Home-made Chinese pork with vegetable rice

Making delicious Chinese pork at home is incredibly easy with this simple marinade.

Preparation and cooking time is around 30-35 minutes.

Following on from last week's post about how to mix up the Chinese marinade that we'd binned the instructions for,  we had need to do it again yesterday.  A trip into our local Tesco had produced 4 pork chops, reduced in price, so we added them to our trolley. Once home we cut the pork from the chop bones, and sliced the meat into thin strips, then laid them into a roasting tray. Mixing up our Flava-It Chinese marinade with the sweetened soya milk we poured it over the pork strips, covered the tray with foil and popped it into the fridge until this evening.

The first thing to do, before cooking the pork, was preparing the vegetable mix. A raid of the fridge produced some mushrooms, a handful of mangetout, red and yellow peppers, and a courgette, all of which were sliced into small pieces (around 2cm max). Adding 3 crushed garlic cloves and a small red bird's eye chili (deseeded and finely chopped), a small red onion chopped, a few green olives halved, and some small plum tomatoes cut into quarters, we were ready to start cooking.

Hubbie set to with the rice (we used Tesco own brand Arborio risotto rice - half a cup per person) and water (a pint and a half) with a couple of stock cubes and a sprinkle of mixed herbs added to make the stock for cooking the rice in the paella pan, whilst I plugged in the teppenyaki grill and cooked the marinaded pork on it. The pork cooked really quickly, and turning it over midway meant it was browned on all sides.  (A big plus was that, unlike when we cooked the marinaded ribs in the oven, the grill cleaned up very quickly afterwards. The oven tray from the ribs had to soak for almost 2 days before all the baked-on marinade finally came off!)

The vegetables were added into the rice once it was almost cooked (test the rice by tasting a small bit, if it's still chewy it needs a few minutes longer) along with the cooked pork. Mix well into the rice and add a bit more boiling water if needed (there should be a bit of liquid in the pan, rather than be very dry). Heat through until all the veg are hot through, and remove from the heat.

Serve in bowls whilst still very hot. Yummy!

Oh look, it's all gone! :)

So why a food blog?

Why a food blog? Aren't there enough of them online anyhow? Well yes, there probably are, but they are not ours, and we like cooking and making things!

So, here we are, with a host of ideas for sharing, things we have tried that worked, things we have tried that didn't work so well, and things we are trying out right now.  We will also talk about the types of equipment we use for cooking and where we found it, as well as the great ingredients we use in our food.

Our focus is on healthy, interesting and tasty food, and that doesn't mean we'll talk about lettuce all the time! It does mean that we'll share with you what we use and where we find it, and show you what we grow ourselves once our garden is sorted and production.

It also means we can keep a record of what we make, and how we make it, that any of the family can access from anywhere. The best thing about cooking is the sharing of it - sharing the making as well as sharing the eating.

We hope you'll come and enjoy this food blog with us too.