Suicidal Vegetables

I often find myself staring intently into my fridge trying to pick and choose the ingredients that would make a wonderful meal for my family for that particular day. I like to have the option of picking whichever ingredient, be it fish, meat, vegetable, etc. that would work best for the dish.

This time, my problem was that I had a head of broccoli, chinese cabbage, oyster mushrooms and green peas which were all threatening to wilt and expire that very night. There was no way I could choose to use any of it the next day. Making a mix vegetable dish was the obvious option, but I couldn't put my boys on another vegetarian meal two days in a row. I knew I'd have a mutiny in my hands and dinner would be a failure. So to save the vegetables and at the same time not incur the wrath of my family, I decided to incorporate fish.

I used three pieces of medium sized dory fillets and cut them into bite sized cubes. After giving it a light dusting of salt and pepper, I lightly fried it in olive oil to give it texture and color. Next, I did justice to all the above vegetables that insisted on being cooked this very night. After removing the nearly cooked fish, I stir fried a medium sized white onion (roughly chopped), a thumb sized garlic (thinly sliced) and grated three cloves of garlic right into the pan. Before adding the vegetables one by one, starting with the most hardy, I added a drizzle of saseme seed oil for added flavour. I also added some fish sauce, sweet soy sauce and a tablespoon of oyster sauce. I wanted a bit more soup in the dish so that my son could wet his rice with it and so, added half a  up of water.

I love my vegetables crunchy and so, in minutes the dish was done. I returned the fish to the pan, gave it a chance to mix with the vegetables and the sauce and turned off the heat within a couple of minutes. Walla. I saved the suicidal vegetables and made a delicious and healthy dinner.