Experimental Chopsuey

Sarita helped inspire to re-create this recipe.

You see, my college friends and I have been emailing recently. Trying to catch up on who's pregnant and who's not, who's working and who's not, who's here and who's abroad. For the longest time, we have been amiss in emailing each other. Now, all of a sudden, everyone's back from dead. This includes those who rarely reply. (I admit I am one of them.)

One of the topics brought up was eating healthy. Sarah was asking for simple vegetable recipes and so I tried to recreate the one I cooked in Germany (some months back.) All I can say is this, it's sooooo much easier to get ingredients when they are written in English (or Filipino).

Without further ado, my simple experimental vegetable stir fry.

What do you need:

a little oil
1 clove of garlic (chopped)
1 piece of onion (sliced)
2 tablespoons of cornstarch (mixed in a 1/4 cup water)
3 tablespoons oyster sauce (approximately)
1 cup of water
salt and pepper to taste
and of course, vegetables you like... (Lucky me, the supermarket has mixed vegetables, peeled and cut, so it takes less time to prepare this.)

For this one, I used the veggies that I love:

1 small cabbage
1 medium red bell pepper
1 small carrot
1 small cauliflower
1 small broccoli

What you do:

Heat the oil in a wok (preferably non-stick skillet). Saute the garlic (make sure you don't burn it.) and add the onions. Stir-fry the vegetables harder to cook (like carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, etc) and put the easier ones to cook last. Add the mixed cornstarch in water, oyster sauce, and water. You may put more oyster sauce and water as you like. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Let it simmer in very low heat for about 10-15 minutes (depends on the vegetables you use.)

The sauce (cornstarch in water + oyster sauce + water) will have to be proportional to the amount of vegetables you cook. It will be thick and may take quiet awhile for the sauce to appear.

Disclaimer: This is a non-professional recipe. I learned this when I first started cooking, without a cookbook and using ingredients named in German.