Kale, Meet the Wok
Hsiao-Ching Chou
Author's Note: For the month of November, I am participating in NaBloPoMo (National Blog Post Month) and pledge to post once a day.
I mentioned that I was going to follow up yesterday's post on making dinner for friends with a post on shopping for the dinner party. But, my plans changed. Instead, I want to share one of the dishes I made for dinner tonight.
The other day, I wrote about creating an Ingredient Matrix to help cooks learn how to improvise stir fries. I've been collecting My go-to method is green vegetable + protein + sauce (soy sauce, water, splash of wine). Then I riff. I might add ingredients such as minced garlic, ginger, green onions, chili bean sauce, sesame oil, and/or a secondary vegetable (carrots, mushrooms). If it makes sense, I might incorporate tofu.
One of the dishes I made tonight featured some Tuscan kale that I knew I wanted to cook with chicken. I started by heating oil in the wok and stir frying some sliced jalapeno to release that telltale green flavor of the chile. I added the kale, which I had stemmed and roughly chopped, and let it wilt. Next, I added chicken chunks, which I had par-cooked by blanching in oil, and minced garlic. Then came the sauce (soy sauce, water, wine). It didn't take much time to cook. Cutting the chicken took the longest, because I had gotten a whole chicken and had to break it down into pieces and debone them.
Normally, when I get Tuscan kale, I saute it in olive oil with some garlic, red pepper flakes and a squeeze of lemon juice. But this trendy green can just as easily become a stir fry. The kale worked well in this preparation and was delicious.
You can use this this baby bok choy and chicken recipe as a guide and change the greens and add flavors according to what inspires you.