ingredients.
We opened two beers and scooped rice into pasta bowls and
ladled spoonsful of the stir fry dish onto the rice and ate a delicious dinner on our patio,
mostly from our garden. The dish was a
little dark and tasted of soy, so I knew had over soyed the dish, but I loved
the consistency of the thick sauce and how it coated the food. My goal was to imitate the dark thick sauce
one usually finds in on Beef and Broccoli in a Chinese restaurant and I
achieved that. The dish had a wonderful umami
taste and we did not crave any dessert.
Bon Appétit 
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