Bœuf braisé aux carottes

Bœuf aux carottes is a classic French dish, I think, but I've found the recipe under that name in only one of my 8 or 10 French cookbooks. There seem to be quite a few other names for the same thing. Simply bœuf braisé, it being understood that carrots and onions will be in the pot with the meat. Or bœuf mode. Even bœuf à la mode (no, no ice cream with it).

Braising used to be done in a fireplace, with a special cooking pot called a braisière set right on top of the fire's glowing embers. The braisière had a tight-fitting lid with a rim around it so that you could put some of the glowing embers on top to turn it into a kind of oven. Nowadays, we cook things like bœuf aux carottes or bœuf bourguignon on top of the stove or in our oven.

To braise meat or vegetables, first you brown the main ingredients in what is called un corps gras — butter, oil, duck fat, or lard. That's called faire revenir la viande or faire revenir les légumes — to "bring them back", as Walt pointed out on his blog a few days ago. I've been thinking about that expression, and I think it means that browning is a way of bringing food back to life. The meat or vegetable was alive and then it was dead and maybe not very appetizing. Browning it in the corps gras turns it into something appetizing again. Does anybody have a better theory?

Here's how you make bœuf braisé aux carottes. Like so much of the good food in France, it's not so much a recipe as a method. As I said, first, on fait revenir des oignons, des lardons, et des morceaux de bœuf. Start by browning 2 or 3 sliced onions with a hundred grams (3 or 4 ounces) of diced bacon or ham in a stew pot. I like to use a high-sided pot so the cooking fat doesn't spatter everything in the kitchen. You can also include 3 or 4 garlic cloves, smashed and peeled, for more flavor.

When the onions and bacon are lightly browned, take them out and into the same pot put 2 to 2½ lbs. (un kilo) of beef cut into big chunks. Chuck roast is a good choice. It doesn't have to be the tenderest beef, but you want it to be tasty. Have the pot very hot, put the beef chunks into it in a single layer without crowding things too much, and let them brown really well on one side. Then turn them over and brown them on another side. Finally, just start stirring them around so that they brown more or less all over. You shouldn't have any or much liquid in the pot at all during the browning.

Now add the onions and bacon back into the pot and stir everything around again. Pour on enough white wine — red wine would turn the braise into a bœuf bourguignon instead of a bœuf mode — and stock or water to just cover the ingredients. Add salt and pepper at this point, along with some thyme, bay leaves, and maybe a little ground cloves or allspice. If you want a nice brown sauce, add a tablespoon of tomato paste, but don't overdo it. I added some dried shitake mushrooms and some green leek tops to my stew. The leek tops are just for flavor; leave them in big pieces so you can take them out of the stew at the end of the cooking time.

Let the beef and aromatic ingredients cook at a low simmer for at least an hour. Taste the sauce for flavor and seasonings, and add some more wine, water, or stock as you think necessary to keep the meat just barely covered. Meanwhile, peel and cut up half a dozen carrots weighing 1 to 1½ lbs. Add them to the pot and push them down into the liquid, again adding more liquid as needed. The carrots need to cook slowly for a long time and they will lend their vegetable sweetness to the meat. Let the pot continue to simmer for an hour or even two hours longer on a very low flame.

I think that's it. You can put some potatoes into the pot for the last 30 or so minutes of the cooking time if you want to eat the bœuf aux carottes with potatoes. Or, separately, you can cook some rice or pasta to have with it. It needs a green salad too, either before or after you eat the main course. Bon appétit and happy cooking.

December 11ths past

Sometimes when I don't have anything better to do, I snoop around on my own computer to look at different photos I've taken over the past 11 years. Yes, yesterday marked the 11th anniversary of the day we saw this house for the first time. Six months later, we crossed the Atlantic and moved in.

December 11, 2013: Leek and bacon pizza — pizza aux poireaux et aux lardons

On Wednesday 11 December, two days ago, Walt was in the kitchen making us a couple of pizzas for lunch. They were going to be leek and bacon pizzas, one of his favorites. We hadn't had leek and bacon pizzas in a while. Walt first started making them some 15 years ago, when we still lived in San Francisco.

To dress up this year's pizza, we liberally sprinkled on grated parmesan cheese at the table.

Since I wasn't working in the kitchen, I opened up a folder of photos from December 11, 2004. What did I find? Well, on that day, nine years ago, Walt made leek and bacon pizzas too. It was a funny coincidence.

On December 11, 2004, we had the same kind of pizza. It wasn't the first time, or the last.

This morning, I had a look at the photos I took on December 11 in 2003 and in 2005. Here are two of them.

On December 11, 2003, we were amazed by one of the first winter sunrises we saw from the kitchen window of our 'new' house.

Collette was Callie's predecessor in our household. The photo dates from 11 Dec. 2005.

Collette was a dog we rescued from the Humane Society shelter in Santa Clara, California, in 1992. She was six months old and had been found wandering the streets with no collar or tag. She moved to France with us in 2003, at the age of 11½. And then she passed away at the age of 14, three or four months after I took this photo.

P.S. Today is CHM's birthday. Happy Birthday to him, and many happy returns of the day.

Electricity in the air and on the ground

I don't know why I like these but I do. They are the old and new warnings about the danger of our electrical feeder lines. The first one, which was posted on a utility pole, says:

It is absolutely forbidden
to touch the wires
even if they are lying on the ground
DANGER OF DEATH

The second one is less picturesque — more modern and functional. La Renaudière is the name of the hamlet we live in near Saint-Aignan:

Electricity Distribution Network France

High-tension transformer

La Renaudière

DANGER OF DEATH

Now that the feeder lines that bring electric current up to our hamlet from the river valley have been put underground, there's obviously no more mention of wires lying on the ground. We hope there's much less danger of power outages now.

It's possible too, to get a charge out of our local sunsets. No danger of death, however — at least I hope not. Even so, I guess you could call this a killer sunrise.

The way the sun was illuminating the trees in the background of this shot was drop-dead gorgeous, in my opinion.

Rouille

Rouille in French means "rust" — it's pronounced [ROO-yuh], with the French uvular (back-of-throat) R of course. It's really just one syllable, but with that tiny, short [yuh] glide at the end. The OO vowel is much rounder than any OO sound we have in English. You really have to pucker your lips to say it right.

Anyway, this post isn't about rust. It's about a sauce called rouille that people in the south of France serve with fish soup — either soupe de poissons or bouillabaisse [boo-yah-BESS]. Rouille is essentially an aïoli [eye-yo-LEE] sauce with hot pepper puree or powder stirred into it to give it a rusty color. And aïoli is basically a mayonnaise with a lot of garlic in it — at least one version is like that. Mayonnaise is a raw egg or egg yolk with vegetable or olive oil beaten into it to make a thick emulsion.

The easiest mayonnaise in the world to make is one using a whole egg, a cup of oil, and a stick blender. I've never seen it fail. Break an egg into a high-sided bowl — I use a tall, flat-bottomed glass pitcher — and put in a teaspoonful of Dijon mustard (or a good pinch of mustard powder) with some salt and pepper. Then pour in a cup of oil — I like to use half olive oil and half canola or sunflower oil — and mix it all up with a stick blender. Using a tall pitcher keeps it from going all over the room.

To turn the mayonnaise into aïoli (ail means garlic and is pronounced [EYE-yuh]) you just drop in three or four peeled garlic cloves as you blend the egg, mustard, and oil together. Or press the garlic into the finished mayonnaise. Finally, to turn that into rouille you add in a teaspoon or tablespoon of hot red pepper paste or powder, to taste. If you want a redder color, mix in a little bit of tomato paste.

Other ways to make rouille leave out the egg and use either bread crumbs or a pureed cooked potato as the thickener with oil, garlic, and red pepper paste or powder. I've never tried those. The whole-egg mayonnaise is just too easy to make. Juilia Child's MTAOFC has a recipe for the potato version*.

One way to serve with rouille when you're having fish soup is slather the rust-red mayonnaise on slices of toasted baguette and then float them on the surface of the soup when you serve it in big bowls at the table. The bread of course starts to go soggy and the rouille sauce ends up gradually mixed into the soup. The garlic and the hot pepper really perk the soup up, as you can imagine.

As a crowning touch, sprinkle some grated parmesan or swiss cheese (Gruyère, Comté, Beaufort, or Emmenthal, for example) over the rouille "rafts" and onto the surface of the soup. Eat it all with a big spoon while it's hot.

*Here is Julia Child's recipe for the potato-thickened rouille:

Kale is cool

My kale crop is growing beautifully. Kale is all the rage in France these days — at least among a small crowd of foodies in Paris. It's not something I had ever eaten before 2013, but I'm enjoying growing, cooking, and serving it. In French, it seems to be called chou frisé, or curly cabbage, and to be precise, chou frisé non-pommé — curly cabbage that doesn't form a head.

I have about a dozen plants. Some, in one plot, have been almost entirely eaten by slugs, snails, and or caterpillars. I'm hoping that the plants will recover now that it's cold enough to keep such pests away. In the other plot where I have kale and collard greens planted, the leaves are a lot prettier.

Yesterday morning I went out and cut a dozen or more leaves to cook for lunch. The leaves were frozen solid! I didn't pick more than 10% of what I could have picked. If the weather doesn't get a lot colder than it is right now, the greens will do just fine. I've kept collard greens in the ground all winter here in past years, and enjoyed harvesting and eating them well into the spring.

I washed the raw, cut kale leaves thoroughly in cold water. It thought they might end up really wilted because they were so frozen, but as you can see from the pictures up above, they were still fresh and crisp. In the picture immediately above, you can see the kale leaves after I cooked them — in duck fat, a little duck broth/gelatin, and some white wine, with salt, black pepper, and crushed hot red pepper flakes. The kale greens were delicious, and not bitter at all.

What we had with them was a kind of faux risotto made with brown rice — in this case, riz complet de Camargue from southern France. I cooked it in chicken broth and added some dried shitake mushrooms to the mix. I didn't know how much it would resemble a risotto, because I didn't cook it by the risotto method. I put some leftover green peas in at the end of the cooking time. Oh, and those are saucisses de Toulouse (plain pork sausages) that I cooked separately by poaching them in water and then browning them in a skillet.

Speaking of cooking time, the rice simmered for at least an hour before I thought it was ready to eat. It was creamy with the slightest crunch at that point. I followed the package instructions — I soaked the rice in cold water for 30 or even 45 minutes before I put it on to cook. That didn't really shorten the cooking time, as far as I can tell. And when it was ready, I didn't have to drain it because almost all of the liquid had been absorbed. I have to get some more of the Camargue rice, which I think I found at the Grand Frais store near Blois.

More Saturday morning views

It's cold here, with the temperature just below freezing this morning, but at least we don't have 8 inches of snow and ice on the ground the way Mary in Oregon and many others across the U.S. do. I don't know whether to wish you all a white Christmas or a December thaw.

The shot above shows part of the vineyard that's only a couple of hundred yards from our house. Callie loves to walk down into that little valley that separates two vineyard parcels. There's a stream down there, but it's dry most of the time. Only heavy rainfall over a period of days or weeks get the water flowing there. The stream doesn't even have a name, as far as I know.

These are two of our neighbors' houses in the hamlet. Both are a lot older than our house. The one you can see best, with the ladder leaning up against one wall, is currently being fixed up by its owner, who lives in the Paris area and just comes here for the summer. It belonged to her mother-in-law, who died a few years back at the age of 95. The owner's late husband, who died last year, grew up in this house.

Above is a much wider view that shows the houses in the previous picture (on the far right) as well as our house, the very tall cedar tree in our yard, and our garden shed. The larger stone building just to the left of our shed is the cabane de vigneron owned by the people who run the Domaine de la Renaudie vineyards and winery. To the far left in the photo is the grain silo on the other side of the river and that big water tower over on the heights opposite us.

Finally, just some examples of our fall colors.The rising sun was really highlighting the reds and golds of the season. If I tell you that I was out at dawn taking these pictures, you might be impressed at my initiative. But you have to remember that the sun doesn't come up until about 8:30 at this time of year.

Hier matin

The weather has turned cold again and the sun shines brightly in a clear sky. Yesterday I put my little camera in my pocket before I went out for my daily walk with Callie the collie. I took some pictures, and here are some examples. As I've said before, you have to take advantage of these mornings, especially at this time of year.

You never know when you'll get to see the next sunset. It might cloud over for days or weeks on end, blotting out old sol and plunging us into a gray and dreary existence. Hope you are having a sunny morning...

The Cher and the cliffs at Bourré

Bourré (pop. 750) is a village on the north side of the Cher River. It's just east of the town of Montrichard. Bourré's claim to fame is that a lot of the big blocks of white limestone that were used in the construction of the great Loire Valley châteaux, including Chenonceau, was quarried here. By the way, I took these photos in early December 2005.

Looking east toward Saint-Aignan from up on the cliffs at Bourré

Quarrying at Bourré left hundreds of kilometers of tunnels and galleries carved into the limestone cliffs on the north back of the river. People lived in these galleries or caves, and still do. Their houses are described a troglodytiques in French. Some have formal façades, like the one below. Often, you'll see chimneys sticking out of the ground above these houses, at the top of the cliff.

Une maison troglodytique à Bourré — wonder what it looks like inside.

At nearly 250 miles long, the river called Le Cher is the twelfth longest water course in France. We call it a river in English, and in France it's a rivière, which means it is a tributary or affluent of a major river, called a fleuve. The fleuve in this case is La Loire, which is the country's longest river, at about 600 miles in length. The Cher flows into the Loire on the other side of the city of Tours, and the Loire flows into the Atlantic nearly 200 miles east of Saint-Aignan.

Another view of the Cher at Bourré, looking toward Saint-Aignan

The last time the Cher flooded was a dozen years ago, about the time we were looking at houses that were for sale in the region. We looked at a few houses that had had minor flooding, and we decided that it wasn't worth the risk. We ended up buying a house about half a mile south of the river, near Saint-Aignan, on very high ground.

Troglodytic and semi-troglodytic houses in Bourré

The name Bourré is a funny one in French, because the word bourré means "stuffed or filled (with)" and, in modern-day slang, "inebriated" — cet homme est complètement bourré means "this man is completely drunk." One legend has it that the name Bourré originated because the French Renaissance king François Ier was a local favorite and admired the stone quarried here. He was called "good king" François, and all those centuries the French word for king, roi, was pronounced [rway] instead of [rwah] as it is now. Le village du bon roi became Bourré because [bõ-rway] evolved that way. As I said, it's a legend.

Fall chores and a warming Thai curry

Now that the leaves have finished falling, it's time to start picking them up. Walt got the rake and wheelie bin out yesterday and started the job.

In the kitchen, I had the rest of the Shanghai choy to deal with. This time, I decided to make a Thai-style coconut milk curry to serve with it. I made a red curry, using a kind of home-made curry paste to color, flavor, and spice up the cocnut milk.

The main two ingredients in the red curry paste are Sriracha sauce, a sweet-hot Thai pepper sauce, and tomato paste — about 2 tablespoons of each. To that, I added a tablespoonful of finely grated ginger and the same amount of finely chopped basil leaves, both out of jars that I bought at the Asian market in Tours.

For good measure, I put in a couple of pinches of piment fort (cayenne pepper) and a tablespoonful of Tandoori Massala, which is a red curry powder from India. That might sound like a lot of spice, but the paste has to be pungent enough to flavor 400 milliliters, or about 1½ cups, of coconut milk. A good squirt of Thai fish sauce added flavor too.

We made the Thai curry dish with tofu, and with a few shrimps as a garnish. The vegetables were carrots, onion, garlic, mushrooms, and baby corn (from a tin, of course). Again, stir-frying things separately or in batches, depending on how much cooking time a specific vegetable needs to be cooked to the right degree, worked really well. At the last minute, you put all the prepared and pre-cooked ingredients back into the pan with the curry sauce and just let everything heat through.

For the tofu, I cut it into pieces and put them on a silicone pad in the oven at high temperature to brown them slightly and dry the tofu out a little. I put the tofu pieces on top of the curried vegetables and noodles because they were fragile, and the shrimp on top, too, as a decoration. We cooked some noodles to go with the vegetables and tofu, and I cooked the choy as I did last time, braising it for two or three minutes in simmering water. Serve it separately.

This is a really easy recipe to make if you can get the ingredients, and it can be as spicy as you like it.

Dégel

Thaw. Dégel. There you have two words that bear little resemblance to each other but mean the same thing. The dictionary says 'thaw' was first used as a noun in English in the 15th century. It has its origins in German (douwen), Greek (takein), and even Latin (tabere). We are having a thaw today.

It's a good thing I saw this scene a couple of days ago. It's gone now.

'Thaw' is a very hard word, I think, for a French-speaking person to try to pronounce. First, there's that TH sound that doesn't exist in French. If you become self-conscious about it, you end up feeling kind of silly rubbing your tongue on your front teeth to say the initial consonant of 'thaw'. Is it TH as in 'then' or as in 'thin'? And then there's that vowel. Is it an A sound or an O sound? Some Americans would pronounce as if it were spelled 'thah'.

Old vines on a December day

Dégel is much easier. The first attested use in writing was in the year 1265, according to the French Robert dictionary. The pronunciation is obvious, I think — [day-ZHEL] — even for us anglophones. Of course, you have to say it with a French accent, cutting the first syllable short (no diphthong) and pronouncing the final L completely, not just partially as in 'bell' or 'tell'. The ZH sound is the one we have in the middle of words like 'pleasure' and 'measure'. It's also the consonant of the first person singular pronoun je in French. I don't think we have any words in English that start with that ZH sound.

Frost and feuilles mortes

Okay, I got carried away. The fact is that the temperature this morning is above freezing for the first time in a few days. It's cloudy instead of foggy, and that's why we've had a thaw. No more freezing fog. We haven't seen the sun much this week, but today we probably won't see it at all. It's a trade-off. Clouds and a thaw, or a hint of sunshine through the freezing fog. I'm not sure I'd want to choose. I don't get to choose, anyway.

Promenade du matin, promenade du soir

Walt, Callie, and I have a carefully worked out and regular schedule for our walks around the hamlet or through the vineyard. For example, Walt went out this morning. I'll go out with the dog this afternoon (Wednesday) and tomorrow (Thursday) morning. Then Walt will take Callie out tomorrow (Thursday) afternoon and Friday morning. Et ainsi de suite. Only illness or absence disturbs the schedule.

Stepping out the back door at 8:15 on an early December morning

That way, the dog gets a morning and an afternoon walk every day, and Walt and I each get one walk a day. Some walks are longer (3 or 4 km) and some are shorter (1 or 2 km). Some of it depends on the weather, of course, but we seldom really get rained out. Light rain doesn't bother us, and we get a lot of that. Heavier rain dampens the dog's enthusiasm, and she doesn't want to go far. She just need to take care of business, and then she wants to go home.

Callie does a quick sweep of the yard to see if she can chase away any intruders — mostly birds.

Some days a camera goes out on the walk too. Yesterday was one of those days for me, in the morning. It was cold (0ºC) and foggy. The fog was freezing on plants at ground level, but not so much on trees. The ground isn't yet frozen, and it's still fairly soggy after all the rain we got in November. There was no wind yesterday, so the walk was chilly but pleasant.

Autumn leaves on the edge of the vineyard

One problem with carrying the camera on the walk is that it means I have to keep taking off my gloves to snap a picture. My hands get cold and the walk is slower, but that gives Callie plenty of time to have a good sniff around. I think she's picking up the scent of deer, mostly. Yesterday I went into Saint-Aignan and when I was driving back up the hill at 10:30 a.m. a deer crossed the road just a few meters in front of the car. There was no danger of a collision, but it was surprising to see a deer out in broad daylight like that.

Spend the winter improving your French

On these gray winter days, what better way is there to occupy yourself than to improve your French? If you live in France now, it's doubly important. You'll enjoy living in France more in proportion to your ability to understand and speak the language. If you are planning a move to France, or dreaming about it, or you just want to travel here frequently, you'll benefit from good French language skills too.

One proven tool that can help you understand and speak French better is a video series — 52 thirty-minute espisodes — called French in Action. I've just discovered that most of it is available on YouTube. French in Action is the story of two young people in Paris, and their friends and families. Robert is a young American whose mother is French but lives in the U.S. Robert speaks French but doesn't know much about France. He meets Mireille, a French student. Here's a sample lesson from very early in the series that you can watch:

Each episode of French in Action is half story and half lesson. For the first part of the episode, you observe Robert, Mireille, et compagnie in entertaining and realistic everyday situations. Then the professeur, Pierre Capretz, comes on and goes over the scenes you've just watched, giving explanations that include pronunciation exercises and verb conjugations. You both hear and see the language, which can be very helpful.

The French in Action series is done with a lot of humor. For example, at one point Professor Capretz asks why you think he named his main characters Robert and Mireille. It's because both of those names are so hard to pronounce for English-speakers. He'll help you with them.

The situations and spoken French in French in Action are authentic and the scenery — mostly Paris — is fun to watch. There are movie and TV excerpts illustrating the use, meaning, and pronunciation of many words and expressions. If you have a computer or a tablet and a good internet commection, go to YouTube and search for French in Action lesson X — entering the number of the episode you want to see. I think you'll enjoy it.

P.S. I just noticed that the sample video I posted above won't play through Blogger on one of our Android tablets but works fine on the other. If you click the link in the last paragraph of the post and then click to see lesson 2, it works fine in YouTube. Qui sait pourquoi...

Shanghai choy and shrimp

When we went to the Asian supermarket called Paris Store over in Tours Friday morning, one of the things we wanted to buy was a bag of big frozen tiger prawns, also called Asian tiger shrimp. We try to keep a bag of them in the freezer at all times, but we were out. I believe these shrimp are farm-raised. Paris Store is a chain of Asian markets based in... Paris.

We grabbed a few other items off the shelves — sesame seeds, hon mirin, teriyaki sauce, a jar of grated ginger — and were headed toward the checkout stand when I noticed the produce section. On an impluse, I picked up a bag of what was labeled as shanghaï choï, just because it looked so fresh and appetizing. There were six heads of choy in the bag. (I have a garden full of collard greens and kale ready to be harvested, but never mind...)

Braised Shanghai choy with a hoisin-based sauce

At the checkout stand, I asked the cashier if this was the same thing as bok choy. She said no, it's Shanghai choy, and it's not as green or as large as bok choy. Then she shrugged her shoulders and said, « Enfin, c'est à peu près la même chose. » I was just curious because I'd never heard the term Shanghai choy before. I'm not even sure I'd ever cooked bok choy before.

Sliced Shanghai choy

When I got home, I thought about the possibility of combining some choy and some shrimp to make a stir-fry. I found some recipes for such a dish on the internet. (On trouve tout sur le 'net.) What I found of most interest was that the way to cook Shanghai choy is just to braise it very briefly in simmering water.

Stir-fried shrimp, mushrooms, onions, bell peppers, and garlic in the same sauce

One recipe I found for a dish called Hoisin Chicken called for making a sauce using hoisin sauce, soy sauce, sesame oil, pepper, and cornstarch. That sounded like it would be good with both the braised choy and some shrimp stir-fried with vegetables.

This is what is called la mise en place — everything is prepared and ready to be cooked.

Here's the recipe I came up with. Most of the quantities are very flexible. You could make it with broccoli, for example. It might seem complicated, but if you cook the choy and the rice while the shrimp are marinating, and then make the sauce, all you really have left to do is the stir-frying.

Hoisin shrimp with Shanghai choy

1 medium onion, sliced

3 garlic cloves, roughly chopped

1 red bell pepper, cut into strips

6 large mushrooms, sliced

3 heads of Shanghai choy

18 large tiger prawns, peeled and de-veined

¼ cup toasted sesame seeds as a garnish

Marinade:

1 Tbsp. grated ginger

2 Tbsp. white wine

1 Tbsp. white wine vinegar

Sauce:

3 Tbsp. hoisin sauce

1 Tbsp. soy sauce

2 pinches of black, white, or cayenne pepper

1 tsp. sesame oil

1 Tbsp. corn or potato starch

¼ cup water

Marinate the shrimp in the wine, vinegar, and ginger for 15 minutes or longer. Meanwhile, stir-fry the onion, garlic, bell pepper, and mushrooms in a wok or skillet.When they are just slightly cooked but still crisp, take them out of the pan and set them aside.

Cut each head of choy into two or four pieces, from the root end to the leafy top. Braise the choy slices for no more than three minutes in just enough simmering water to cover them. When they're done, take them out of the pan and keep them warm. (I put them in a dish in the microwave oven so I could re-heat them briefly if necessary.)

Make the sauce by combining all the ingredients. Mix well and set aside. Take the shrimp out of the marinade and stir-fry them briefly in the wok or skillet, just until they turn pink. As soon as they are done, take them out of the pan and put them aside with the stir-fried vegetables.

Put the sauce mixture into the pan and bring it to a boil so that it will reduce a little and thicken. Add more water as necessary. Also add in the shrimp marinade. When the sauce has a nice syrupy consistency, spoon some of it over the braised choy in one dish, and then toss all the stir-fried ingredients briefly in what's left in the pan. When everything is hot, sprinkle on toasted sesame seeds and serve with steamed rice or Asian noodles.