I must say that week six of my share was the best so far. It led me to cook with something brand new that I now love and will include whenever I prepare one of my favorite types of food: Asian cuisine.
I will use any excuse to cook with soy sauce, so when I learned my share contained a vegetable that calls for using it, I was very excited.
That vegetable is bok choy, a type of lettuce I had never heard of before. It’s a Chinese cabbage that tastes slightly more bitter than regular lettuce. It looks very cool: each leaf has its own long stem protruding off its end.
I assumed that I could just throw it in with a salad, like normal lettuce. However, after talking it over with my friends who work at Loma Farm, I realized that bok choy is best eaten stir-fried with some soy sauce. All they had to say was “soy sauce,” and I was sold.
This meal was very easy to prepare. I only had to purchase brown rice; I already had everything else for a Chinese stir fry: bok choy, broccoli, soy sauce and an egg.
I started by warming up some olive oil in the pan. Then I threw in the broccoli, since it would take longer to cook than the bok choy. In a separate pot the brown rice was cooking on its own.
Once the broccoli began to warm up I tossed in the bok choy and stirred it all together. I waited a few minutes to let the two flavors mingle, then added a few splashes of soy sauce. It sizzled, and the sauce’s sweet aroma filled my kitchen. The bok choy, like any other type of lettuce, shriveled up and turned a dark green.
So, with the greens looking good and the brown rice ready to go, I added some rice into the pan, letting all the flavors combine. Then I pushed the ingredients to one side of the pan, whisked an egg in a bowl, and poured it into the other side of the pan.
When the egg started to scramble I stirred it in with the broccoli, bok Choy and brown rice. Then I added a final dose of soy sauce, pouring it in while stirring everything together.
My meal was complete and delicious. I really enjoyed the bok choy because it had a nice, slightly bitter flavor with a bit of crunch from the stem.
I thoroughly enjoyed this week’s share because it gave me a meal that was quick and simple, yet allowed me to cook with something that was entirely new to me.
In fact, I loved this meal so much that I made it for lunch again the next day. I’m sure that from now on I’ll be enjoying this new dish often.
Margaret Sheets is the 2016 events intern at Taste the Local Difference® and she is a senior at Albion College. You can contact her at [email protected]