Dinner is served – pass the chopsticks please

Do you think our dinner met the Canada Food Guide requirements for servings of vegetables?

I always feel quite virtuous when I'm working on a home-style stir-fry. Standing there chopping all those vegetables definitely feels worth it when they're all arranged, waiting for the wok.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about wok cooking and I shared the two cookbooks that first introduced me to Chinese/Asian-style cooking.

I give these books every credit for helping me with the basics for last night's dinner – the marinade for the chicken which becomes the sauce in the wok which becomes the vehicle to accompany those vegetables to cover the rice!

I used chicken breast cut into one-inch chunks. To the bowl, I added lots of minced garlic, fresh chopped ginger, then a bit of safflower oil, rice vinegar, pomegranate molasses, chili oil, sesame oil, fish sauce, oyster sauce and soy sauce. I can't tell you how much – I've been making this dish for a long time and I've figured it out over the years.

After the chicken sits in the marinade for awhile and when the rice is almost done – a sticky rice, usually Cal-rose here – it's time to heat the wok. I don't like it smoking hot but let's say moderately hot.

I use safflower oil for this part also and, of course, I throw in the veg in the order of the length of time they need to cook. When the veg are tender crisp (I usually hold the broccoli florets out until the bitter end so they'll stay nice and green) I push everything aside and dump in the chicken and the marinade. I let the chicken monopolize the centre of the wok for a few minutes. I stir it. It doesn't take long to cook.

Because stir-frying is an intense experience, I didn't take any photos of each separate vegetable being added; neither did I summon my photographer. But before you knew it, we had reached this point. The rice is in the small pot.

The last step is adding the vermicelli. It's a rice vermicelli that I'd poured boiling water over five minutes before adding. The second last step was adding a tiny bit of corn starch, stirred into a small amount of cold water.

And here it is, just before it was placed into a serving bowl and taken to the table.

There were accolades all around and if I do say so myself, it was quite tasty.

Cloud ears and lily buds are on my shopping list

The first chef I remember seeing on television – before television exploded with cooking shows and chefs became celebrities – was Martin Yan. His show was called Yan Can Cook and his catch-phrase was "If Yan can cook, so can you!"

I found him very likable and appealing although he was somewhat manic and told really corny jokes. He was cute though.

And of course, I loved his cooking. He was a master with the chopping knife – a showman, in fact. He would give a flirty signal when he was going to start and he'd flick his wrist and then his hand would become a blur as the onion fell in slices so thin, you could read the recipe through them.

His style of cooking – and his ingredients – were foreign to me and I mean that completely literally. But I was enthralled and his was the first cookbook I had that I felt was authentically of another culture. (It probably wasn't but it seemed so to me at that time.)

I've taken the book off the shelf for the first time in ages and it makes me think I must get back to it. The first recipe I saw when I opened it was for "porcupine meatballs" – definitely Martin's kind of humour. The meatballs are tasty spicy ground pork, rolled in broken cellophane noodles and fried in hot oil. You can see where the "porcupine" reference comes from. He has "remarks" at the end of each recipe and yes, they're often funny or corny – and sometimes both.

The second book I got around the same time is called Chinese Cooking at the Academy – California Culinary Academy.

I found a shopping list inside it just now: bamboo shoots, black beans, black mushrooms dried, cloud ears, 5-spice powder, lily buds, dried tofu, water chestnuts. Except for the 5-spice powder and the rice, these are ingredients I don't have right now. They sound good though, especially the cloud ears and lily buds.

This book has glossy pages and coloured photos unlike Martin's which is much plainer. Both books are instructional though and go further than simply providing recipes. I realize flipping through them that there are some very complex – some really hard – recipes. They appear so challenging that I think I'm going to have to confront them – after a visit to an Asian grocery.

Here's a nice description of a menu for a "winter supper":

A whole chicken simmering in a fragrant mixture of soy sauce, wine, fresh ginger and spices gives its perfume to the whole house. Warm Green Onion Cakes and a garlicky cabbage stew also help ward off the chill. In true Chinese fashion, the soup is not served as a separate course, but is sipped throughout the meal.

I love the idea of sipping the soup throughout the meal because I like soup but I find if I have it as a first course, it's too filling and it takes away the full appeal of the main course.

I use a carbon steel wok for my Chinese cooking. It was a gift from good friends, right around the time I started to enjoy this kind of cooking. It needs to be "seasoned" as cast-iron does and never washed with soap and water. Looks something like this:

I quite often do a stir-fry, always with lots of veg and maybe some chicken or shrimp or pork. My marinade uses any combination of vegetable oil, rice vinegar, fresh ginger, minced garlic, sesame oil, chili oil, oyster sauce, fish sauce, soy sauce, maybe a little honey. My vegetables are pretty much always carrots, celery, onions, mushrooms, broccoli, whatever green leaves I might have, and some thin long noodles – vermicelli. We have it with sticky rice.

It's good but I'm always complaining about being in a cooking rut so I think I'll go back to the excitement I felt when I first owned these books.

Crispy chicken wings with lemon dip sounds good.