Thai Stir Fry, plus a way to find exciting new Asian recipes!

So I had a bunch of miscellaneous vegetables plus chicken lying around, meaning it was high time for some stir-fry. I poked around for a recipe and was originally going to make this one. It was basic enough that I wouldn’t screw it up. Plus, after having visited the grocery store, I had all the necessary ingredients. However, I really wanted to add a lime, so I decided to search around for a recipe that incorporated lime. I ended up on this recipe, and more or less blended the two recipes together. Well, up until the point where I abandoned the recipes entirely and started adding things all willy-nilly, but that just kinda happens sometimes. The final outcome was better then most of my other wok experimentations, rather like a thai ginger sweet sauce:

• First, I whisked together a sauce in a separate bowl, consisting of various quantities of the following:
• -1 lime
• -1/3 cup water + chicken bouillon
• -fish sauce
• -sugar

After tasting it and remembering all of the items living in my cabinet that I’ve yet to use, I added a chunk of powdered coconut milk along with more water. After tasting this, I impulse-added some coriander.

I chopped up some vegetables and set them aside in a big pile. I really like stir-fry in that you can dump in whatever’s sitting around, and it generally tastes good. Here’s what I used:

-eggplant

-onion

-red cabbage (though it really needs to be called purple cabbage, IMHO)

-green onion

-cilantro

-carrots (the remnants of a bag-o-salad, so no chopping for me!)

-celery

Next, I chopped up some ginger (probably more then necessary, but I’ve been excited about ginger lately), and stir-fried it along with some garlic in sesame oil. I added a dash of rice wine as well. Next, I dumped in some chopped chicken, along with a little of the aforementioned sauce. After the chicken had cooked thoroughly, I added in the vegetables and the rest of the sauce, plus some ground peppercorns, pushing everything around for a few minutes. I served it on some brown rice, and declared it delicious.

I’m a sucker for both Asian cooking and the Allrecipes website. Not only is there a great variety of recipes, but there are also a great deal of reviews. These are great for not only seeing if a recipe is good or not, but seeing how other people have altered a recipe based on lack of ingredients of wanting to alter the taste. It seems that Allrecipes is branching out into other countries. The very first recipe I linked to is on Allrecipes Asia, and there are several other branches as well, including Japan, China, and Germany. Not really sure why Japan and China aren’t just included in Asia, though. For some reason, the Asia site is in English, but all of the other countries (the ones that I looked at, at least) are in their nation’s own language. So I’m looking forward to thoroughly exploring the Asia one.

I will not, however, let a site’s being in another language be a hindrance to my accessing their recipes. A quick visit to your favorite Babel-type site will fix those language issues nicely. Well, kind of. For example, I inputted this recipe, only to end up with this version. While I am rather excited at the prospect of making some “California the straw raincoat rubbish dumpling which comes”, I do have my doubts as to how easy it will be to interpret the resulting Engrish from the translator.

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

Yaki Udon Stir Fry

Chillin’ at the Thai Basil

Yet More Adventures with Pad Thai