I Love Chives

Another relatively easy dish from our (first, as the delay in posting has been so long that there has now been a second) Every Grain of Rice dinner was the stir-fried beansprouts with Chinese chives (jiu cai yin ya / 韭菜銀芽). Although it was easy to cook, the prep was really time-consuming, mostly because I am slow and made some dumb decisions (more on that to come).

The ingredients in this dish were:

Please ignore the Sichuan pepper, potato starch and unattractive sink

- Chinese chives ($1.50) *

- Beansprouts ($2.99) **

- Red bell pepper ($1) ***

- Cooking oil ($0)

- Salt ($0)

- Chinkiang vinegar (bottle was $1.29, probably used $0.10) ****

* The chives should have been cheaper but I didn't use them all and then they went bad. Sad, because it was a really hearty batch of chives.

** The beansprouts should have been cheaper but the ones I bought from the Chinese grocery store had been sitting in water & I waited too long to use them. Had to toss them and use the super fancy organic beansprouts from Food Emporium, which were of course more than twice the price of Chinatown beansprouts.

*** The red bell pepper was really only supposed to be for color, but I used much more and treated it as a third vegetable.

**** I really have no idea. I think I overestimate the cost on the oils and vinegars.

That puts the grand total for this dish at just under $6. Not that cheap for a vegetable dish but I think some of that is due to the reasons above.

Process:

First step: prep all the ingredients. All the vegetable pieces are cut to about the size of the average beansprout, so that everything starts out the same size when raw. 

Finished product

The part of the prep that took the longest was prepping the chives. I washed them (very) thoroughly and then chopped them really, really carefully. I think what threw me off was this instruction from the cookbook: "Keep the white ends and the green leaves separate." I painstakingly chopped each of the chives to keep the white parts and green parts separate, meaning that I cut each individual leaf at the point where it went from green to white. Of course, had I just read the full recipe more carefully from the start, I would have realized that the point of separating the white and green parts was to cook the white parts for a longer period of time than the green. So it didn't have to be so perfect. Oops. Lesson learned and future time saved.

Second step: blanch the beansprouts (about 30 seconds) and then drain them.

Third step: heat the wok, add the oil, add the white chive parts and red peppers, add the green chive parts, add the bean sprouts, stir until hot, add vinegar, done.

Review:

This dish tasted really healthy because of all the vegetables, prepared and cooked simply. The only negative was that there was a bit too much oil. I followed the recipe and then increased the oil a little bit to account for all the extra vegetables I used. But it definitely didn't need that much oil, not even as much as the recipe called for. Otherwise it was pretty good. It definitely passed the color test!

Since then, I've made the chives and red peppers together again (didn't have beansprouts in the fridge) with the vinegar, and the flavors came out really well. These dishes were the first time I had ever cooked with Chinkiang vinegar and I have really come to like the flavor. Another good dish from the cookbook!