Cooking calamity

Ever since we arrived in Brisbane I have been meaning to cook using more Asian vegetables and ingredients but not really known how. On Saturday one of the ladies who delivers the meals at work had a vegetarian cookery book in the kitchen and offered to lend it to me to try a few recipes. I had a little look through the book this lunchtime and decided upon Asian Greens with Teriyaki Tofu Dressing. We popped into Clayfield Markets on our way back from Centro Toombul as we were returning a truely awful hat I had bought for Neil's birthday. It is the wrong season for hat buying and when I bought it I hadn't got him any other presents so it was out of desperation.

Anyway, the recipe calls for baby bok choy, choy sum, snake beans and teriyaki sauce. Apparantly snake beans are a winter vegetable so were recommended normal beans instead. The recipe was quite simple requiring the vegetables to be stir-fryed and kept warm whilst the next stage was being cooked. The teriyaki dressing needed 1/2 teaspoon of ground chilli and 2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger. This was based upon 6 people and I had halved the recipe but in my wisdom I put in 1 teaspoon of ground chilli, about 10 cm of grated ginger and 4 cloves of crushed garlic as I rarely cook without garlic and what harm could it do?

Remarkably, the final dish actually looked like the photo in the book. I had been concerned that the Asian vegetables and tofu would be quite bland but wow it was really quite hot... my nose was running and not just from hayfever. Poor Eloise had a few mouthfuls and then put her hands into her mouth as if she was trying to get the stinging out. We served her up a bowl without the offending dressing but was having none of it. She ended up with a peanut butter and jam sandwich. We have lots of left overs for tomorrow. Yeah right. I'm sure it will be even hotter tomorrow.

Shame Chris isn't here. He would have loved it. Maybe we can freeze it until he arrives next month.