[College Cuisine] SUCCESS!!! BWAHAHAHAH!!!!!
This one goes in story format rather than recipe format, because it is Just That Epic.
Over a period of several days, by gathering leftovers from meetings that had served fresh-veggie-platter type free food, I managed to gather a respectable variety of veggies. I decided that Today Was The Day To Do Something With Them. So this evening, instead of faking stir-fried random in the microwave, I went down to the basement kitchen and did legitimate stir-fried random.
I spent quite a while cutting up veggies in my room, while listening to an old episode of CarTalk. That was quite relaxing -- should remember to do that whenever I'm cooking large quantities. Now, I had three ideas for what to do with my surfeit of veggies, and I just cut up everything and partitioned it accordingly. I have the makings for Outpost Stew and pasta primavera in the fridge now -- maybe do those sometime during the week, I don't know if the veggies will keep till next weekend.
After cutting up the veggies, I got out some ground beef and added soy sauce and "Sichuan Spicy Noodle Sauce" (which I have yet to use on noodles) and mushed it all together. The world interrupted at this point: I knocked over my little potted plant, and had to spend a while cleaning up dirt off the floor. So I was not in an optimistic mood.
I eyeballed the rice and shoved that in the microwave. Then I hauled all my stuff downstairs (I have a crufted wok!) and set to work. Now I guess the stove in the basement kitchen is really slow, or else it's a property of my wok, because everything took forever to heat up. But it did, as stoves are wont to do, eventually.
I sprayed the wok with cooking oil, using more than I normally would because I had no idea whether the wok was at all nonstick (didn't look like it). Dumped all the veggies in at once, stirred them around, got bored, added some water, got bored, started poking around in those of the cabinets that were unlocked.
And I found some quite interesting things, including public bottles of Kung Pao sauce and oyster sauce, so I added a bit of those to the veggies, just to see if anything would happen. Stood there occasionally stirring the veggies until they looked pretty done, then poured them out and started putting the meat in.
I quickly discovered that trying to stir-fry ground meat while keeping it as coherent lumps is a hopeless business, so I just sort of stirred it around randomly. And added some oyster sauce to it as well. When it finished, I dumped it in the veggies and went back upstairs to retrieve the rice.
(One annoying thing about my rice cooker is that it maintains quite a steep humidity gradient. The rice at the bottom is thoroughly wet, and the rice at the top is a bit underdone. In the middle it's just right. This is actually a good thing for rice, because I like a little of the nutty underdone flavor but not too much. But it's a pain when trying to cook things other than rice.)
Lo and behold, everything came out *really well*. I wasn't expecting that, but wow. It's actually really good. And it tastes like legitimate Chinese food, like stuff I'd pay for in a restaurant. (Which is very nice, because I've been missing good Chinese food.) In fact, it came out so well I took a picture of it.
As before, this is taken with my laptop, so it's slightly blurry. And I'm disappointed in the colors -- the red pepper should look much redder -- but you'll just have to imagine it, and I'm sure y'all have seen red bell peppers before.
I actually made much more than is shown in this pic, but it's to be saved for during the week.
Over a period of several days, by gathering leftovers from meetings that had served fresh-veggie-platter type free food, I managed to gather a respectable variety of veggies. I decided that Today Was The Day To Do Something With Them. So this evening, instead of faking stir-fried random in the microwave, I went down to the basement kitchen and did legitimate stir-fried random.
I spent quite a while cutting up veggies in my room, while listening to an old episode of CarTalk. That was quite relaxing -- should remember to do that whenever I'm cooking large quantities. Now, I had three ideas for what to do with my surfeit of veggies, and I just cut up everything and partitioned it accordingly. I have the makings for Outpost Stew and pasta primavera in the fridge now -- maybe do those sometime during the week, I don't know if the veggies will keep till next weekend.
After cutting up the veggies, I got out some ground beef and added soy sauce and "Sichuan Spicy Noodle Sauce" (which I have yet to use on noodles) and mushed it all together. The world interrupted at this point: I knocked over my little potted plant, and had to spend a while cleaning up dirt off the floor. So I was not in an optimistic mood.
I eyeballed the rice and shoved that in the microwave. Then I hauled all my stuff downstairs (I have a crufted wok!) and set to work. Now I guess the stove in the basement kitchen is really slow, or else it's a property of my wok, because everything took forever to heat up. But it did, as stoves are wont to do, eventually.
I sprayed the wok with cooking oil, using more than I normally would because I had no idea whether the wok was at all nonstick (didn't look like it). Dumped all the veggies in at once, stirred them around, got bored, added some water, got bored, started poking around in those of the cabinets that were unlocked.
And I found some quite interesting things, including public bottles of Kung Pao sauce and oyster sauce, so I added a bit of those to the veggies, just to see if anything would happen. Stood there occasionally stirring the veggies until they looked pretty done, then poured them out and started putting the meat in.
I quickly discovered that trying to stir-fry ground meat while keeping it as coherent lumps is a hopeless business, so I just sort of stirred it around randomly. And added some oyster sauce to it as well. When it finished, I dumped it in the veggies and went back upstairs to retrieve the rice.
(One annoying thing about my rice cooker is that it maintains quite a steep humidity gradient. The rice at the bottom is thoroughly wet, and the rice at the top is a bit underdone. In the middle it's just right. This is actually a good thing for rice, because I like a little of the nutty underdone flavor but not too much. But it's a pain when trying to cook things other than rice.)
Lo and behold, everything came out *really well*. I wasn't expecting that, but wow. It's actually really good. And it tastes like legitimate Chinese food, like stuff I'd pay for in a restaurant. (Which is very nice, because I've been missing good Chinese food.) In fact, it came out so well I took a picture of it.
As before, this is taken with my laptop, so it's slightly blurry. And I'm disappointed in the colors -- the red pepper should look much redder -- but you'll just have to imagine it, and I'm sure y'all have seen red bell peppers before.
I actually made much more than is shown in this pic, but it's to be saved for during the week.