lazy wife's Chinese stir-fry

Chinese stir fry on wild rice

Here’s one of my lazy wife’s one-pan stir fry for dinner. It tastes really good, and we always can’t stop ourselves with second and third helpings, because flavorful stir- fries just make you want to devour more with rice!

This crazy stir fry is a combination of shallots, dry scallops, mushrooms, carrots, celery, tomato and potato. Real filling and yummy!

This is a healthy dish and helps you get rid of the carrots, potatoes and celery you have lying around in your fridge

Ingredients:
Dried scallops, soaked in cold water
Shallots, sliced
Mushrooms, sliced
Carrots, diced
Celery, diced
Potato, diced
Cherry tomatoes, halved
Rice wine or sake, ¼ cup
Hondashi
Salt
Half a Serrano chili, chopped
Wild rice ( or brown rice)
(1/4 cup chicken stock) if needed

Preparation:
Soak the dried scallops in a bowl of water for 20 minutes.

In a sauté pan with oil, cook the shallots, mushrooms, and dried scallops. Season with salt and a little sprinkle of Hondashi. When the ingredients are cooked through, add Serrano chili, carrots and potato, pour in rice wine and simmer for 10 minutes. Add tomatoes and until the mixture thickens. If the liquid runs out, add some chicken stock.
Then add celery, continue to cook. Check to see if it is well seasoned. If not, add some more salt and pepper.

Serve on a bed of warm rice, and there you have it - lazy wife's one plate dinner =)

tiny white sardine and egg fried rice

Back at home, I love Shirasu, which are baby white sardines. I was able to find a small frozen packet at a Japanese grocery store and made egg fried rice with them. Be sure to use overnight rice to make good fried rice, for each grain to be hardened and seperated.

Ingredients:

overnight rice

Shirasu

chopped garlic

soy sauce

sugar

green onions

2 eggs, beaten

sesame oil

In a frying pan, use sesame oil to cook chopped garlic and shirasu. Stir fry with soy suace and sugar until the white fish has turned to a brown color. Scoop up and put in a bowl.

Return to the frying pan, pour 1 tablespoon of oil and add the rice, breaking it into pieces with a spatula. Add the stir-fried Shirasu back into the rice mixture. and then add the two eggs, stirring constantly, to make egg fried rice. When the egg pieces are cooked, turn off heat and stir in chopped spring onions. Serve warm!

Spicy tomato sauce on brown rice

Feel like something spicy and tasty but don't want to ruin the momentum of a eating healthy?

Here's an easy recipe: Spicy tomato sauce on brown rice. It's sour, tart, real spicy with bold flavors. The color is beautiful, too!

ingredients:

tomato sauce ( 1/2 can)

one potato ( cut into chunks)

2 carrots ( cut into chunks)

8 pearl onions

beef stock

asian chili sauce

soy sauce 2 tablespoons

pepper

olive oil

concentrated beef stock

Preperations:

In a pot, heat olive oil and suate the pearl onions. Add the chunks of potato and carrots. Cook for 10 minutes, occasionaly stirring to avoid sticking to pot. Add soy sauce, pepper, asian chili sauce and stir. Add beef stock and stir. Pour tomato sauce and bring to simmer. Cook until it becomes a thick paste, and serve over brown rice. We just happened to have some leftover roasted duck take out, so I stir-fried that with celery sticks.

Parent and child over rice: Oyakodon

Chicken 'n eggs is what's in a Oyakodon, a poetic way of saying parent and child. A traditional, homey dish, it's great for lunch or dinner, and anytime of the year.

Oyakodon for 4

Ingredients:

4 cup steamed medium grained rice
3/4 lb chicken thighs, cut into chunks
sesame oil ( 2 tablespoons)
1 2/3 cups soup stock (dashi)
7 tbsp soy sauce
4 tbsp mirin
3 tbsp sugar

slices of ginger
4 eggs, beaten together

Steam rice and when it is cooked, leave it at warm and start preparing below.

Here, I conveniently used pre-made Oyakodon sauce, which is a mixture of the dashi, soy suace, mirin and sugar. However, you can also create your own, which is easy and very tasty.

In a pan with sesame oil, add thinly sliced ginger and sear. Add the dashi then add soy sauce, mirin, and sugar in the sauce, for a couple of minutes. Put chicken in the pan and simmer on low heat for a few minutes.

Bring the chicken and sauce to a boil, then pour the eggs. Turn the heat down to low and put on a lid and let the mixture sit. After one minute, turn off the heat but leave it to simmer a bit.

In a deep bowl, fill halfway with rice packed inside. Place the chicken and egg mixture on top. Sprinkled some japanese chilli powder on top, and some greens ( asparagus) on the side. Serve warm!

Risotto San Martino, perfecto!

Amazing, amazing risotto...

We had this Risotto San Martino as a first course, prior to the Rioja Osso Bucco.

Our dear Chef Panico was inspired by Mario Batali's Risotto San Martino. I have always preferred vegetable risottos or seafood risottos over pork/sausage based ones. I originally was worried that a sausage in a risotto would make risotto stock too greasy, and the actual sausage would become dry, but boy, was I mistaken! The combination of mushrooms and sausage is perfect, and when the mushrooms were cooking, the whole kitchen smelled so fragrant and earthy. The risotto was amazingly creamy and rich. The sausage was in smaller bite-sized pieces so they fit perfectly within every bite with the juicy, tender mushrooms. We barely added any salt, and because we took the sausage out of the casings, the herbs dissolved into the stock and made it so savory, bold and rich.

Servings: for 4 people

Ingredients:

Olive oil

2 tablespoons of butter

half of a chopped onion

1 chopped garlic

chicken stock

white wine ( in this case we had leftover red wine so we used red, and the risotto color was much darker)

sliced portabella mushrooms

2 italian sausages

4 cups of Arborio rice

2 cups freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

Saffron, a sprinkle

Open the casing of the sausage, and smash the sausage into small nibblly pieces.

In a large pot slowly simmer together onion and garlic in the butter, when the onion starts to turn a gold color, add portabella mushrooms and mix well. Cook until the mushrooms shrink, and add the pieces of sausage. Stir the sausage until cooked, and then start to "toast" the rice, as Batali says. ( It is called toasting the rice because the broth has not been added).

After a minute or so, pour in a ladle of wine, at one a time, in order to allow the rice to absorb it. To make risotto creamy you have to mix it a lot adding the broth, as needed. After we added two ladles of wine, we transferred to adding chicken broth, after the rice absorbed the juices. The total cooking time took us more than one hour, cooking the rice alone was about 45 minutes, by repeating the steps of stirring the rice, and when the juices are almost dry continue to adding wine/ juice...and repeating again.

When risotto is almost done, stir in Parmigiano, and add the saffron and stir until well mixed. Risotto should be soft. Sprinkle some more Parmigiano on top, and serve immediately.

It's really, really delicious. I could live on this my whole life.