Improvising Stir Fry Meals From Refrigerator Velcro

8 years ago

last modified: 8 years ago

As far as I can tell, there are three leading approaches to converting refrigerator velcro into a meal. (I assume there is no need to define "refrigerator velcro", right?)

1. Salad

2. Soup

3. Stir fry

My favorite one is the third. Salads are a little selective about just what they will gracefully incorporate, and soups take a certain time to prepare.

Okay, that's debatable, others will disagree. But anyway my mind is currently on stir fries.

Last weekend we hosted a dinner/sleepover party for my son's dance program, which meant twenty sugar-buzzed teenage dancers bouncing off the walls all night, rushing from floor to floor like stampeding herring, playing pool and foosball and The Game Of Real Life, and finally sleeping, if at all, piled up on the floors everywhere.

We needed to supply food, suitable for teens who are either eating everything in sight or eternally dieting, many of whom are vegetarian to boot. So it was thin crust pizza + salads to the rescue. I spent the day par baking ten pizza crusts and precooking dozens of different toppings, while SWMBO filled big steel workbowls with different salads. Then when the horde arrived, we set out the salad troughs and started cranking out pizzas. I think I finally got to bed at 4:30 am, by which time half the kids were still awake but had at least started to whisper instead of shriek. We got up at 8:00 am to make breakfast. No wonder no one else volunteered to host this.

Naturally, by Monday we had a refrigerator full of leftover ingredients and no energy to make anything complicated for dinner.

So, time to stir fry!

My approach to stir fry is somewhat Chinese, because that's what I know. (But I'm hoping this thread teaches me other approaches.)

Put two woks on the burners to heat up. Start dicing, slicing, chopping, and cutting matchsticks. Fast cooking stuff can be cut larger, slow cooking stuff needs to be smaller or thinner. Sort your piles of prepped stuff by color, texture, taste. Mince a bunch of garlic and ginger. Find some nuts. Get some chicken stock and a cup of flour or cornstarch. Line up your sauces (soy sauce, sesame oil, Siracha hot sauce, black vinegar/Worchestershire, Shaoxing rice wine/sake, fish sauce, etc) and your spices (red and black pepper, chili powder, sesame seeds, salt, sugar, five spice, star anise, etc).

Start stir frying the ingredients, in batches, usually one at a time or maybe two complementary ingredients together. Cook on high heat, as little as possible, adding splashes of sauce and pinches of spice. Careful, the wine vapors can catch fire.

Line up a few big empty bowls. As each batch is done, add it to one or another of the bowls, choosing by intuition or whim, design or calculation, but basically trying to make sure each bowl ends up with a balanced mix of different colors, textures and flavors. You don't want one of the stir fries to end up all brown, and another to look like Froot Loops. Nor should one dish feel like baby food, while the other have the mouthfeel of kitty litter. One or two dishes should be vegetarian, one should be hot, another mild. And of course they should taste different from each other.

The finished dish needs some moisture (kitty litter = bad), so to a couple batches add the stock and flour/cornstarch, and cook longer to make a sort of sauce.

Hopefully you have rice going in the cooker too.

After an hour, you should have a greasy stovetop, three or four bowls of assorted improvised refrigerator velcro stir fry, and slightly more room in the refrigerator.

A couple more days of this, and I'll have my refrigerator back. Which I had just cleaned out and organized, before the chaos.

I'm having trouble posting photos, but maybe I'll add some later.

Now,

what are your approaches to stir fry? What are your dependable combinations of the common or uncommon sorts of velcro? Favorite sauces or flavorings? Are there non-Asian versions we should talk about?

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