Ascension pseudo-stir-fry
Today is Ascension Thursday, so after Mass this morning I treated myself to bagel in Bayside.
I would buy so many of these, generally, if I weren't budgeting. It was a fun splurge. Then I kept things extra special by taking the Long Island Railroad back to Elmhurst/Woodside instead of the bus and 7 train. I felt like royalty!
For dinner, it was time to cook all my remaining beef round strips I had brought home from my friend's house. I didn't have all the resources he had, so I had to improvise, and it turned out okay. I velveted the meat first with baking soda, though not for quite as long as he did, and as I probably should have done. Meanwhile, I cooked... mini cucumbers. They were leftover from materials used to make a salad, but I didn't want to make a salad, and I wanted to see if mini-cucumbers would cook down into less tangy, the way onions do if you cook them long enough. I couldn't stir-fry anyway with only butter as a cooking oil, so I sliced up the cucumbers and cooked the slices for a while in butter and doused them in salt, pepper, and garlic powder, then decided I wanted more garlic, so I chopped up an entire head and through it in. You can see the result sitting in the little white bowl in this pic:
Then I started cooking the meat in butter, so again, not stir-frying. I was worried about undercooking and naturally, ended up over-cooking (probably). But not by an obscene amount. I didn't think I had the resources to make a soy-sauce based sauce, exactly, as I had no sugar or cornstarch or anything to add to soy sauce to make it more saucey. What I did have was tons of sour cream that I want to use up before leaving town for a bit on Saturday. So I went for more of the buttery/creamy pan sauce kind of thing that I had been making for chicken a while ago. I deglazed with shaoxing, melted butter, added a lot of sour cream, and sprinkled in some garlic powder and some pepper, AND a good drizzle of soy sauce. The resulting sauce tasted pretty great.
Then I poured the meat and cucumbers in and stirred it all to coat, then dumbed it in a bowl on top of the rice I had made.
It was highly adequate, even if a little weird with the cucumbers. The meat was also under-velveted and hence a little too tough. And it was overcooked. But whatever. It was civilized and contained lots of good and interesting flavors. And the bowl was pretty.
