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The main ingredient in this recipe is baby bok choy.
The baby bok choy, like all the other choys behind me,
and that name really refers to a category of vegetables
that refers to Chinese cabbage.
This one's small unlike the larger version,
which is quite a difference in size.
But what they have in common is that
they have this larger base.
It's almost like celery-like stalks.
It tastes a little bit like a mild sweet celery,
and the tops are very-- are leafy,
and a little bit like spinach.
The next thing I need is some shitake mushrooms.
Now, what makes this mushroom a little different from others,
is its wide cap like this, it remains open.
It has a stem though that is, um,
it's sort of ***, and you do need
to remove it and discard it, and not cook with it.
And it's a very meaty texture,
so it's a wonderful mushroom.
However, this convenience package has them already cleaned,
stemmed and sliced for me,
so I think this is the one I'm using today.
Unlike classic oyster sauce, which is made from fermented oysters,
this vegetarian option is made from mushroom extract.
As with any stir fry that you do,
the most important thing is what you do in advance
before anything touches the heat.
That's what really counts, because we've got all of our
mise en place ready to go, meaning everything is chopped.
Our sauce is made, everything is right here
ready for us to cook, because once you get started,
this is a very, very quick process.
Now, the first step that we're gonna be doing in this--
in this recipe is to blanch the veggies.
In this case, it's baby bok choy.
And the reason that you blanch baby bok choy,
which means putting it in boiling salted water,
is to, A, set the color, because these will stay
nice and bright and green, and also it's a pre-cooking technique,
so that at the very end when you go to combine
the sauces with the veggies and all the seasonings,
this will take very, very little time to cook.
So, those are all in the boiling salted water right now.
That'll take about a minute and a half to cook.
And that's it, so we'll be back in a little bit.
Okay, I've already drained the bok choy and arranged them
on a platter so that when we have the sauce made
we'll be ready to go and finish this dish.
Now, my wok is heated on low at this point.
So once we have that heated on low,
we're adding our peanut oil to the wok.
And set that aside for a second.
Now we want to add our garlic and ginger to this.
The garlic and ginger, once it goes in, will start to sizzle,
and start to brown rather quickly.
We don't want this to cook for too, too long
because we--before we add the mushrooms,
but we want the garlic and ginger to start to, um,
start to release the aroma and the flavors.
So as you see, we're cooking this on low for maybe
about 30 seconds or so until is starts to sizzle.
Okay, now we can add our mushrooms,
but first, let's turn that up to high.
And you don't want the garlic and ginger to be cooking on high,
but you do want the mushrooms to cook on high,
because the mushrooms will release water as they cook.
And instead of having them be boiling or simmering
in their own water, you wanna evaporate that water
as they cook until they're tender,
and do that on high heat.
Probably this will take you two or three minutes to cook completely.
Watch it carefully, because you don't want
the garlic and ginger to burn.
If it starts browning a little bit,
just add a couple teaspoons of water
to that to stop that browning from happening.
But we'll be back in about two to three minutes
to see how this looks.
Okay, the mushrooms are tender.
The garlic and ginger is not burnt,
just lightly golden maybe, that's it.
So, we're done with that.
Now we're going to finish this with a sauce.
So we're adding our oyster sauce to the pan.
And this is a little bit on the thicker side,
so we're going to add a bit of water,
about a quarter cup just to thin that out a little bit,
and then give that a stir so that we create
a nice sauce at the base of all this.
Let that cook up for about 30 seconds, a minute
until you have the right thickness that you want.
I think we're just about there.
You don't want it to thicken too much.
You can turn off the heat if you want there.
And now we just finish the dish
by bringing this right over to our bok choy,
and pouring it right on top
while it's still sizzling and hot.
So there we go.
We're ready to serve.
You can cut up all the veggies yourself,
or let us do the work for you.
Look for these meal kits, like this,
at the Fresh Cut Veggies station in selected stores.