Last Wednesday, two days after the big storms here in the Northeast, our power went out at about 5:20 in the afternoon. A few hours later it was clear we wouldn’t be getting it back until nearly midnight, so, accompanied by the unearthly racket of our neighbor’s obnoxious generator, I went ahead with the stir-fry I had planned for dinner!

It was still somewhat light out while I was chopping up the veggies and meat, and by the time it was really dark I was mostly mincing ginger and making sauces. Ben brought in a bunch of candles and took some hilarious photos of me looking confused while trying to read the recipe.

I didn’t really follow a recipe in the end, since I had a random selection of vegetables and I wasn’t in the mood to velvet the pork. I took Barbara Tropp’s sauce and marinade recipes from a pork stir-fry and used whichever ingredients I had. The marinade had some sesame oil, soy sauce and garlic; the sauce included sugar, soy sauce, sherry vinegar (subbing in for cooking sherry and rice vinegar!), hoisin sauce, etc. For aromatics I just used garlic and ginger. Veggies: orange pepper (for Ben), a big head of bok choy, zucchini. The pork was from the tenderloins; I had trimmed the skinny and fat ends and frozen them for stir-fry.

I cut them up into ribbons and cooked them halfway in a little corn oil, then stir-fried the aromatics and vegetables, cooked them in the sauce, thickened the sauce with cornstarch, and at the end threw in the leafy parts of the bok choy and the pork to finish cooking.

Served with jasmine rice, it was quite good, and the leftovers were even better the next day.