So here's my problem. I make the Chinese-ish food. I make the sauce. It's thin. I mix up a cornstarch slurry, like I'm 'posed to, and I mix it in and nothing happens. No thickness, no yummy glossy sauce. Bleh.
Or, I get disgustingly thick, jelly-like goo. Double Bleh!
Problem #2: rice. We're not great at making rice. We do ok. But sometimes it's gross and sticky (I like sticky rice, but there's sticky rice and then there's wallpaper paste), sometimes it's wet, sometimes it has a funny taste and leaves a starch layer on my teeth. I'm crap at rice, as Will might say.
Tonight, I solved both problems.
Months ago, I bought a bag of noodle disks at the Large But Not Very Nice Asian Market. It was maybe 20 disks (the size of a rice cake), dried and pressed. Like ramen. The whole thing cost maybe $2.99. And I thought (tonight), "what if I used noodles instead of rice? Would the planet spill off its axis, ending all life as we know it?"
Prolly not. So I boiled some water, then dropped in two disks and turned off the heat. After about 3 minutes I drained the noodles. They were not fully cooked.
Meanwhile, I'd been cooking tiny chicken chunks in a very hot pan with teriyaki sauce (they were marinated in it and I just dumped all that in the pan). I added sliced water chestnuts. I added a handful of snow peas. Then I dumped in the noodles. They soaked up the sauce, turned a satisfying beige, and were done in approximately 2 seconds.
Yum. Noodles, chicken, peas and crunchy bits, all flavored with teriyaki but not dripping with it. And no waiting for rice. And no cleaning up the rice pot.
Yay!
3 comments:
Sounds yummy. My mother passed on a tip that she learned from a Honduran lady that I find really helps when making rice. She always heats up the pan and stirs the uncooked rice around for just a couple of minutes with a tablespoon or two of cooking oil until all of the grains get a coating, but not so long that they start to turn colour. Then you add your water and put a lid on it and it helps the rice maintain a good texture and not get all gummy.
It's so rare that I ever having any cooking tips to share, so if this is old news to you, just let me pretend I was being helpful. :¬)
I love that trick (I've done something similar for pilaf, but it's more Indian than Latin American). With short-grain white rice from China, I kind of want it sticky, but I still want the grains to be individual.
I read about rinsing the rice, and saw a Japanese cook do it on TV (Martha Stewart, if you must know), but I tried it and it made no difference. I think my pot might be part of the problem, because it's very thin and on our flat-top cooker it wobbles. Wobbling is bad. I wish we had gas like you.
Dude,
It's called a rice cooker, dawg. Forty bucks.
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