[Sca-cooks] baby bok choy

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach vicki shaw:
>Mmm sounds delish!  Now I know what I will have for dinner.  but what do you
>mean by toy and toysanese?

Toy is a generic term for veg (at least green, leafy veg), a Pinyin 
(that is to say, Roman alphabet) rendering some Southern Chinese 
dialects' pronunciation. Same as choy in mainstream Cantonese. Tsai 
in Mandarin. Toysan is a district in Kwangtung (a.k.a. Canton) 
Province whose dialect is what sometimes gets spoken at our house. At 
one time nearly all the Chinese immigrants on the East Coast of the 
US spoke the dialect of Toysan.

>   and can I use both garlic and shallots?  they
>are rather different.  I tend to use shallots in fish dishes or in a tomatoe
>base calamari sauce with lots of garlic and olive oil....mmm!

I guess you could use both. Using garlic is more typical of places 
like Hong Kong and Guangzhou, whereas shallots are more likely to be 
used by the people of Toysan. It's a little more subtle, in my 
opinion. You can brown the shallots to a greater, and richer, state 
of caramelization than you with garlic.

>I will skip the sauce because I have no oyster sauce here, but I will
>drizzle some toasted sesame oil instead and probably spike the lot with some
>vietnamese hot sauce.  I dont use corn oil so I am not a weenie,

Glad to hear it, ma'am! Actually, I don't really have so little 
respect for people who use corn oil, I just find it kind of silly, 
and basically disparage the action. It's not tasteless, as some 
people claim, and it gets rancid easily, which causes it to taste 
utterly vile in the early stages, and its alleged health benefits are 
fairly bogus when compared to several other oils, so basically its 
primary selling points are cheap and [approximately, to some people] 
neutral. I'd rather have an oil which, since I can taste it, tastes 
good. My usual generic cooking oils are a fairly good quality Umbrian 
EV olive oil (which I buy pretty cheaply by the 3-liter can) and 
peanut oil. Sesame oil (toasted) is a seasoning, not a cooking oil; 
it has a very low smoke point.

>  nor do I have a weenie!

Too much information, darlin'.

>Thank you, Adamantius!

My pleasure!

A.