Tomatoes and Beef over rice

Being in Hyde Park, NY, having good Chinese food or authentic Chinese food is pretty impossible. So sometimes it calls for an opportunity to cook it yourself, if you have all the ingredients that is. Lucky for me, I only live 1.5-2 hours away from home, so I can pick up groceries from Chinatown every time I go home. I have all the typical seasonings to make basic Chinese food.

Growing up I never really enjoyed tomatoes. So automatically, I wasn't too fond of tomatoes and beef over rice. My brothers loved this dish though. This dish is actually pretty homestyle, every Chinese restaurant would make it in their own way. I only started liking this dish from this one restaurant called "Goody's". It was different from any other restaurant and they would also whip an egg into the sauce, like how they make egg drop soup (this style would translate into "wet/smooth egg"). Too bad I stopped going to them after I found a cigarette butt in my noodles while eating there one time. They have since relocated or closed.

This was my attempt to make the dish here at school when I was craving some homey Chinese food. All was apprx to taste, so adjust the seasonings to your own taste. I liked mine a bit more sweet and I like a lot of sauce. Growing up Chinese, the more rice you eat means that the dish/sauce is really tasty, this is actually a compliment to the Chef, when you have multiples of rice to eat with the dish. I love the extra sauce so that every grain or rice would be soaked up.





Here is the recipe.

.25 lb sliced Flank steak
2 ea tomates, washed cored and cut into wedges.

Marinade

1 t sesame oil
1 dash white pepper powder
.5 T sugar
1 T oyster sauce
1 T light soy
1.5 T dark soy
1 T tapioca starch

Those are just apprx. I marinaded the beef.
sauteed the beef, took it out, sauteed some garlic and thinly sliced
ginger, put the tomatoes in and then the beef put the sauce in.

Sauce

1 t sesame oil
2 T light soy
1 T dark soy
1T oyster
5 T ketchup (or to taste)
pinch of white pepper
sugar to taste

That was also apprx. I did it all by taste and added more if I needed
it. Then I mixed a slurry with cornstarch and water and put it in the
wok along with the beef and tomatoes till it bubbled and thickened.

Lots of blogs to be posted!

Seems like I am forever trying to catch up on blogging. I guess that is going to be happening quite often, given how busy school is. Lots of catching up to do. 6 more months till graduation. Started to look for jobs and seeing what the options are out there. I am not too sure what I exactly want to do. Still exploring. I am taking a "Professional Food Writing" course as an elective at school. I must say that it is the only class that I am loving right now. I actually want to go to class and when Professor Chalmers lets us out early, which she does quite often (even if it is 5-10 mins), I get really sad. She also has a blog online, her newest book is "Food Jobs" www.foodjobsbook.com/blog that's the link to her blog! Check it out. She's really funny and fascinating with tons of experience.

One of the recent class assignment was to write an article, for the Alumni Magazine (40,000 copies get sent out),on one of the following topics: Stars and Stripes (Independence day celebration on campus), Flavor or Bees. I attended the event and took some pictures, wrote two articles one on the event and one on flavor. Hey! I have to take every opportunity to get published! Who knows when someone will read it?! Well needless to say, my article did not get chosen but as a "consolation prize" the editor said she would use some of my pictures (or maybe just one). That's better than nothing. I am pretty happy about it. That's a start of something!

Here are some shots from that day that I actually liked myself. The editor didn't tell me which shots are going in yet.





OH! I'm also taking an online photography course soon! Really excited about that!