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Friday, June 22, 2012

Allegedly Oriental ...

This one goes out to @Ipsita for shaking me out of lethargy and getting me to start posting again... Here goes... Again...


I'd just lugged all the pottery pieces that I'd made and that'd just been glazed and fired. I was hungry as hell and thought it would be good to try out the bowls to see if they really withstood a nuking in the microwave.


I've inherited a fair bit of oriental sauces when @Subha and @Guru moved to Singapore... Here I thought was a good opportunity to put one of them to good use. Now I can't really categorize this one... Is it is a soup... Or is it a salad... Where do I place it on the map? Since two of the four ingredients originate in the orient, I am going to call it 'allegedly oriental'...


I thought my Sunday deserved some colour, crunch and slurp, so I peered into my long suffering fridge and spotted some Napa Cabbage, a couple of red and yellow peppers, and some broccoli. Nice mix, I thought, of greens, yellows and reds! The peppers would be nice and 'sweetish' unlike the green ones, the broccoli would give a nice little something to bite into while the cabbage (I hoped) would spring a little crunch in the mouth.



A little aside... I always wondered at the many variants of 'cabbage' that is consumed across the orient. I love Bok Choi (báicài or 小白菜 )  but always end up associating the Napa Cabbage (dàbáicài  or 大白菜 ) with soupy things for some reason. Putting both in the microwave produces some interesting results depending on how long you nuke...

For example, Napa Cabbage microwaved at 900w for about 3min produces a near cooked but still crunchy-ish effect. Pushing it for 5min or more releases more liquids and also makes the cabbage more slurpy and limpish...The entire process took about 15min including the cutting of the vegetables. I first washed and diced the broccoli into florets and the bell peppers into little diced pieces.

These all went into the fresh-from-the-glazing-furnace bowl and I also threw in some finely minced garlic...


Next the well washed cabbage leaves got sliced and stuffed on top. The thought process was that if the cabbage stayed near the bottom, the juices they released would stay there and not bless the rest of the stuff (especially the broccoli) with much succulence.

And then I just put on the lid and microwaved it for 5min. I pulled out the dish and mixed the entire lot with a generous dash of the Wo Hup Oyster (flavoured) sauce... Voila! My lunch was ready... :)