[Hannah]: Cooking at home

Here's the thing about cooking at home. You get to a certain level, where you know you can make a pretty fine dinner. Whatever you make, it smells good, it tastes good, it's reasonably healthy. But you have this gradual realization that the underlying flavor in all of your pretty fine dinners is 1) soy sauce, 2) lemon/vinegar, 3) black pepper, or 4) tomato sauce. If you cook like me, everything also has garlic in it.

Here was my attempt to go beyond these flavors, based vaguely on Mark Bittman's "Spicy Shredded Beef" and also on all the dying stuff we have in the fridge. I am not calling it Thai as Mark does, because, well, if someone really cared they might be offended.

Thai-Inspired Refrigerator Stir Fry For Two:

saute in oil:
a couple cloves minced garlic
a teaspoon minced ginger
basil left over from some other cooking project
1 diced jalapeno.

Add a minute later:
a couple celery sticks, sliced into small pieces crosswise.
mushrooms left over from some other cooking project
soy sauce
lime juice
ground black pepper

cook this until the celery is bright green and softened.

Don't rub your eyes because remember you just diced a jalapeno.

Add 1/2 pound chicken breast, cut into thin shreds. (for some reason Mark tells us to toss the chicken breast shreds in an egg white first. I did this, and it was fine, but I have no idea whether it was important, because Mark didn't explain).

Cook until chicken is cooked. Serve immediately, with rice, noodles, or packaged peanut butter thai noodles if you need even MORE flavors in stuff.

Okay, so it still has soy sauce and garlic. but it's a start!