table talk / By Joseph Byrd

Byrd-Fried™

A whole new world of stir-fry awaits

(Aug. 27, 2009)  OK, I confess: I’m obsessive-compulsive about food grammar. You know, like the way cases and tenses have to match in prose? Well, components of a meal should do the same thing, or it bothers me — for example, combinations that just don’t go together, like guacamole and knackwurst. Or lamb curry and iceberg lettuce with blue cheese. Or sashimi and corn bread. Or chili dogs with dill-buttered Romano beans. Nothing exactly illegal about any of those, but something in me winces. They just don’t belong.

This does not mean that I can’t push the envelope: one of our favorite take-out meals is Crispy Szechwan Beef from Liu’s in Eureka, combined with Vegi Samosas from Indian Cuisine. But there’s still a note — call it “Oriental Mystique” — that bonds the two dishes. (Pssst: Both are deep fried. Tell no one.)

This attitude would be truly obsessive if both Beni and I did not enjoy cooking as a hobby. Since we do cook, it’s more a theme. When the chili dog accompaniment came up, we made slaw. But in the midst of the Farmers’ Market season, we seek out all the grand variety of flavors and textures. And often, finding ways of combining the food we’ve purchased (and much that we’ve previously frozen) is a welcome challenge.

So our meals — usually planned by her, based on purchases we make Saturday — are negotiated. Mary’s bone-in chicken thighs, for example (the roasting of which we’ve been refining since we discovered them). She’ll say, “You have to trim the chicken and marinate it. Do you have time to do that Friday afternoon, when we need to have a dinner picnic for four?” And we work it out.

One of the most glorious presentations I know is a cornucopia of blanched, chilled baby vegetables and home-cured pickles. But what of the rest of the year?

For many, the answer is “stir-fry” — a verb become so ubiquitous it is now a noun. If I had no personal interest in culinary complexity, I could easily make delightful simple suppers of hamburger steak combined with a vegetable stir-fry. But for most people, a stir-fry is an Asian-derived meal. I sure used to think so. You need sesame oil, ginger, garlic, chiles, then you deglaze the pan with sweet white wine, and add tamari and/or black bean sauce. That’s what we define as “stir-fry,” a concatenation of flavors that are distinctly Asian.

And that’s what bothered me earlier this summer. We were having lamb chops, and I wanted a kind of medley, or ratatouille of new vegetables, but not a stir-fry with the usual Asian flavors. I didn’t want a sesame/soy/garlic sauce; I wanted a Mediterranean stir-fry.

So I tried it. I blanched most of the vegetables ahead. Using a wok, I heated olive oil (in place of sesame or peanut), adding shallot and celery to the garlic/ginger/chile sauté. When these became translucent, I deglazed the pan with vermouth (in place of wine and tamari), added a little heavy cream, and a sprig of thyme. When the chunky sauce had come together, I threw in the vegetables, tossed and put the whole thing in a serving container. It was a revelation — not at all Chinese, but with bright flavors and firm textures.

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