Chinese foods

Chinese food is a pretty quick dinner, but certainly, it's not without constant cooking when you decide you want to make eggplant. So the first thing that I usually do when I'm making eggplant is slice the eggplant and then saute it so that it's soft. Eggplant takes a while to cook, so I usually put it over medium heat with a little water in the pan, cover, and let it cook while I prep everything else. Then it's soft and ready to go without a lot of oil. I used to add oil so that the eggplant would soak it up. It still took a long time and it wasn't very healthy.

So when I'm at the point to begin cooking, I still do the eggplant first. For this batch, I started off with corn oil, then added minced garlic and sliced ginger. Then added the eggplant plus some soy and a little sesame oil. Topped it off with chopped scallions.

The last time I made beef with scallions, it wasn't very saucy. Nothing worse than non-saucy Cantonese food. So I got out the cornstarch early and mixed up a slurry. Half of it went into my beef with scallions mix, which was a little short on scallions since I ran out of them. Oops.

For my beef and tofu dish, I've started always adding black beans to add a little more flavor. My slurry added a nice sauce, and you can see that perhaps there was a bit too much! It took care to take the bowl to the table. But I also used the refrigerated tofu from the store, instead of the shelf stable box stuff. Pretty tasty. And it lasts a long time. So maybe I will just start stocking it, even though the fridge is really full and in need of a cleaning. Guess I should do that today.

And so we have my dinner plate that night. I like to put my saucy stuff on the rice so it's easier to mix. It's funny. I don't really eat that much rice when I go out or even with most foods. But when I make these comforting dishes, I always go back for a lot more.

Yums.