Colette Tatou (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thetoughestcook) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomhigh2009-09-15 08:44 am
thetoughestcook) wrote in fandomhigh2009-09-15 08:44 am
Entry tags:
Anyone Can Cook, 9/15/09, Period 4
"Bonjour," Colette greeted, once everyone seemed to be at a work station. "Last week, we learned about kitchen utensils and mise-en-place. This week, we will make a Chinese-American dish that puts those things to even better use than bananes en jambon. We are to make stir fry. I will demonstrate, then you will do the same."
She went behind her own work station, neatly lined with diced vegetables, chopped chicken, and sauce ingredients. "First, I heat the wok. There is vegetable oil in it, just enough to cover the bottom of the pan. I add onion, ginger and garlic and cook them until they are gold, oh, three or four minutes." Once the aromatics were cooked, she reached for the plate of chicken. "Then I add the ingredients that need the most cooking time -- chicken first, then carrots. Any protein will work; if you wish to make it vegetarian, tofu is good."
She kept stirring as she talked, dropping in broccoli and bell peppers and cooking each for about three minutes. "And now that it is all cooked, add a sauce. If this were a French recipe, I would make a sauce, but, as it is not, I will use teriyaki sauce from a bottle. We will learn to make better sauces soon."
Of this she was confident. The meal was now almost cooked; she took an appreciative sniff before turning off the burner.
"I started rice in the rice cooker at the start of class, so now we have dinner in, oh -- it took about fifteen minutes. And now it is your turn, yes? Pair up and prepare stir fries."
She went behind her own work station, neatly lined with diced vegetables, chopped chicken, and sauce ingredients. "First, I heat the wok. There is vegetable oil in it, just enough to cover the bottom of the pan. I add onion, ginger and garlic and cook them until they are gold, oh, three or four minutes." Once the aromatics were cooked, she reached for the plate of chicken. "Then I add the ingredients that need the most cooking time -- chicken first, then carrots. Any protein will work; if you wish to make it vegetarian, tofu is good."
She kept stirring as she talked, dropping in broccoli and bell peppers and cooking each for about three minutes. "And now that it is all cooked, add a sauce. If this were a French recipe, I would make a sauce, but, as it is not, I will use teriyaki sauce from a bottle. We will learn to make better sauces soon."
Of this she was confident. The meal was now almost cooked; she took an appreciative sniff before turning off the burner.
"I started rice in the rice cooker at the start of class, so now we have dinner in, oh -- it took about fifteen minutes. And now it is your turn, yes? Pair up and prepare stir fries."
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"Yes. I'm just working on the vegetables at the moment. Anything in here you don't like?"
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She carefully coated the wok with the oil and set it on the heat.
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She waited a moment. "I wonder how we'll know when it's warm enough."
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He lined his ingredients up first, one after the other, in little bowls, all in the order he wanted to add them; heating the wok came next, until it was so hot that it was starting to glow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stir_frying#Bao_technique). He'd decided on sesame oil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_oil#Cooking), even though it wasn't as traditional for Chinese cooking as peanut oil; the Chinese tended to the darker sesame oils for flavour, not the lighter one he was using here for its higher smoke point.
It was almost hilarious how much George changed when he was in the kitchen; for a boy who could power New York with the intensity of his flailing, he was remarkably calm and collected while cooking. As soon as the oil had been added to the wok, the pork went in, and he started tossing it, stirring it; a few seconds passed before he started adding the vegetables, each time pausing his stirring only long enough to add the new ingredients. As the amount of food in the wok grew, the spectacle of George's stirring increased; the stir-fry was being tossed higher and higher, each time falling effortlessly back into the wok, not a single morsel falling outside.
The sauce was last, of course, and then the stir-fry was tossed just long enough that everything was lightly coated before George turned around and spooned it out onto his waiting serving dish. He turned immediately and began rinsing the wok under running water to prevent the residue from charring and burning to the wok.
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What? Someone had to get brave with the bean curd. . . .
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