The Spice Blend
Portobello mushrooms have a meaty quality that makes them a healthy stand-in for the steak that you might expect to find in this kind of Chinese-style stir-fry. (But you can add some sliced steak, if you wish.) Broccolini is great for stir-frying because its thin stalks cook quickly. Don't confuse it with broccoli rabe, which it resembles -broccolini is much milder. This stir-fry also gets a non-Asian seasoning of thyme, which works beautifully with the other flavors.
Sweet-scented Pilaf: Masala Pulao
Lacto-vegetarian (vegan if you use oil); gluten-free
Now that summer's coming soon to a neighborhood near you (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), you have to keep this simple but magical technique — ohitashi — in mind. Ohitashi is a method of steeping vegetables in a delicate dashi, which infuses ingredients with umami and lovely flavor but retains the food's natural taste and sensibility. The trick is to first blanch and shock the vegetables (quickly boiling in water, "blanching," then halting the cooking by plunging in ice-water, a.k.a. "shocking"). By partially cooking this way, you transform ingredients from the raw state, but still retain their integrity, and allow them to absorb the dashi.
Simple but delicious! Wrapped in a sheet of newspaper, this is a popular breakfast for people on the run. Often, the Vietnamese will simply pull up with their motorcycle at their favourite banh mi cart to pick one up on the way to work.
Fried rice is never something I intend to make, but it's something I'll cook for myself when I'm home, my wife and kids are away, and there's not a whole lot in the refrigerator. Fried rice is best made with day-old rice, so it's essentially glorified leftovers.