Chinese-style Pork with Green Peppers, plus Steamed Rice

Tuesday 29 November

We're pretty sure we've made this recently, so it should be on the blog.  But Blogspot's search engine has become so unreliable lately that the little box at the left top corner can't find older posts at all.  (If you're similarly stymied, by the way, try googling your search terms coupled with "holtandbarbara".  Google, unlike Blogspot, still works.) 

In the fridge were the last of Sharon's garden peppers and a packet of scrappy pork frozen, which prompted this dish. 

First, we set a half cup of long grain rice to cook.  Have we ever mentioned our simplest method of doing this before?  Blogspot won't tell me, so I'll just write it.  We take a small pot with tight cover, grease its inside with a leftover butter-wrapper kept for this purpose, put the rice and a dash of kosher salt in the pot, add twice the amount of water as rice, set on the fire until it just boils, and then cover tightly and set at lowest possible heat for 19 minutes.  At that point, uncover, fluff, and you're there.

We sliced the pork into small coins, then made same-size slices out of 2 onions, 5 little green peppers, and a carrot (with Holt's trademark notches dressing the latter up). 

Our mise-en-place continued with a clove of minced garlic and an equal amount of grated fresh ginger.  Half got mixed into the pork in its marinade (2 Tbsp. soy sauce, 1 Tbsp. Shao Xing wine, and a dusting of sugar and black pepper), the other half was used in the initial stir-frying of vedge, in this order: onion, peppers, garlic and ginger, carrot.  When the vedge was all bright, we popped in a block of veal broth until a couple of tablespoons melted, removed it, covered the wok, lowered the heat, and simmered until tender. 

Then we set the vedge aside in the warmer and stir-fried the pork; when no pink was left, we put two Tbsps. of black bean garlic sauce in center, cooked it briefly, re-added all vedge, and dressed the dish with sesame oil.  The black bean sauce gave it a nice edge, different from the ketchupy sweetness you want with green pepper beef.