Chinese Stir-Fries for Health and Money Saving by Ruth Paget
Fuchsia Dunlop’s cookbook Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking promotes the use of healthy ingredients by usually stir-frying or dry-roasting ingredients in a wok.
Stir-frying is mostly used in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong and Hong Kong. This method features the use of 2 to 4 tablespoons of oil heated to a high temperature with ingredients cooked quickly in about 15 minutes or less.
Dry roasting uses less oil than stir-frying. In dry-roasting 1 to 2 tablespoons of oil are heated to a high temperature and ingredients are almost seared in this method that also takes about 15 minutes or less to complete. Dry-roasting is a method used in the southern interior province of Sichuan.
Dunlop’s book features recipes from Guangdong, Sichuan as well as a few from the Jiangnan region surrounding and including Shanghai.
Dunlop provides several sample menus in Every Grain of Rice that adults who want to try tasting Chinese food would enjoy.
For people with children or who are just starting out in cooking with a wok, I would suggest trying the following recipes from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice:
*Spiced Cucumber
For this recipe, you slice a cucumber in half, scoop out seeds, salt it, drain it, and then stir-fry it.
Then, you add in Sichuan chile peppercorns and finish it with sesame oil.
*Stir-fried Greens with Dried Shrimp
This recipe could not be more Chinese with the use of dried shrimp. If you go to Chinatown in San Francisco on market day, the air is redolent with the briny scent of dried shrimp.
Dried shrimp are a salty acquired taste, but they are a way of storing protein over long periods of time as well as valuable salt in a country with very little air-conditioning.
For this recipe, you can stir any kind of greens or cabbage along with the dried shrimp and just finish the dish with soy sauce.
Stir-fried greens with dried shrimp is an especially great dish to eat in Salinas and Monterey County California, because we have so much lettuce and varieties of cabbage grown in this region. Transportation costs are lower that those for the rest of the country for these regional products, which keeps the ingredient price low.
Unsold shrimp on market day could be turned into dried shrimp, if food waste reduction management practices are put in place.
Fuchsia Dunlop’s cookbook Every Grain of Rice is an important cookbook for showing how to reduce the amount of energy spent to cook a meal.
The traditional Chinese dining pattern of about ½ of plate of rice to ¼ plate of vegetables and ¼ plate of protein stretches food dollars while providing essential nutrients as well. Meat has always been expensive in China, which may account for how this ratio system came into being.
For a great introduction to Chinese food and energy-saving cooking techniques, families might enjoy reading and trying the recipes in Fuchsia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice.
By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France and developer of the Novgorod and Bento War Games
