A dinner at home
This matters to me because...
The combination of a simple vegetable soup, a clean protein, stir-fried vegetables, and rice is the quintessential meal that my dad made while I was growing up. I wanted to recreate that on my own. The four mini-dishes are:
- Tamago kake gohan - I pasteurized a half-dozen eggs and had some lying around, so I elevated my rice mixing in an egg into it it.
- Yu vegetable soup (菜心汤) - The vegetable is "yu vegetable"; in Cantonese, I called it "choy sum" (菜心), which translates to the "heart vegetable". I love the simplicity of it.
- Baked cod - I baked it in a carbon steel pan.
- Stir-fried napa cabbage - I've been defaulting to just stir-frying vegetables lately, and given that I had some napa lying around, it was a no-brainer for me. Followed the trusty 蒜蓉 garlic sauce stir-fry.
Ingredients
Tamago kake gohan
- Steamed rice
- Egg
- Soy sauce
- Salt
- Sugar
Yu vegetable soup
- Yu vegetable (菜心)
- Water
- Ginger
- Garlic
- Salt
Baked cod
- Cod fillets
- Salt
- Pepper
- Cayenne
Stir-fried napa cabbage
- Napa cabbage
- Ginger
- Garlic
- Salt
- Cornstarch
- Sugar
2 Comments
- So much nostalgia when I placed all of the dishes on the table. If I tripled the portions of everything, I could've seen this being at my childhood family table, minus the tamago kake gohan. I thoroughly enjoyed planning and cooking all of these dishes. Surprisingly, it didn't take as much time as I thought.
- The carbon steel pan was too small to fit all of the cod in there. I got a bit lazy and didn't want to bring out a baking sheet, so things were a bit crowded in the pan, leading to lots of moisture retention. I'm not sure if that's a bad thing though--may want to try using a baking sheet pan and seeing if I prefer a drier.
2 Learnings
- Timing when I should start cooking each of the dishes was important. I'm glad I made the conscious decision of doing the soup and cod first. They required some upfront attention but were able to be left alone until the very end. I then was able to spend the rest of my time stir-frying the cabbage.
- Stir-frying the cabbage in batches, starting with the thicker stems was a good call. This made sure that the leafy areas weren't over cooked, and I actually liked that there was some browning left behind. Felt like it was a bit more flavorful.
References
Since this was mainly inspired from what my dad cooked during my childhood, there weren't a lot of things I "referenced", per se. However, I found this video from the YouTube channel Chinese Cooking Demystified to mirror the philosophy behind this kind of cooking.