The Daily Grind, Chop and Fry

Adapted fromThe New Moosewood Cookbook (Mollie Katzen’s Classic Cooking)

This is a hard recipe to write up – I’ll try to use amounts as best I can, but the authors of the cook book write it as a rough guide, which is how I’ve always made it. Writing it as a hard-and-fast recipe takes one of the best features away from it, which is flexibility.

It will also make it hard to put the shopping list together, especially for a whole week’s list, since you might want to choose different vegetable to make it each time. This is also good for using up things you might have in the produce drawer; it’s a great budget-stretcher. One nice thing is you can use different vegetables depending on the season. You can also vary the grains you use, and this is a nice chance to use grains you may not be very familiar with and want to try, such as quinoa, bulghar, or millet. Of course, you can use rice.

2 – 2 ½ cups assorted seasonal vegetables per (full-sized) person, cut bite-sized or sliced thin.
About 1 tsp. canola oil per serving of vegetables
Enough grain for everyone, cooked (Time your grain so it is ready and hot by the time your stir fry is finished.)
Sauce or fresh herbs for sauté. Try:
Basic Sauce for Broiling Tofu
Basic Stir Fry Sauce
Miso Ginger Sauce
1 part Simple Sauce to 1 part orange or mango juice

Directions for Stir Fry:
You have two objectives when cutting vegetables for stir fries. The first is to cut each vegetable so that it cooks quickly yet still retains its color and snap. The second is to keep each piece manageably bite-sized while still recognizable.

When doing your prep, separate the vegetables into a few groups, depending on how long they take to cook. Add them to the skillet or wok in order – the quickest-cooking things like spinach and sprouts won’t need more than a minute, if that, on the heat. Use a hot skillet and keep the vegetables moving in the skillet in order to keep them from charring, and heat your oil to hot but not smoking before beginning. Your liquid, which would be whatever sauce you are using, will go in shortly after the short-cooking things like summer squash and peppers, which will finish cooking in the liquid. Since things like carrots, potatoes and hard squash take the longest to cook, use them to judge when to add the other ingredients. The whole thing is usually done in less than 10 minutes. When the stir-fry is finished, serve immediately over the grain.

(Basic cooking instructions for bulgar wheat: 1 cup bulgar to 2 cups of water. Rinse bulgar. Bring water to a boil, add bulgar. Return to a boil, reduce heat to low, cover and cook for about 15 minutes until soft.)

I hate to give you too many options, but another way I’ve made this that was really good was to use no sauce (I know, I’m blowing your mind) and flavor the vegetables with herbs. Once I layered the vegetables over cooked bulghar wheat, put cheese on it and put it under the broiler. It was a little extravagant, calorie-wise, but it was delicious.

Shopping List

Enough assorted seasonal vegetables for about 1/2 cup per person, cooked
Grain – Millet, quinoa, barley, bulgar wheat or rice