Pork with Napa Cabbage

Friday November 16

Can you believe that we still had half a Napa cabbage, the other half of which had gone into last Friday's blue-cheese slaw? We decided to treat it as a Chinese stir-fry, so we defrosted a half-pound package of scrappy pork ends.

Barbara cut the pork into thin bite-size slices, and marinated it in:
1 Tbsp. soy sauce
1 Tbsp. Shao Xing wine
1/4 tsp. sugar, and
a grind of white pepper.

Holt cored the Napa cabbage and cut it into half-inch-wide slices, about the same size as the pork. He cleverly kept the thicker bottom slices on one end of the chopping board, and the thinner top leaves at the other.
He also minced about a Tbsp. of fresh ginger
and a couple of garlic cloves.
The whites of 3 or 4 scallions got chopped into inch lengths, while the greens were chopped more finely and kept separate.

We put out vegetable oil,
salt,
rice vinegar, and
hoisin sauce;
and that completed our mise-en-place.

Barbara heated the oil in the wok over medium heat, and stir-fried the Napa cabbage, thicker slices first, adding the ginger, a little salt, and extra oil if needed as it cooked. When she got to the thinner parts of the Napa, she added the scallion whites, and finally, when the whole thing was crisp-tender, the scallion greens for a few last stirs. She turned this out into a covered platter, to keep warm.

She reheated the wok, this time to high, and stir-fried the pork with the garlic. When the meat was just browned on all sides, she put the vegetables back in, lowered the flame a bit, and stirred in about a Tbsp. of vinegar and about a Tbsp. of hoisin sauce, tasting often; the idea was to get a barbecue-y yet sweet-and-sour taste. Once we got that, the dish was done, served, and chopsticked up.