Tonight's Dinner: July 23, 2012

This week I decided that we're going to go Chinese.  I've noticed that we cook all different kinds of food from Mexican to Southern and tend to avoid Chinese.  Our Chinese food consumption is typically at our parents' houses, restaurants, or take out boxes.  I'm determined to learn how to cook more Chinese food.  I can do basics, but I'd like to go beyond that.  Tonight we made a simple family-style steamed fish and gai lan.  It was delicious and very similar to what you get in restaurants.  I generally don't eat a lot of fish, but I'm pretty sure I could have eaten this whole thing by myself.  This whole meal was about $7 for the two of us.  Pretty good bargain if you ask me.

In restaurants they usually don't put anything in the cavity of the fish, but
since we had a lot of green onion, garlic, and ginger cut up I decided to shove
some in for good measure.  This steaming only took about nine minutes.

We combined the oil and soy sauce step together.  I believe that you usually
steam the fish with soy sauce already in the steamer, but we just mixed it in with
 the oil to pour over.  It was just as tasty. 

I parboiled the gai lan and then quickly stir fried them in sesame oil and a little
bit of the left over soy sauce mixture.  We drizzled oyster sauce on top.

I think I ate most of the gai lan by myself, but it works out well because I like
the stalks and nick likes the leaves.  It makes it easy to share.