I am the stir-fry queen. I will throw anything in a wok and cook it. I mainly like chicken and beef stir-fry. I often go to the farmers market and buy fresh vegetables. There was an Asian family there selling their vegetables. Most of the stuff they had I had never seen but I am open to trying new things. They convinced me to buy a vegetable that looked like a cucumber and some other weird shaped vegetable.They referred to the strange item as a luffa.
Luffa is a fruit eaten as a vegetable and belongs to the cucumber family. The weird thing about this fruit is its use as a bath or kitchen sponge also spelled loofah. The fruit dries out for use as a natural scrubber. Who knew? It is a popular vegetable in Chinese stir-fry dishes and known as Chinese okra. Since I am such an adventurer, I bought one to see what I could do with it. I came up with a Chinese okra chicken recipe.
Ingredients
1 lb chicken breast
1 bunch broccoli
1 Chinese okra (luffa)
1 onion
1 tbsp garlic chili paste
2 tbsp sesame ginger marinade
6 tbsp oil
¼ cup soy sauce
1-2 cups cold rice
Salt and pepper to taste
Wash chicken and marinade in sesame ginger sauce for an hour. Place a wok on the stove and add 2 tbsp oil. Let the wok get nice and hot before adding ingredients. Cut the chicken breast into pieces. I season the chicken with sea salt and stir in the hot oil for a few minutes. Remove chicken from wok. Clean the wok and add 2 tbsp oil. I microwave the broccoli for 1-2 minutes first before adding to the wok. Wash the Chinese okra and cut the ends. Slice into ½ inch pieces. Stir-fry broccoli and luffa in the hot oil. Add the garlic chili paste in the middle of the vegetables and stir around. Remove vegetables once tender. Add 2 tbsp oil to wok then add cold rice and stir-fry for a minute or two. Cut up the onion. I like to add the onion at the end so it won't become soggy. Add to the rice the chicken, vegetables, and cut up onion. I don't use much salt since soy sauce has a lot of sodium. Pour the soy sauce into the wok and stir-fry all the ingredients together. Enjoy!