Robin Garr wrote:Let's kick things up a bit with a traditional "What are you having for dinner tonight?"
To be honest, I don't have the foggiest idea what we're going to eat tonight, but I can relate what I did last night.
I like Asian food. A lot. Of course, getting the ingredients for non-French food in France can be a bit of a problem unless you're in Paris (and I'm not), but some of the real basic stuff is not too hard to find.
Anyway, the menu last night was a kind of ginger chicken with influences from several sources.
You fry up a finely chopped onion in sunflower oil with a bit of sesame oil added for that "toasted", nutty flavour. While it's cooking you chop up your meat. Chicken, turkey, lamb, beef or meaty fish like shark, swordfish or tuna (you leave softer fish 'till the end), just about anything will do. When the onion is nearly cooked, chuck in the meat, and stir the lot up with a good glug of soy sauce and oyster sauce, a bit of sake or mirin if you can get it works well, too.
Into the liquid that forms you add some minced ginger and a bit of ground turmeric to give it some colour. Also add either a small amount of chilli powder or a finely chopped fresh red chilli. Mix it up and lay some fresh bean sprouts on the top. In fact about half-fill the wok because the sprouts go down to nothing after they're cooked - almost as bad as spinach.
Leave it to cook for a while with the cover on the wok so that the steam cooks the bean sprouts.
If you were planning on using softer fish or seafood of some kind, then now's the time to add it to your concoction. It won't take more than a few minutes to cook if you just plonk it on the surface of your mixture and whack the lid back on the wok straight away (in effect, you'll be steam-cooking the fish), cook for a few minutes and then fold the fish into the mixture and watch it go bright yellow
Serve on noodles or rice to taste.