Like workers everywhere, I frequently buy lunch at a food court located in a retail mall near my office. My food court is the one at 520 North Michigan Avenue, which I like to call the Nordstrom Mall, even in print in the magazine, which I'm sure causes the owners of the mall to gnash their teeth in irritation. Today, I went to Max Orient, the Chinese-food option, and ordered, as I often do, the same thing as the person directly in front of me in line: Hunan chicken. What is Hunan chicken? It's chicken, broccoli, water chestnuts, ziggy-zaggy cut carrots, all smothered in a delicious and gently spicy brown sauce. What is this brown sauce? I wish I knew. I'd make it home. My friend Kipp often throws together Chinese-ish type stir-fry dishes at home. I think I have seen him use oyster sauce. When I've tried to improvise stir-fry at home it usually comes out salty and one-dimensional. I did recently make an eggplant stir-fry with Japanese twist peppers and ground pork that springboarded off a Mark Bittman recipe. That turned out pretty good, but it was vaguely sickening in that way food can be when the cook just throws shit together. You know?
She says: YUMMY.
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4 comments:
I am sure your food never tastes vaguely sickening even if it was thrown together! But I get that effect from my own meals all the time. I call it the Trough Effect. What to do!?
Exactly! It's like slop for people! Blech!
The ancient American-Chinese Secret to brown sauce: Oyster sauce, black soy sauce (which exists at the intersection of regular soy sauce and molasses), a dash of black vinegar, brown sugar. As with most things, it's the sugar that makes it yummy! (I learned the secret not from my mother, but from Ming Tsai).
Black soy sauce! Do you also use that as you would regular soy sauce, i.e. as a condiment, or only for cooking your unparalleled stir-fry dishes? Black vinegar? What's that?
I haven't thought about Ming Tsai in a long time.
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