Or thank goodness for the silk road!
Beef With Cumin; Revolutionary Chinese Cooking, page 102
When you think Chinese food, do you think cumin? I didn’t. But thanks to the silk road, Muslim traders and settlers, cumin has a place in Chinese cuisine. Dunlop notes that cumin is associated with the Muslim influenced city of Xinjiang.
Kevin, busy with work, took a night off from the kitchen and I was left to fend a pound of sirloin on my own. Sliced thin and tossed with soy sauce, shaoxing wine and potato flour to thicken, I stir-fried the beef with a handful of minced garlic, julienned ginger, firey hot long red thai peppers grown on Hedlin farms in La Conner and the all important cumin. I threw in a bit of chopped green onion when “the ingredients were sizzlingly fragrant and delicious,” as Dunlop said they would be
Cumin’s musky woody sent filled the house, and guess who came drifting out of the office, looking for the source.
Quickly, I fixed up another of Dunlop’s recipes, Chinese Water Spinach Stir-fried with garlic. No magic here, just Chinese water spinach (a product I had previously never used) thrown in the wok with minced ginger and finished off with a kiss of sesame oil.
Seated at the dining room table Kevin pondered over why he ever thought to hate Chinese food. Simple, elegant, and complex flavor profiles proved that there is more to what Kev and I grew up knowing Chinese food as.
Recipe ease:10
Time: 10
Make Again: 10 Not a bad thing to say about this recipe at all.
