March 17, 2014 New Recipe: Stir Fired Pork with Bamboo Shoots, Shitake Mushrooms and Baby Bok Choy

March 17, 2014 New Recipe: Stir Fired Pork with Bamboo Shoots, Shitake Mushrooms and Baby Bok Choy

Yesterday I noticed a bag of baby bok choy and a package of snow peas that I had forgotten I had purchased at Talin about two weeks ago when I purchased the shitake mushrooms and a small can of bamboo shoots languishing in the fridge in the garage.  So today I decided to make a simple Chinese dish with the bok choy and some pork and the small can of bamboos shoots and shitake mushrooms I had bought at Talin.  At lunch I took a ½ lb. boneless pork sirloin chop out of the freezer to thaw.

After going to the Tax Assessor for the old records on the Candy Lady building, I dressed to ride my bike but when I walked outside found that the wind was gusting up to about thirty miles per hour, so instead I took a nap from 4:45 to 6:00 when Suzette came home.  Suzette was hungry, so I went into action. 

I first made rice with 2 cups of water and a dash of Knorr dried Chicken stock for flavor and added the rice and set the heat to a low simmer for 30 minutes when the water came to a boil and the 1 cup of rice was added.

Then I gathered three bowls and all the ingredients and a knife and a cutting board.  In the first bowl I put one chopped shallot and 1 Tbsp. of red onion and 2 Tbsp. of chopped fresh green ginger root and 1Tbsp. of garlic (the hard ingredients), while Suzette went to the garden and pulled two garlic plants and chopped the white portion of the plants and added those and began stir frying those ingredients in heated peanut oil.  Then I dissected the white bottom portions of four baby bok choy bulbs from the green top portions and chopped each and put the tops in one bowl (the medium soft ingredients that are added next) and the bottom white portions in another bowl (the softest ingredients that need little cooking time).   I handed the white bottom parts to Suzette who put them into the wok with a dash of Chinese Cooking wine.

Then I sliced four fresh shitake mushrooms and put those with the green tops in the third bowl and took them to the kitchen and fetched 5 oz. the can of bamboo shoots threads and opened it and drained the packing liquid from it and put the bamboo threads into the wok.  

We then added about two Tbsp. of Oyster Sauce and 1 ½ Tbsp. of double dark fermented soy and then the mushrooms and green tops of the bok choy leaves and covered the wok and let the mushrooms and leaves steam  bit.  We looked at the timer and there were 2.15 minutes cooking time left on the rice.  So I heated tea water for green tea and Suzette poured out the last of the 2012 Dry Creek Sauvignon Blanc.

When the rice timer bell range we were ready to eat.  The stir fired pork dish and rice had taken just over 30 minutes to make.  The dish combined that wonderful balance of fresh and canned oriental vegetables and condiments.  We ladled clumps of warm rice onto our plates and spoonfuls of the pork and vegetable dish on top of it and then scooped a spoonful of the un-thickened sauce over the vegetables and rice.  There was a good deal of sauce made from the simple combination of oyster sauce, dark soy and vegetable liquids to pour over the warm rice to loosen it.  The lack of thickening gave the dish an added degree of freshness, while the use of oyster sauce that is thick, probably due to use of some cornstarch in it, and the heavier double dark soy sauce created its own slightly thickened sauce.

We liked the dish and enjoyed it while we watched Tim Burton’s 2003 directorial masterpiece, “Big Fish”, starring Helena Bonham Carter, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup,  and Jessica Lange.

What an enjoyable evening of a fresh and exciting dinner and a movie!

I did a bit of research and found that Helena Bonham Carter is Tim Burton's domestic partner and has an illustrious family tree; perhaps even more impressive than Julia Louis-Dreyfus'.

Louis-Dreyfus was born in New York City. Her mother, Judith (née LeFever), was a writer and special needs tutor,^[1] and her father, the billionaire Gérard Louis-Dreyfus, chaired Louis Dreyfus Energy Services. She is the great-great-granddaughter of Léopold Louis-Dreyfus, who in 1851 founded the Louis Dreyfus Group, a French commodities and shipping conglomerate, which members of the family control to this day.^[2] Her paternal grandfather, Pierre Louis-Dreyfus (1908-2011), was president of the Louis Dreyfus Group;^[3] he remained in France during World War II, fighting as a cavalry officer and later in the French Resistance.^[4] During this time, her father fled to America from France.^[5][6] Her paternal grandmother, Dolores (Neubauer), and her mother, were American. Her paternal grandfather was from an Alsatian Jewish family,^[7] while Julia's other ancestry is German, Mexican, English, French, Scottish, and Scots-Irish.^{[8][better source needed]} In 1962, one year after Louis-Dreyfus's birth, her parents divorced. After relocating to Washington, D.C. when Julia was eight,^[9] her mother married L. Thompson Bowles, Dean of the George Washington University Medical School.^[1][10] During her childhood, her mother occasionally took her to Unitarian church services.^[11]

Louis-Dreyfus spent her childhood in several states and countries, in connection with her stepfather's work with Project HOPE, including Sri Lanka, Colombia and Tunisia.^[12] She graduated from the Holton-Arms School in Bethesda, Maryland in 1979, and attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. There, she was a member of the Delta Gamma sorority, and studied theatre for several years, before dropping out due to a professional acting job offer.^[13] 

Helena Bonham Carter Family background[edit]

Paternal[edit]

See also: Bonham Carter family

Bonham Carter's paternal grandparents were British Liberal politician Sir Maurice Bonham Carter and renowned politician and orator Violet Bonham Carter. Helena's paternal great-grandfather was H. H. Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Prime Minister of Britain 1908–1916. She is the grand-niece of Asquith's son, Anthony Asquith, legendary English director of such classics as Carrington V.C. and The Importance of Being Earnest.
Bonham Carter is a distant cousin of fellow actor Crispin Bonham-Carter, who played Mr. Bingley in the 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, and politician Jane Bonham Carter. Other prominent distant relatives include Lothian Bonham Carter, who played first-class cricket for Hampshire, his son, Vice Admiral Stuart Bonham Carter, who served in the Royal Navy in both world wars, and pioneering English nurse Florence Nightingale.^[56]

Maternal[edit]

Her maternal grandfather, Spanish diplomat Eduardo Propper de Callejón, saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust during World War II, for which he was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations (his own father was a Bohemian Jew).^[57][58] He later served as Minister-Counselor at the Spanish Embassy in Washington, D.C.^[59]

Her maternal grandmother, Hélène Fould-Springer, was from an upper class Jewish family; she was the daughter of Baron Eugène Fould-Springer (a French banker, who was descended from the Ephrussi family and the Fould dynasty) and Marie Cecile von Springer (whose father was Austrian-born industrialist Baron Gustav von Springer, and whose mother was from the de Koenigswarter family).^[5][60][61] Hélène Fould-Springer converted to Catholicism after World War II.^[62][63] Hélène's sister was the French philanthropist Liliane de Rothschild (1916–2003), the wife of Baron Élie de Rothschild, of the prominent Rothschild family (who had also married within the von Springer family in the 19th century);^[64] her other sister, Therese Fould-Springer, was the mother of British writer David Pryce-Jones.^[60]

God bless the internet and Wikipedia.  

Bon appétit.