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.