I have never really been a fan of the stir-fry. Remember when stir-fry became fashionable in the eighties and you would be invited around to friends` homes for a stir-fry on the Cadac skottel instead of a braai and you would get a load of mince and rice with mushrooms and onions and odd sauces and you were expected to be impressed? Formerly living organisms were fried in a boat load of oil until they really were beyond resuscitation and uniform in lack of flavour and the only thing that stirred in me was my repugnance. Then frozen stir-fry veggie mixes were put on the market to ameliorate in the choice of veggies. And they are still on the shelves! Who buys them? The mix is good in theory but the limpness has never won me over to the continually fashionable, and ostensibly healthy, stir-fry! But tonight I enjoyed a stir-fry for the first time.
Son has been super considerate with the cooking so far. I think it’s because he is a little bored still being on vac and confined to home most of the time and I look awfully exhausted when I fall in through the back door at 5:30 after a day at work, 10 minutes a day in a supermarket getting fresh ingredients (shopping is a challenge for me) and 30 minutes at the gym. I got home tonight to find him doing a Sudoku…YAY! I have another one in the family addicted to them now! I thought I would leave him in peace to finish a puzzle and get on with dinner. It is very unfair to expect someone to interrupt their solving of a sudoku puzzle. There is an entire familiarity with the numbers that builds up as you enter the numbers and at times you just know numbers go in certain blocks without being able to rationally explain it, but you know the number layout well enough to just write them in! If you break the process, you might as well give up on that puzzle. So much thinking time is wasted if you have to put a puzzle down and pick it up again later. When I am on my own I have a SSB (secret single behaviour) which involves sudokus that I would be hard pressed to give up if I ever am fortunate enough to share my home with a magnificent significant other again (and he would have to be magnificent). I have a sudoku book in the loo and I like to complete a puzzle every morning…which means I need to be left in peace in the smallest room in my house for up to 20 minutes sometimes. And I have only one loo in my house…its an old vintage bungalow that I love more and more each day, but it has its limitations. I limit the loo sudokus to the easy ones or else I could be holed up in there all day. When my dad comes to visit, we share the puzzles, because I clearly cannot keep the loo occupied for 20 mins when there are more than just me in the house. I fill in some numbers, then he fills in a couple, then I carry on, and we can finish one between us over two days. Maybe Son can play the game too now and we can work on the more difficult ones. I digress… back to the stirfry.
As soon as I looked like I was going to make a start, Son instructed me that he was going to make the meal. Now I want peace in my home and will not challenge him on anything that does not go against our families` moral fibre, so I allow him to do what he wants. I know I will make up for it when he is studying for tests and exams and has tight deadlines during the semesters.
Chicken satay is a dish that introduced my palate to mixing peanut butter with meat. It was a mix I was unconvinced about until I tried it and I did develop a tolerance. Tonight’s recipe required a sauce of soy sauce, peanut oil, curry powder and peanut butter to be made up to fry strips of meat and then veggies once the meat was browned. Now I am not going to go out and buy ingredients that I am unlikely to use again so Son substituted the peanut oil with olive oil. We bought a magnificent 400g mature rump steak at the butchery last Saturday for this dish and today I bought a fresh Hawaiian stir-fry mix from Checkers. I do not have a working oven at the moment so I could not toast cashews, so I bought chilli cashews to add to the cooked dish just before serving. Wow... did we enjoy! The recipe is supposed to be enough for four people if served with rice or noodles. We ditched the carbs and ate the entire stir-fry between the two of us! No leftovers for lunch tomorrow! Son scored the meal at 8/10.
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