Craving Chinese Food, Part 2
If you enjoyed yesterday’s posting, exalting the use of black olives in a wonderful dish of wok-charred long beans, then no doubt you’ll enjoy this next Chinese stiry-fry dish that uses fresh corn kernels.
Nope, not the canned baby corn we’re all too familiar with in Chinese dishes, but actual scraped-from-the-cob kernels bursting with sweet milkiness. “Miao Pork with Corn and Chiles” is a dish from the semitropical region of Guizhou in China. And it’s from the gorgeous book, “Beyond the Great Wall” (Artisan) by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, husband-and-wife writers, photographers, cooks, and global travelers. Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai usually get all the attention. But Alford and Duguid lead you to the even more interesting, off-the-beaten-path areas of Tibet, the Silk Road, and Inner Mongolia.
There’s no better time to make this dish than now, when fresh summer corn is in abundance. I’ve made only a couple changes to the recipe. I used jalapeno peppers rather than cayenne ones because I happened to already have them on hand. I also upped the quantity of Sichuan pepper to 1/2 teaspoon, just because I love its aromatic tingle. And because I thought the dish needed a little something to tie all the flavors together, I drizzled on a tiny bit of toasted sesame oil right at the end. You could also toss in a few slivers of green onion, too, if you like.
Miao Pork With Corn And Chiles
