Beef and broccoli Trooper York Style

So since Good Food has closed I have to find a new source of meat. It is not as easy as all that. I can't just go to the supermarket because the crap they have there sucks. I have to to the other Italian market Mastellone which is about five blocks away instead of across the street. Now Vinny the butcher is also the owner but he is not into meat as much as Mike from Good Food. So his stuff isn't as good. And he is not behind the counter to cut it fresh. I have to hunt him down to get fresh meat. Or take what is in the case. Now that can work because sometimes some stuff is fresh.

On Sunday night he had some good beef strips. To use in making bracoles  or for a stir fry. Which is what I used if for to make beef and broccoli.

Frist I got about four packages of meat which was about three pounds. I sliced the already very thin slices into smaller pieces. I then took 17 cloves of garlic and a whole piece of ginger (cleaned and peeled). I put them into the food processor and ground them up and put them in some oil in the wok. I cooked them until they started to brown and then threw in the meat. I cooked that for about fifteen minutes until well browned. I reserved that and then put in four heads of broccoli which was only the florets that I had chopped up. (I saved the rest of the broccoli to make soup) I threw the broccoli florets into the residues left from cooking the meat and added some olive oil to lube it up a little.I flashed fried it until it was nice and crispy. Then I threw the meat back in. Added a nice half cup of low sodium soy sauce and three tablespoons of hoisin sauce. If you are going to cook chinks you need the hoisin sauce. It is the key ingredient in most of your tasty dishes. I slopped that around for a while to coat everything with the sauce.

Served it with brown rice. It was delicious.

We have been eating at home since the first of the year!

We have been so busy that we have not gone out to eat a lot. Until last night.

One of the things that has stopped us is that the wife has to eat a special diet. No starches. No pizza. No macaroni. No bread. None of the good stuff. So I have to come up with delicious food that she can eat and not feel deprived.

One of the things I have been using a lot is barley. As a grain it is not like rice or wheat that shoots up her sugar. It takes a long time to digest so it helps fill you up and inhibits your appetite.

I have been making it in a simple stir fry.

First I took some green and red peppers and a couple of onions. Chopped them up in the food processor. Then chopped about two heads of garlic as well. I sauteed them in a wok until they were nice and soft and then took them out and reserved them. Then I flashed fried some broccoli and reserved that. Boiled the barley and drained it. Put the veggies in the wok and slowly added in the barley. Mix it all together like a big busta chote and then add a shit load of low sodium soy sauce. Mix it thoroughly. You will have the equivalent of fried rice. Just add chicken. Or shrimp. Or pork.

Oh yeah. Don't forget to add the peas. Chuck would be pissed if you didn't add some peas.

A great diabetic dish.

Everything goes better with Garlic and Chili's!

Today's food tip is one of the best things I have found to spice up any savory dish you might care to make. It is Huy Fong Foods garlic chili sauce. A mere teaspoon of this is like rocket fuel. Add it to your tomato sauce or use it when you are sauteing chicken or pork. Add it to a stir fry. Man the heat and flavor this throws off is unbelievable. Now you have to very careful how much you use because it is really overpowering so don't go crazy the first time you use it. Be judicious in it's use and you will have found one of the most useful flavor added sauces in your cupboard.

You can generally find it in the oriental foods section of your bigger grocery stores or I guess you can get it direct from the company. But trust me, it will really enhance the flavor of you roasts and meat dishes immeasurably.

Stir fryed pork with scallions Trooper York Style!

I love to cook Chinese food and everyone loves when I do. I always use the freshest ingredients and obviously no MSG. The key is to have all the sauces and vinegars and spices that make the dish.

One of Lee Lee's favorites is stir fryed pork with scallions.

Ingredients:

2lbs of Pork Loin

6 cloves of garlic

1/4 cup of olive oil

8 Bunches of scallions

Hosin Sauce

Rice Wine Vinegar

Soy Sauce

Dice the garlic and put it in the wok with the olive oil. Saute until it is caramelized but make sure you don't burn it.

Now I like to use great ingredients so I don't stint when I buy meat I get the best. What I do is buy a pork loin without too much fat. Put it in the fridge until it is really chilled. Then take it out and slice it paper thin with a really freakin sharp knife. Each slice should be about the size and the thickness of a silver dollar.

Put the pork in the pan and fry it up. Make sure you slop the garlic and oil all over the place to give it some flavor. When you have browned it up, drain out the excess oil but leave just a little or add a fresh drop or three.

Now when you cut the scallions don't cut them the way you usually do. That is to say slicing from the white side down. You need to cut them in long strips about two inches. Use all of the scallion both the white and the green parts just leave off the fuzzy stuff at the bottom. Toss in the scallions and stir fry that stuff around.

Add three table spoons of rice wine vinegar and stir it around. Add in 1/2 cup of low sodium soy sauce and stir. Add two tablespoons of hosin sauce and mush it all around until you have a thick gravy.

Now you can spice it up with a 1/2 teaspoon of red pepper flakes.

Serve over white rice.

(Note the photo is of shredded pork which is just cut differently, and it is a cheaper cut of pork)

Remembrance of things Pabst

When I was eleven or twelve years old, my dad brought me to work with him on a Saturday and Sunday. He worked for the Irving Trust in the accounting department as an auditor but on the weekends he picked up extra money doing tax returns for this guy in Midtown. He had his own accounting practice and as I said he specialized in the garment center and Chinese restaurants.

Anyway my job was to file, sharpen pencils and copy the tax returns. It was around 1969 or 1970 or so and they didn't have such a thing as a Xerox machine. What they had was a Bruning Copyflex which was a "Wet" copier. Now that is not as exciting as it sounds. What it was is you did the returns on a stencil and matched it up with "treated paper" and it was run through a machine. There was fluid in the machine and when it came out it would be wet and you would have to lay it out to dry. Then you had to put the pages in order and staple it and mail it to the government. Of course tax returns were about five pages then not the twenty to fifty pages they are today.

Since I had a good work ethic and worked really hard the boss hired me to work through the summer. When I was in high school he hired me to come help him at his accounts during the summer. Now in those days there was no such thing as a computer or a calculator or a laptop. You had green accounting paper, pencils and your fingers and your toes. So it was a lot of adding and subtracting and proving out ledgers and old time accounting work like you were Bartleby the fucking Scrivner.

So I would go with Eddie to these Chinese restaurants. I was a punk kid and I couldn't have a beer legally but I got a good grounding in Chinese food. Now in the early seventies you didn't really have the variety and knowledge about Chinese food that we have today. Basically when you were talking about Chinese food you were talking about Cantonese style food. You know. Egg Rolls. Chop Suey. Spare Ribs. Egg Drop Soup. Birds nest soup. It was really big with the Jewish guys. They loved it.

Now we had this client on Ann St in downtown Manhattan. It was called Yee's cafe and it was a pretty interesting place. They had just taken over a Greek diner and sold food like a diner. I mean it wasn't a traditional old school Chinese restaurant with the decor of the Budda and the fish tank and all that happy horseshit. You could get eggs in the morning too. A lot of the back office people who worked on Wall St would go there for lunch. He did have a great dish with shrimp and bean sprouts that was really tasty.

Anyway it was a pretty easy account in the accounting sense. I mean he did a lot with cash and only wrote a few checks if you know what I mean. So it became the first account I went to on my own without any supervision. For years upon year I would go and do the books and chow down on some bean sprouts.

But then we had the Szechuan invasion. A lot of people came over from the Szechuan province or whatever the hell it was and brought the spicier and hotter Szechuan style to compete with the blander Cantonese style. This new place opened up around the corner on Broadway on the corner and started to steal a lot of business. It was tough for Yees Cafe.

Now I bet ricpic is the only guy old enough to remember when Chinese food only came in cardboard cartons and there was no such thing as the Styrofoam lunch containers that are so ubiquitous today. It seems that a Chinese restaurant supply company came up with this compartmentalized lunch packaging that you could go in and get a combination plate with fried rice, beef with broccoli and a egg roll in one shot for three dollars. The problem was what do you do with it when you are done? You see Yee's was like a diner. You got the stuff on real plates and ate with a metal fork. Old school. But this new fangled place was all modern. The dude running thought he was going to start a string of them and be the Chinese McDonald's.

Now around 1978 or so I was in college in Pace and still doing the taxes for Yees. He was holding on even thought the competition was tough. They had knocked down the building next door and there was just a big hole in the ground. And a funny thing happened. The other guy with the fast food Chinese decided that he could save money by firing his carting company and dumping his garbage in the big empty lot between his store and Yee's cafe. Mounds upon mounds of garbage. Of course this was the seventies and the city was all fucked up so no one noticed or they bribed the sanitation guys or whatever.

One hot summer night a pipe burst and hot scalding water was emptied into the lot. About a thousand rats came pouring out on to Ann Street. They bit passerby's, tires, garbage bags and anything they came into contact with in lower Manhattan. It was like a horror movie. Just like the movie "Ben" only without the Michael Jackson songs or the creepy white guy. They swarmed the cops and the fireman who were sent out to kill them. They closed the whole street for two weeks.

After that no one would eat at Yee's. The other guy was gone with the wind because they could prove it was his fault so he want back to Hong Kong or whatever. But Mr. and Mrs. Yee lost their business and there was nothing you could do about it. I mean they probably would have lost it soon anyway because all of the big chains like McDonald's and Burger King and Wendy's and what not took over the fast lunch business. People didn't want to sit down in a diner setting so much anymore. So like Cantonese food, a Chinese diner became a thing from out of the past. Like a gas light or a hitching post.

I have eaten a lot of Chinese food since then, but I have yet to get a shrimp with bean sprouts that matched up to Yee's.

And the rats. Well man, they are still around. Watch out because at any minute they can come streaming out and start biting you on the ankle.