Stir-Fried Ginger Broccoli

At Christmas and Hanukkah time, my food-related thoughts go straight to starch and sugar.   I can spend hours planning which cookies I’ll make, or devising latke variations.   Grating potatoes and using up huge amounts of butter, sugar and flour is my modus operandi at this time of the year.

So it was refreshing to make stir-fried ginger broccoli with the Grace Young and the Wok Wednesdays crowd this week.  The dish was simple to prepare, especially with my tip for peeling ginger.

The recipe does have an extra step (before stir-frying) – quickly cooking the broccoli for just about 1 minute in rapidly boiling water. This  technique, blanching, turns the broccoli bright green and tenderizes it before the stir-fry.  It is best to set out all the ingredients near the wok (mise en place) before you start stir-frying and use a cheat sheet to remind you of the steps as you cook. Using those tips, you can make fragrant and crunchy stir-fried ginger broccoli in less than 5 minutes.

The key to the gingery taste is slightly smashed ginger slices and ginger juice. You get the latter by grating ginger and squeezing it.  In Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge, the recipe uses double the amount of ginger juice.  I used the larger amount and it wasn’t overwhelming at all.

Here is a slightly adapted version of the recipe, along with a video of Grace preparing this dish.  (I didn’t find the video until after I made the broccoli.) 

I did “invent” 2 variations on Grace’s methods besides my tip for peeling ginger: 

Using a clean white handkerchief to squeeze out the ginger juice.  That technique worked beautifully and I recommend it. I keep the handkerchief in the kitchen for fine straining; it works well when a fine strainer or cheesecloth would allow bits of the item begin squeezed to come through, but the handkerchief keeps all the solids out of the liquid and you can throw the pulp away after you have squeezed out all the juice.  This handkerchief was my dad’s and using it is a nice way to bring his memory into the kitchen.  If you don’t have one on hand, you can buy all-cotton handkerchiefs inexpensively at Sears, Target, Amazon and elsewhere. 

Using the pestle (the club-shaped pounder) from one of my mortar and pestle sets to smash the ginger instead of the back of a knife.  I am notoriously clumsy and avoid using knives in creative ways whenever possible.  

I served the stir-fried ginger broccoli with Asian-style turkey meatballs and rice.  

The next night I didn’t have any leftovers. (My beloved took the rest of the stir-fried ginger broccoli to work for lunch.) However, I did have rice.  With a bunch of chopped up vegetables and 2 eggs, I used the rice to make scrumptious peppery fried rice with toasted pine nuts.