I have a new Wok!

My birthday was last weekend, and Carolyn got me a wok! This is super awesome and super important because, as I'm sure you know from our cabbage stir fry post, we nearly always over fill the skillet with vegetables. Anyway, on Wednesday, we used our new wok to make one of our mainstay dishes, ginger-garlic stir-fry.

Stir-fries are very simple affair, and a fantastic way to make a healthy dish that's still tasty. At heart, stir-frying is just tossing bite sized pieces of food into a skillet with some oil, and taking them out before they burn. The only challenge is seasoning them properly. So before I tell you about the stir-fry we had on Wednesday, let me tell you the really easy way to make a stir-fry: just buy a stir-fry sauce from the grocery store. They come in a variety of flavors, and all you need to do is toss some in at the end of the cooking process and stir it around a bit. Easy as can be.

Anyway, ginger-garlic stir-fry:

1 teaspoon minced ginger
2 cloves minced garlic
1-2 tablespoons oil

Fry on high heat until garlic is beginning to turn brown. Then toss in your chopped veges. We used

carrot (might want to put this in right at the beginning. Carrot takes a while)
broccoli
mushrooms
green pepper

Continue frying until your veges are nearly cooked. I'm not going to give a time estimate, because there are a lot of factors that alter it, such as kind of oven, amount of oil, type of pan, and amount of veges crammed into that pan.

Once nearly cooked, add the following ingredients, already mixed together:

3 parts soy sauce
1 part cooking sherry
1 water
1 teaspoon corn starch

Add to taste.

Serve with rice or noodles or whatever you want.

Carolyn and I both love this particular stir-fry. Ginger and garlic are both silly cheap (only buy as much ginger as you need. Feel free to break a chunk off at the store), and add a different kind of spiciness to the stir-fry. As with all Asian cuisine, I love to add garlic chili sauce here and there to really kick up the spice (Post dedicated to this amazing sauce to come)(hoy fong foods, you're welcome for the free advertising). Also, its the rare stir-fry for us that doesn't have broccoli and mushrooms. We eat almost exactly this meal close to weekly.

Finally, a note on using my new wok. It holds so much food! Our meal looked paltry in this thing. Since it's teflon lined, the heat does distribute, but naturally the bottom was still much hotter than the sides, so a good amount of stirring is necessary. Also, tossing the food seemed to allow bits of garlic and ginger to fly out more easily than your typical skillet. Oh, and food took a little longer to cook.