Do you ever wonder why Chinese restaurants name their obvious sauté of mixed vegetables and meat Pork and Broccoli?  The Broccoli is only one of many veggies in there.  Does it have superior health benefits that I don’t know about?  Is it socially popular?  Or is it just the only vegetables that the average American is not afraid to eat?

I love a good stir fry… but for me, it is mushrooms!  I love it when they throw a mixture of different mushrooms into the mix (porcini, enochi, straw mushrooms – and not the canned ones either!).  I always find that I eat a wider variety of greens in a stir fry too.  Take bok choy for example.  This is not a vegetable that I eat in any other form beside stir fry.  

Now, there are some major downsides to eating take-out (because let’s face it, 90% of the time, we order our Chinese food to go) stir fry… they cook in crappy oil; they use tons of MSG, they coat the meat in corn starch before cooking it.  Don’t forget how you are always hungry an hour later. ..  the list goes on.

Now, this weekend, I started cleaning out my chest freezer to make room for the half a pig I ordered from my neighboring farmer, when I came across a package of “Boston Butt slice” and thought, “Why would anyone slice that beautiful roast!”  But, in the interest of a clean freezer, I took it up and put it in the fridge to slowly defrost.  

Saturday morning, I perused the Organic produce farm, reveling in all the spring greens, and… well… I got a little carried away.  I bought ramps, fiddlehead ferns, spring leeks, green onions, fresh ginger… oh the wonderful greens!  So, Monday night, after cooking all day Sunday, the desire to utilize the enormous pile of greens (and the desire not to eat egg salad for the third meal in a row) motivated my stir fry.

I julienned the leeks, the bokchoy and the ramps.  I cleaned and prepped the mushrooms (enochi  Yum!). I minced the ginger, sliced the garlic, cut up the broccoli (yes, of course I added broccoli), and tossed the fiddlehead ferns into the bowl with the rest of the veggies.    Then I opened the package of pork.  What I found was thin slices of marbled, soft pork on a bone that looked sort of like an anemic T-bone.  I cut the meat away from the bones and sliced it into strips.  

My dogs LOVED the raw pork bones.  They were happier than, well, pigs….  

Now, my laziness quotient kicked in… it is a Monday night after all, and I still have a few hours of work ahead of me, so I didn’t feel like digging out the cast iron wok from inside a storage chest in the other room.  Instead, I grabbed a stainless steel sauté pan with straight sides and heated it up.  I tossed some olive oil and minced (pulverized really) ginger into the bottom.  Then I added the pork, keeping everything moving in the pan.  When the pork cooked through, I removed it from the pan, which by now had a thick layer of crust on the bottom and added rice wine vinegar – a lot of rice wine vinegar – enough to properly steam my face with it as it reduced.  

Next, I added soy sauce and kept scraping up the brown bits and dissolving them into my sauce.  When the liquid reduced down to a thick paste, I poured the viscous liquid over my sautéed pork slices and added a bit more oil to the pan.  (Now I would have remembered – this is where I’d have added some chilis, but I didn’t remember). I put the aromatic greens in first (onion, leek, ramp, garlic, etc) and sautéed them, keeping them moving in the pan.  When they cooked down, I added the mushrooms and bok choy, then the broccoli and fiddleheads, until everything was tossing away in the pot.  I splashed a touch more vinegar (as needed) to steam the sturdier veggies.  Finally, I put the pork back in the pan and gave it all a final toss before taking it off the heat.

The end result… Voila!  Stir Fry… all the yum and none of the junk food.  I’m glad I have leftovers