July 11, 2017 Lunch – Lax, goat cheese, onion, and caper Bagel with asparagus and a deviled egg. Dinner – Stir fried Vegetables, Fried Tofu, and Pork

July 11, 2017 Lunch – Lax, goat cheese, onion, and caper Bagel with asparagus and a deviled egg. Dinner – Stir fried Vegetables, Fried Tofu, and Pork

I did not eat breakfast.  I ate Brunch at 11:00 with Aaron.  I made a plate with three stalks of steamed asparagus, a veiled egg and a bagel, smeared with goat cheese and layered with onion slices, capers, and slices of Lax.  I drank hot tea with milk and poured Aaron a glass of Benton Lane Rose’.

I had a snack at 5:00 of two slices of nine Gran bread; one covered with melted Jarlsberg cheese and the other smeared with peanut butter and honey, again with cups of hot tea and milk.

I started cooking at 5:30 before Suzette arrived.  I wanted to replicate my new favorite Lunch dish at East Ocean, Moo Goo Gai Pan.  We bought pork tenderloins at Costco on Saturday for $2.49/lb. so thawed out a package of two in the afternoon.  They were thawed enough to pull apart by 5:30, so I put them in separate bags in the fridge.

I then chopped vegetables, first,  4 stalks of sweet bok choy, then ½ of a vadalia onion, then I julienned a carrot, then I cut the kernels from two ears of cooked corn, then diced about ten stalks of steamed asparagus, then I split a stalk of celery and sliced it into pieces, then I trimmed ½ package of white beech mushrooms, I then sliced the rectangles of fried tofu we bought at Talin on Sunday, then about 1 T. of ginger, 1 medium bulb of fresh garlic from our garden.  I then fetched bottles of soy sauce, sesame oil, Chinese Cooking wine, oyster sauce, and peanut oil and a box of corn starch.

My menu idea was to fix a delicious, filling pork, fried tofu, and vegetable stir fry dish that could be eaten without rice.

I separated the ingredients into four different bowls, the meat cut into strips with the ginger and garlic, the green tops of the bok choy with the diced asparagus, the corn and tofu, and the white bottoms of bok choy with the mushrooms, celery, and carrot.  The reason for separating ingredients is to divide them according to each’s different cooking times.

I first sautéed the meat with garlic and ginger in 2 T. of heated peanut oil.  Then I removed the meat from the wok, leaving as much of the ginger and garlic as possible.  I then added the onion, white stalks of bok choy, carrots, and celery and stir fried that for about ten to fifteen minutes.  While the hard vegetables were cooking I made 2cups of chicken stock in a bowl.  Then I made a  thickening/seasoning sauce with 1 tsp. of sesame oil, 1 T. of soy, 2 T. of Cooking wine, 1 T. of oyster sauce,  and 1 cup of chicken stock.

I then added the green vegetables and conked them for a few minutes. Then I added the corn and tofu and ¾ cup of chicken stock to the wok and stir fried all the ingredients to mix them and then covered the wok to steam the ingredients for about ten minutes.  When Suzette said she was ready I added the thickening sauce.  It over thickened the vegetables, so I added the remaining ¼ cup of chicken sauce and then another 1/3 cup of watered down chicken stock until the sauce was thinned out a bit and did not glob onto the vegetables but instead flowed a bit.

 


We poured glasses of mint and lavender flavored green iced tea and enjoyed our bowls of vegetables with fried tofu and pork and watched the second half of Michael Cook’s PBS presentation called the History of China, while we ate, which seemed completely appropriate for tonight’s meal.

Bon Appetit