Celery-cashew stir-fry with a food court omelette

October 3, 2024

   

We're pretty ambivalent about celery over here - it's a valued ingredient in a few favourite recipes, but often leaves more stalks behind than go into the chosen dish. Roasted cauliflower salad is my usual fall-back and it can take some extra beyond the written quantity. When I chose that as my first celery-laden dish this week, I decided to test whether Hetty Lui McKinnon's recipe for cashew celery could serve as a similar back-up.

McKinnon stir-fries celery chunks with your choice of green vegetable, strips of five-spice tofu and cashews, and coats it all in a cornflour-thickened savoury sauce that's lively with ginger. Served with rice, it's a full meal. Even so, I decided to serve it alongside McKinnon's food court omelette, another recipe I'd bookmarked from Tenderheart. It's stuffed with broccoli (or in my case, what remained of a bag of frozen mixed green vegetables) and smothered in a salty-soy gravy that echos the stir-fry sauce.

The omelette is another dish that, served atop rice, is potentially a full meal on its own. (I remember first encountering something similar at Middle Fish and absolutely loving it.) My omelette was much messier than McKinnon's, and I'll not repeat frozen veges for this one, but the gravy was fun and these two dishes worked together well. Time will tell whether we return to this tasty combination, either to use up more celery or entirely on its own terms.

Food court omelette

(slightly adapted from a recipe in Hetty Lui McKinnon's Tenderheart)

2-3 tablespoons vegetable oil

a few spring onions, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, minced

6 eggs

salt and white pepper, to taste

1 head broccoli, cut into small florets and a 5mm dice (or two handfuls frozen green vegetables)

rice, to serve

gravy

1 tablespoon cornflour

1 1/2 tablespoons tamari

3 teaspoons vegetarian oyster sauce

3 teaspoons Shaoxing rice wine

2 teaspoons sesame oil

1 cup vegetable stock

pinch of white pepper

Make the gravy by placing all of the ingredients in a small saucepan. Bring the mixture to the boil, stirring consistently, for 4-5 minutes. When the gravy has thickened, turn off the heat and set it aside.

Heat a few teaspoons of oil in a frypan, then add the spring onions and garlic. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion is soft. Transfer the mixture to a bowl and set it aside.

In a medium mixing bowl, beat together the eggs, salt and pepper. Stir in the broccoli. Return the frypan to the heat and add a tablespoon of oil. Add a quarter of the spring onion mixture and a quarter of the egg mixture, cooking until the underside is golden and much of the egg has set. Flip the omelette over and allow it to cook through. Remove the omelette from the pan (I stored mine on a paper-lined tray in the oven on low heat) and repeat with the remaining oil, onions and eggs.

Serve each omelette over rice with gravy poured over the top.

Cashew celery

(slightly adapted from a recipe in Hetty Lui McKinnon's Tenderheart)

2 teaspoons cornflour

3 tablespoons vegetable stock or water

1 tablespoon tamari

2 tablespoons Shaoxing rice wine

vegetable oil

4 stalks celery, trimmed and slice diagonally

1 tablespoon minced ginger

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

a few spring onions, finely chopped

green vegetable of your choice (we had kai lan), cut into 5cm lengths

200g very firm five-spice tofu, sliced into 5mm strips

1 cup roasted cashews

white sesame seeds, to serve

rice, to serve

In a small bowl, stir together the cornflour, stock/water, tamari, and wine until they're well mixed. Set them aside.

Set a wok over medium-high heat and add some oil. Add in the celery and stir-fry for a couple of minutes until the celery starts to soften. Push it to the side of the wok so that you can stir-fry the ginger, garlic and spring onion for 30 seconds, then bring the celery back in to the mix. Add the green vegetable, tofu and cashews, cooking for just a minute. The cornflour has probably separated from the other sauce ingredients in the small bowl, so stir them back together and pour them into the wok. Toss everything together until the sauce has slightly thickened and coated everything evenly.

Serve over rice, sprinkled with sesame seeds.