Cooking by numbers

Here’s the thing about mixed-vegetable dishes: which vegetable cooks first? It all looks so simple until you have to handle them yourself, then you realize how delicate these things are.

Out comes my timer and steamer. Hey, I do what I gotta do — it’s amateur hour. My experience with chow pat chin is limited to restaurants, most of the time at Majestic. I take a cue from Eva’s chop suey — that is, cook the dish one vegetable at a time. It takes a while, but it’s time well spent as it gives me the chance to catch each one at that point they call “half-cooked” (or a bit south of it, anyway). Carrot? Depending on the cut, I now know to keep my eyes peeled around the seven-minute mark. Broccoli — no more than five (cauliflower a little less). Comfort in numbers.

Now I’ve done the math, you can do chow pat chin straight in the wok like those show-offs on YouTube. But let’s do them one better, shall we? See, the beauty of steaming the vegetables separately is that it lets you do 80% of the work ahead of time and leaves you free to put the dish together at a later time, which is more likely to be the very last minute, when the dish is at its best. You’ve got the numbers, use them to your advantage.

First things first: prep. For shrimps, remove head, peel except for tail end, devein. For squid, peel, remove innards, slice. Clean and set aside in fridge until using. For vegetables, slice into bite-size portions and steep in water (for what it’s worth, I add a splash of vinegar to mine). After 15 minutes, drain and rinse.

Get your steamer going. Once water boils, put in the vegetable(s) that will take longest to cook, in this case carrots. Mine were sliced about a third of an inch thick, so that’s around 8 minutes — let’s go by that. Start the timer, cover the pot. At 2:00, add bok choy; at 3:00, broccoli; at 4:00, cauliflower. Lid back and wait until the timer clocks 8 full minutes, then remove basket from the steamer and dump the contents into a bowl of cold water to stop them from cooking any further — and don’t worry if they’re undercooked at this point, we’ll take care of that later. Also, save the liquid you steamed the veggies with, a cup of it (add more water if it comes up short).

That wasn’t so hard, was it? Now let us wrap this up. Finally, we get to use that wok! Get it hot with about 2 tablespoons of oil. Add your mushrooms of choice (mine is straw) and sauté for around 5 minutes. Next, stir in some sliced onion and minced garlic, followed by the shrimps and squid. Cook a minute or two, or until the meat lose their raw color, then pour in reserved liquid along with 2 teaspoons of hon-dashi and a teaspoon of white sugar. Let boil for a minute, then thicken with a teaspoon of cornstarch dispersed in an equal amount of water (stir to avoid clumps). Season with pepper and a drizzle of sesame oil before adding the drained vegetables. Stir well, turn off heat, and let sit for a minute before serving.