Day 140: Pork stir-fry

My Aunt Rosemary describes food shopping as soul destroying work and I totally agree. You take the food off the shelf and put it in the trolley, you then put it on the belt, you then pack it into a bag, you then put it in the car, then you have to lift the bags out of the car into the house, you then have to take everything out and put it away. There goes half my Saturday. Is it any wonder that there’s an increasing trend of ordering online and the supermarket delivers to your door? A friend of mine swears by it. However, here’s the thing…it has become a ritual now that Dear Son and I do the food shopping together every Saturday. Being a creature of habit, I park in the same spot (God forbid anyone else thinks about parking in it! Lol!), we see the same other customers, I navigate around the aisles in the same manner (please don’t let them have changed everything round this week!), Dear Son sneaks things into the trolly, I sneak the same back out and, most importantly, Dear Son has taken to this particular sales Assistant called Mary who has ‘high 5s’ and cuddles for him every week. You see, as much as I love online shopping, online shopping doesn’t give you the same experience. That’s where the supermarkets have me. Plus, I love to see what new items they now stock and how I can use them in my cooking. Therefore, for now and the foreseeable future, I will continue to shop in store.

Being a Saturday, I did my usual food shopping which involves no less than five different stops. Well, it used to be four until recently because Harry’s of Bridgend now run their Made in Inishowen local food market (10:30am-2:30pm). Five stops is the only way I can manage to get through a full week of cooking without having to run every five minutes to the supermarket for something that I’ve forgotten. I have a shopping list and I’ve tried many variations of this – Post-Its, electronic lists on my Blackberry, light cardboard from the box of tea bags/mansize tissues (a favourite of Dear Father’s and my late granny) and spiral notebooks. However, what I’ve found is that an actual bound notebook is my saviour. There’s no chance of me losing that thing. I have different pages for different shops/supermarkets and each item goes into the appropriate page accordingly. It’s a bit of organising but it sure beats that dreaded feeling when you are mid-way through cooking a recipe only to remember that you forgot to get something. Horrible.

So, being all stock up for the week ahead, I decided to give my new wok a go. Yes, I finally did round to buying one. I decided to make a stir-fry which is a recipe don’t do often and chose Pork stir-fry in particular.

The cookbook said to prepare the pork and then make the sauce but I know me (obviously!) and knew to sort out the sauce first as it usually takes me longer to prepare the ingredients than what’s stated in the cookbook. So, the sauce is exactly where I started which involved putting the following ingredients into a bowl – cider vinegar, soy sauce, tomato purée, caster sugar, chicken stock, cornflour and sesame oil. The recipe also said to use rice wine but I couldn’t get any; therefore, I relied on my good friend Google and it said that a dry white wine or sherry could be used as a substitute so I went for the wine option.

Next, it was the turn of the pork. The site of a tenderloin isn’t exactly appealing to me as a vegetarian so, once again, thank goodness for the invention of latex gloves. I simply sliced it into 1cm cuts and seasoned it. I put the wok on to heat, added rapeseed oil and, once hot, added grated garlic, sliced scallions and grated ginger. It fried for about 30 seconds and then I added in the sliced pork. It cooked for about 3 minutes until the pork was cooked through and then I added in the sauce along with half of a diced red pepper. Once it came up to the boil, I let it cook for a further 3 minutes until the sauce had thickened. Once ready, I served it with boiled rice.

The verdict…

Dear Husband’s words were ver batim “First class! 7 marks out of 10!”. Eh? Well, you know by now he's a hard marker. Anything over 7 apparently is 'first class'. It was a chinese-inspired dish so I thought it would do well with him.

 

Overall, it was very easy and quick to prepare and cook. It's definitely made The List and I think it's a perfect recipe for a Friday evening after a long week when you don't exactly feel like starting into a longer recipe - especially when you have that other work to prepare for the next day - food shopping...