Common Vegetarian Dish @ Zhai Cai

Let's see what we have here today! Fried beancurd sheet (tofu skin), dried lily bud, dried black wood ear and glass vermicelli....so, what can we do with all these dried ingrediemts here? These are the dried food stuff that the Chinese often eaten since centuries ago. This kind of preservation is normally taken place when they have extra food to keep for the winter or for long period of storage. All you need to do is just to get them all soften by soaking into clean water. And then transform them into luscious classic vegetarian dishes or any kind of creation flavour as desired.

So, here's what I did.
Ingredients :
1 large  fried beancurd sheet, cut small & soaked
20gm   black wood ears, soaked
10gm   dried lily buds, soaked
40gm   glass vermicelli, soaked
quarter or half chinese/napa cabbage, cut into bite size
handful of shredded ginger
1-1/2 cube  fermented red soybean curd
salt to taste
1 cup water
 
*thickening : 1 tbsp water + 1 tspn tapioca starch

Method :
(1) preheat wok/pan with just enough oil, add in ginger once it's hot enough & saute till fragrant.
(2) stir in napa cabbage, wood ear and lily buds, let simmer for a couple of minutes by stirring constantly.
(3) next, add in fermented bean curd and mix till combined.
(4) add in water and cook over high heat, add in soaked glass vermicelli half way through.
(5) let it simmer over low heat till gravy almost thicken or dry.
(6) finally, stir in thickening and then off the heat. Keep on stirring till you get very thick gravy and then transfer to a serving plate.

There are actually two kinds of dried black wood ear in the market. One is smaller in size and the other is bigger & thicker. The smaller black wood ear is preferable to be used in stir frying and some easy cooking while the thick & bigger ones is only suitable to be used in braising or you may slice them into thin shreds to combine into other simple cooking.

Here's the transformation from all the dried ingredients. Can you imagine how delicious these are? Yeap, this is another favourite dish of mine. I can just have this with plain rice or noodle. Hope you'll love it too. Happy weekend, everyone!
*
I'm sending this to Muhibbah Malaysian Monday.