These boots were made for wokking

My camera woman gave me a thoughtful birthday gift this year. She's aware that I don't cook Chinese food often, so she wrote up a half a dozen Chinese recipes that she cooks well, and then presented them to me, along with the ingredients necessary to make them. (This was especially helpful with respect to the dried mushrooms, because they all look the same to me and the careful labeling in Chinese does not help much.)

Alas, it appears that I don't cook Chinese often because I am no good at it. I have so much knowledge about cooking, which mainly originated from training with French and Italian cuisine. When I taught myself Indian, these European cooking skills were still useful. Once I mastered toasting my spices, many of the ingredients (milk, tomatoes, carrots, and potatoes) and techniques (long slow simmers, frying) were appropriate. But when cooking Chinese, they're useless. Faced with a sauce that's too runny, I would add some cream and boil it down quickly. But, um, Chinese doesn't do dairy. The dish is a little bland? I've got olives, pesto, nut oils, and cheese for Italian dishes. For Chinese I have.... um, soy sauce and sesame oil.

So, I may give up for a while. Last week we got bok choy in our farm share. I pretended it was Swiss chard, mixed it with a bechamel sauce, and topped it with bread crumbs and cheese for a killer gratin. Of course, my camera woman almost cried when she saw what I had done to the poor bok choy, but boy was it good.