04 November 2012

NaBloPoMo: I fail, but here's a recipe

Oh hey, day two and I already screwed up NaBloPoMo.  I'm not surprised, as I didn't have high aspirations for this, but I wanted to come here and use the blog as I originally intended.  At first, it was just an attempt to log what I'd been making as I taught myself how to cook.  We just had stir-fry and I'm getting closer to a stir-fry sauce that I can reliably make and really like.  Recipe and notes below:



1 T olive oil


1/2 large-ish lobe shallot, finely diced
6ish cloves garlic, crushed

2 t sambal
1.5 t honey
1 t powdered ginger

6 T soy sauce
5 T rice wine vinegar
kosher salt

Place a small sauce pan over medium heat.  Add in olive oil when hot and saute shallots with a pinch of salt until soft and translucent.  Add in garlic and stir until fragrant.  Add sambal + honey and stir all to incorporate.  Add in soy sauce and vinegar and bring to a boil and then turn off the heat.

You can reduce the sauce to get it thicker, but I really like sauce-drenched rice, so I didn't really reduce it.  In the future, I may try it with fresh ginger (~1-2 T finely minced) and add that in with the shallot and perhaps a drizzle of sesame oil in at the end off heat.  This was highly adapted from a recipe that appeared in the Penzeys Spices catalog.

Ordinarily, I would wait until I've perfected this and have a highly photogenic meal in which to document.  That may happen, but Ramona actually grabbed the catalog, ripped a bunch of pages out, and drooled all over it.  Suffice it to say, I'm going to throw this out, but I wanted to document it because I wrote my crib notes on the catalog.

Ahh.  Such is the life of a cooking parent.

No comments: