Dumbo in the Kitchen - #14: All-in-One Fare

For a Chinese couple without children - yet - we face the same dilemma that a bachelor would face when it comes to cooking at home: to have a nutritionally balanced diet, ideally there should be two (or even three) vegetable dishes and one protein dish (meat, egg, bean, etc.) to accompany the rice; but to go to all that trouble of preparing three separate dishes just to feed two persons?

One of my favorite answers to that dilemma is the following "all-in-one" fare.

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First, let's look at the main ingredients: Chinese cabbage (not the whole plant, just six to ten leaves, depending on the size), carrot, broccoli (a quarter of a plant, I would say), celery (I have finally come to love this wonderful vegetable, having hated it since childhood), green pepper, shiitake mushrooms (lots of them!), and a couple of tomatoes. And, of course, there would also be some minced meat, which is not shown in the following picture.


You will notice that the assortment of vegetables cover a rather complete range of colors, which is how we should eat our veges, to make sure we get all the different types of vitamins and minerals. And the mushrooms are a wonderful source of antioxidants.

Oh, and of course, lots of garlic, too. In Chinese dishes, it is often the first thing to go into the heated oil, to lend its fragrance to the oil, and thereby adding a wonderful aroma to the overall dish.

For the minced meat, I marinated it with the usual mix of soy sauce, white pepper powder, and rice wine.


The various ingredients go into the wok in roughly the following order:
Oil --> chopped garlic (bring out the fragrance, but don't brown it) --> marinated minced meat --> carrot --> shiitake mushrooms --> (when the meat is almost done) green pepper --> broccoli --> Chinese cabbage & celery. Season with salt, and serve hot with rice or porridge.

If possible, I avoid cooking tomatoes. In this dish, the sliced tomatoes are used as garnishing, but, they will end up in our stomachs, nonetheless. :-)


I have a colleague - a young bachelor - who is going to further his study in New Zealand next year, and we (the busybody fatherly and motherly sort in the office) have been urging him to learn cooking. I told him that he should learn at least seven recipes, so he could have one different dish on each different day of the week (he just stared back at me in disbelief - he knows only how to fry an egg without burning it). And I think this is one of the seven dishes he should learn (in NZ, just replace the Chinese cabbage with cabbage, the shiitake mushroom with button mushrooms or some other mushrooms with similar texture). Another one is the Lanzhou-style noodle from the previous post (imagine: fresh tomatoes and celery from the local market, and some nice NZ beef! Or NZ lamb! He doesn't realize how delicious he could make that dish in NZ...).