Wok Action
15 October 2007 by Jean Johnson
It’s mid-October but the kitchen garden still giveth. Today there was broccoli, roasting ears, a couple small lonesome zucchinis, and a cartload of Anaheim chiles. Seemed like dinner to me.
All it took was a douse of water (which in truth was some cinnamon tea left in the teapot) in my cast iron wok with the burner on high. The broccoli stems when in first of course, since they need the most tempering by fire. Then the chopped up zuch, corn cut off the cob, the broccoli florets, a lingering tomato from my garden, a chopped chile with the seeds tossed in the compost, and a nice dollop of lima beans from a pot of leftovers in the fridge.
I didn’t do much seasoning on this one. Just a tad of salt, letting the chiles have their day. With a grating of Monterrey jack cheese over the top, this dinner had the Southwest written all over it and was good to go.
Usually on warm salad stir flash cooked things like this, I use onion and garlic not to mention spices and various other tricks to make the flavors of the food sing. But I’ve been on the fast track and too busy to fuss much in the kitchen.
That’s precisely what measure free recipes is about. To share how easy this kind of food is to pull together, and how immensely forgiving and amenable to creative license it is. Indeed, I spent years with the task of peeling and dicing the onion just so stopping me from carrying on in the kitchen. The peeling was sticky and the dicing was hard to do. All that plus the tears, and there you have it: a perfect reason to grab something in a crinkly package.
You get the idea, certainly. Onions-schmunions. If you aren’t in the mood to deal with them or any of the other critters in the usual litany, leave those babies out or skip that step and cruise on. Get this great farm-to-table food going any way you can. If your experience is anything like mine has been, you will feel the light in your eyes right way.
