Will Sustain Life: Shrimp Stirfried Rice

This one is a Will Sustain Life with an exclamation point, as in,"Yay, this will sustain life and more!"

We went to New Plymouth for the rugby last Thursday.  Jonno was cheering for the USA, I was cheering for Russia.  I know, I should be rooting for my yankee brothers, but what can I say, my loyalties are screwy!  My favourite thing about the night was Captain Clever, the captain for the USA team.  I thought he should be a superhero. 


A Kiwi backing USA and an American pulling for Russia.

On Sunday when we got home, I did a Very Important Thing and organised our home study.  This had been bugging me for weeks, and upon arriving home from seven hours in the car playing crazy nerd games with my husband, I thought, "Now is the perfect time to tackle the bogey that is the study."  Not anything about relaxing or doing something about the pile of laundry that was starting to swallow the bathroom floor or about putting something together for dinner that was healthier than the last three nights pizza I had endured.  (Ok, 'endured' might be a bit strong - I loved every bite of all that pizza, even if some of it was frozen from the supermarket. I loves me some pizza!)  Nooooo, I was fully in 'Must Organise or Die' mode and nothing was gonna stop me!

I pulled out all my boxes of craft stuff and re-categorised everything, I filed all of our important papers into a new filing system, I even re-framed a photo and painted the frame black which is something I've been threatening to do for about eight months now.  I found our wedding decorations and made plans to create something arty with them one day.  I boxed up everything related to the seventeen different projects in various stages of 'bought the supplies and just barely begun' so that they looked pretty and weren't sitting out all over the show and thus reminding me of my failure to get past the starting line.

Meanwhile Jonno was sitting on the couch, watching the rugby - his Very Important Activity for the next month.

All of a sudden, I hear behind me, "Honey, don't you think we should do something about dinner?"  I realised it had gone way past dark out and my tummy was arumblin', aka past the point of logically being able to think of something to make for dinner and into the slightly-panicky phase where anything edible will do.  Jonno had a scared look on his face, like he was afraid I had forgotten to feed him. 

I always hate it when it gets to this point, when you're so damn ravenous that you can't even wait for the water to boil for pasta, you must have food thisveryinstant.  This time, I did a very new and novel thing for us - I went and looked at what food we had in the kitchen!  (Usually I just declare any thought of actually making food pure foolishness and beg for takeout.)  Lo and behold, in the freezer were some shrimp and some frozen veg, and lightbulb!  Shrimp Stirfry!!  This also helped to reduce the number of soy sauce bottles lurking in our cupboard down to three, all of which are in a semi-full state.  I'm pretty sure the kitchen elves are having a laugh at us somewhere behind all the pasta they stocked up on last month. 

Here are the details on my surprising food win on Sunday.  The stars must have aligned!

Shrimp Stirfried Rice
about 4 serves, super-easy for the lazy meal

• 2 cups frozen pre-cooked shrimp
• half a bag of frozen veggies, stri-fry mix if you have it
• 1 medium onion
• 1/4 cup fish sauce
• 1/4 oyster sauce
• 3 tbsp hoisin sauce
• 1/4 cup soy sauce (ish!)
• 1 cup cooked rice
• 2 eggs

1. Start your rice and cook as per directions.
2. Put the shrimp in a bowl full of very hot water to defrost.
3. Steam up your frozen veg.
4. Beat the eggs in a bowl, then cook them as you would scrambled eggs in a small frying pan or in a non-stick wok if you have one.
5. Roughly chop the onion, then put it into a hot wok with a swirl of olive oil.  Once the veggies are done, shake any excess water off and add to the onions in the wok.
6. Add the sauces to the veggeies and season with a little salt and some pepper.
7. Once the rice and shrimp are done, turn the heat down to low and add them to the wok at the same time, and give the whole thing a swirl of soy sauce, and let it all get to know one another for a minute or so - you don't want to cook the shrimp for too long because they will go all rubbery.
8. Roughly chop the scrambled eggs and add them at the very last possible second.
 

You could also add chopped capsicum, green beans, broccoli - the sky is the limit on the veggies, but this is what I had in my kitchen and therefore what my starved brain thought would be enough to sustain life for another night!  Also, my husband loves pineapple in anything Asian-related, and if we had had some, that would have been a nice addition to this too.

What have you thrown together in a moment of hungry desperation that turned out better than you thought?

...Now back to the rugby!

Will Sustain Life #1

My mother (hi Mom!!) liked to experiment with food, trying new recipes and sometimes making things up.  Whenever she did that, at meal time she would announce that we were eating An Experiment.  This declaration would elicit groans and gasps from my seester and I, while Dad would stoically gird himself to eat pretty much the whole meal on the chance that the rest of us declared it unfit for our consumption.  If the Experiment was actually good, it would go into regular rotation.  Then there was an in-between category that Mom called "Will Sustain Life" - it wouldn't poison us, and would sustain us until the next meal, but she was not under any circumstances going to make it again.  She was not under any illusions about the tastiness of her Experiments, and it was more about the exercise of trying new things that excited her I think.

Cut to Wednesday - I had grand plans of making a Banana Cake (my first recipe from Allyson Gofton's Bake) for this month's Sweet NZ entry, parmesian pork chops, and roasted kumara and peas.  The only success out of those four were the peas.  Total fail.

For some reason, I thought doing the Banana Cake first was the smart thing - then I could easily make dinner while it was baking.  What I failed to notice was that it would take at least 35 minutes in the over, which is way more than enough time for me to crumb some pork chops and chop some kumara.  I could have roasted a turkey in the time I lost waiting for the damn Banana Cake to bake. 

I'll just list all of my fails, shall I?  Let's get it all out there.  Cooking Therapy!

Second: soggy, non-flavorful porkchops.  Now, I thought since I had bought the Apple-Somethingorother flavored porkshops, they would be great with a crumb coating.  Pulled them out of the freezer, defrosted them but (Pork Chop Mistake #1) clearly not long enough, dunked them in olive oil and them coated them with half bread crumbs, half parmesian cheese (Mom's Never-Fail Coating Formula which failed, but due to Operator Error). 

Next: we got a bag of what I thought we just small orange kumaras from a roadside market on the way back from the snow last weekend, and I thought that roasting them might be a nice change from the usual baked (let's face it - microwaved) kumara that I do.  So I chopped them up into chunks, coated with olive oil, a splash of balsamic (this is the Experiment part), salt, pepper, and basil.  Into a casserole dish and time for Pork Chop Mistake #2 - I put them on the top shelf, so they got the direct heat and proceeded to defrost/melt/liquify while the kumara barely got any and therefore didn't actually roast.


The Kumara Experiment - could be a cool band name?


I figured out my oven configuration mistake about 20 minutes into the baking process, and swapped the dishes around, and while that did serve to kind of roast the kumara, it didn't do anything to my poor dead pork chops.  RIP pork chops.  You tried, you tried to be a good dinner, but in the end, you were just soggy.

So the final result of dinner was: wet (hey at least they were moist!) porkchops with no flavor, kind of roasted but too sweet allegedly-kumara, and the aforementioned successful peas.  Have I told you that we can actually screw up frozen peas in our house?  I didn't know it was possible!  But lo and behold, we have done it. 

The most hilarious part of all this was that by taking so long to actually make dinner, I had starved poor Husband all night, so that at that point ANY food would have tasted like the proverbial manna from heaven to him.  Sure enough, after a few bites and my proclamation of this being an Experiment, Jonno said, "honey,  you can experiment like this anytime!"  To which I cringed, because to me, this meal fell squarely in the category of Will Sustain Life.  But boy did we eat those peas! 

After dinner I whipped up some chocolate icing from Alexa Johnston's very important Kiwi cookbook Ladies, A Plate and promptly frosted my slightly pitted-looking banana cake.  Said cake, aka The Bane Of My Wednesday Night Existence Other Than The Pork Chops, was apparently still too warm for my lovely frosting, making it melt and run away from the heat.  I put the whole shebang out in the conservatory hoping to cool it down and stop the madness, but it was Too Late.  The dreaded frosting runs had already created carnage on my cake. 

Mr. Banana Cake - I am so disappointed in you.

Not to be deterred from something with chocolate on it however, I cut myself a nice chunk of cake, poured a big glass of milk (the mandatory bedfellow of anything chocolate), and prepared for Redemption and Glory as I took a bite, only to taste Defeat.  Bland, over-chocolated, over-sweetened frosting, stringy banana chunks.  Hmm, seems I missed the part of the directions that said to "mash bananas" - I merely mushed them up into chunky pieces.  The banana never got the chance to mingle with the other ingredients and spread its flavor tentacles into the cake, and I think they were a bit bland; definitely brown from being smushed in the car over the ski trip weekend but not over-ripe like a real banana cake needs. 

Disclaimer: before moving to New Zealand, I didn't know such a thing as a banana cake existed.  I'm serious.  I come from the Land of Boxed Cake Mixes!  So I guess I am still in the teenage years of being a Foodie in New Zealand, not being able to bake a proper cake from scratch and all.  But I'm working on it!  I will make another banana cake, and another, and another until I get it right, or my pancreas explodes in protest. 

But for now, it's the Rugby World Cup!!!!!

*Random capitalization done on purpose!