Another quick and quite taste wok experiment. This time, we did green roulette. In the fridge we had watercress, a gigantic bag of sugar snap peas and a random part of onion from the night before. To make this a little bit different, I convinced the Wok Master, to add some ginger and play with rice wine vinegar, instead of just oyster sauce and garlic.

Stir Fried Watercress and Sugar Snap Peas

Ingredients:

• Sugar snap peas, about 2 cups, but not scientific, use what you have or want
• A bundle of watercress, the stems all bunched up were about 3 inches in diameter
• Onion, a lot or little, we just had about a ½ cup of white onion hanging around, chopped, not too fine.
• 1 tsp minced ginger
• 2 T or so of garlic
• 2 T rice wine vinegar
• About 2 T or so oyster sauce, not too much, gets salty
• ~ 1 T canola oil

Instructions

1. Wash vegetables and drain well. (water in heated wok oil = splattering)
2. Take the ends off the peas so they are easier to eat.
3. Heat the wok with the oil. Remember – key to wokking is high heat
4. “Pre-cook” the snap peas. Not a real professional term here, sort of like blanching. We basically put the prepped peas in a bowl and filled it with 180 F water out of our dispenser and let it sit for a minute or two. This was just to help it cook along, since they will take longer than the watercress
5. Add in garlic and ginger. Apparently, our ginger in the jar has more water, than the garlic as it Splat. Tered. Stir around
6. Add onion pieces. Stir stir for about 30 seconds
7. Add in snap peas and stir stir for another 30-60 seconds. You goal is to keep them still crispy but cooked
8. Add rice wine vinegar, followed by watercress. Stir around, to get the watercress to start wilting, about 15-30 seconds
9. Add in oyster sauce and finish stir frying. Don’t over cook

You could easily add bell peppers, mushrooms etc to this stir fry. Lots of alternatives. Enjoy!

So what is watercress, and where has this been all my life? Watercress is a perennial plant (first who knew), and, apparently, one of the oldest known leaf vegetables consumed by upright humans. It’s in the Nasturtium family, and when you see the leaves you know why. Tangy a bit like radish greens but not too much, like arugula. If ever in the charming UK town of Alresford, they host a Watercress Festival every year. Apparently attracting watercress-atians from all over, to the tune of 15,000. Look at all this tomfoolery! On home soil, Huntsville, AL used to be the Watercress Capital of the US but due to circumstances not disclosed on Wikipedia, this honor is now bestowed upon the budding metropolis of Oviedo, FL. For my fellow pharmers, it is a known inhibitor of the cytochrome P450 CYP2E1 enzyme (gasp! Not another leafy green with drug interactions!!!!).