Basics of stir-fry: baby bok choy

I love going to the Chinese or Asian supermarket to buy my vegetables. However, nowadays you can easily go to Whole Foods or Berkeley Bowl and find a vast selection of Asian vegetables. We like to buy baby bok choy, because it lasts at least a week in the fridge and its super easy to cook. Most vegetables are really easy to stir fry once you learn the basics. You can easily switch it up by adding different seasonings such as soy sauce, hot sauce, garlic, onions…

Ingredients:

4-6 baby bok choi
1 tbsp diced garlic
1 tbsp vegetable oil

Directions:

1. First wash and clean the vegetable. Sometimes lots of dirt gets trapped in the leaves and you don’t want to be eating dirt later. Also, try to dry the leaves as best you can to avoid the oil splatter when you add to the pan later.

2. Prep time. Chop the garlic or onions if you have. Trim the ends of each bok choy, about 1/2 an inch.

3. Turn heat on med-high. Add vegetable oil to your pan. (Note: vegetable/corn oil cooks at a higher temperature than olive oil, so always use it when stir frying) At this time, if you have garlic or onions, add and cook for ~1-2 min to flavor the oil (and the room).

4. Add the vegetables in the pan. Be careful of oil splatter if there is water on the leaves. Use your spatula to mix the vegetables to evenly distribute the heat. Cook for about 3-5 minutes until the whites are tender and leaves are soft. Sometimes if there are a lot of vegetables, I will add a little bit of water (less than 1/4 cup) to steam and cover for 1-2 minutes.

5. Add salt to taste. You want to add salt at the very end because if you add it early, it will change to a darker shade of green. You can add other seasonings as well such as soysauce (instead of salt), miso (instead of salt), dash of hot sauce…

6. Enjoy your healthy and tasty vegetables!