26th and Broadway

  One of the most memorable restaurant jobs I had was in a place in New York in the eighties, when I was just a nipper. I was also a rookie and surrounded by some real characters, one of whom was proper salt of the earth type who preferred the company of the prep chefs, who were way below him in the pecking order, over his peers.

  He took me under his wing so I got invited to share the breakfast he made, along with the other prep chefs. It was a tasty mess of a plate of food, exploding with flavours and textures and I'm sharing this story with you because it's relevant to the story of the stir fry and is going to add another string to your bow. Mike, cos that was his name, would make this huge cooked breakfast and to make his life easy, it was a stir fry of sorts. So pay attention because you can definitely do it too.

  Instead of quickly stir frying finely chopped veg as we have been discussing, he would stir together all sorts of ingredients, a lot of which he part cooked beforehand. He would often start by frying chunks of chorizo. This would caramelise the outside a bit and create a lot of oil. They would get scooped out and slices of onion got cooked in the dark red oil until soft and melted, sometimes with slices of red and green peppers. While this was happening, in a separate pan, potatoes would get cut into big cubes and fried until soft inside and slightly crisp on the outside.

  With the elements prepared, Mike would crank the heat back up and introduce all the goodies to each other so there was a fiesta of chorizo, onion, peppers, potatoes and as they got hot and started to sizzle, anything else in arms reach might have got tossed in while he vigorously stirred and mixed before finally pouring over heavily seasoned, beaten eggs.

  In one huge pan he might have had enough to feed eight or ten hard working chefs a very hearty breakfast. At the time I was in awe as I'd never seen anything like it. Only recently did it occur to me that it could be considered a stir fry but there's no reason to think of it as anything else, especially if means you're able to dream up an equivalent to call your own.

 

Kirk out

RevoltingFood.com