Whenever I buy red, green and yellow peppers, I will cook two different dishes with them.
One will be my version of Sweet and Sour Pork. The other stir fry bell pepper dish I like to cook have some of the ingredients used in Sweet and Sour Pork, except cucumber. While the ingredients are cut into cubes for the Sweet and Sour Pork, they are sliced lenghwise in the second dish. Pork for Sweet and Sour Pork are deep fried with batter but the meat used in the second dish may be marinated chicken or pork which have been cut into strips.
There are a variety of sauces I used to cook it. These are the combination I have tried:
1) oyster sauce or 2) vegetarian oyster sauce or 3) BBQ sauce with honey or 4) Soya sauce with Worcestershire sauce
Sugar and salt are also added to taste.
If I want to use chicken instead of pork to cook this dish, I will marinate the pieces with garlic oil, soya sauce and sugar. I place the marinated chicken in a round metal container to air fry for 4 minutes at 180°F. I turn the chicken pieces over and air fry another 4 minutes or till the meat is well cooked. The sauce from the chicken is good enough to cook the peppers and other ingredients in.
If there are some leftover from this bell pepper dish, I add celery to the dish to serve it at the next meal.
It inspired me to made my own version. I replaced the cabbage with thinly sliced bell peppers and the ham with minced or thin sliced pork. I cook it with BBQ and pepper sauce. It can be eaten with rice as is or added to scrambled eggs to pan fry for making toast like it is done in the Korean Street Toast recipe.
I also serve any leftovers from my bell pepper dishes on toasted bread and top it with cheese. This is how it turned out after I airfry it.
If you do not like the idea of serving the leftover vegetable dish during your next meal, you can convert it into a bowl of soup. Greens that taste good as stired fried dish and as soup are:
Petola Winter Melon Labu Air (Long Melon) Bayam Merah (Red Spinach) Labu Siam Beijing Cabbage
You can stir fry them according to the instruction I have noted on this chart.
To convert the dish into a bowl of soup, I boil some chicken drumettes with a bowl of water. To save time, I usually boil the broth in a 2 layer pot so that I can heat up or steam another dish in the upper steam pan layer. Recently, I bought a 28cm wide pot cum steamer with an about 10cm in height cover. Other than the regular rack with handles for steaming, it is also supplied with two extra plates for steaming additional dishes. The smaller piece can be placed inside the pot while the larger piece fits on top of it or the rack. That makes it a 3 layer pot.
Once the drumettes are tender enough, I remove them from the broth and cook them with Kam Heong chillie paste. You can decide if you want to include the drummets in your soup. Since there are pork slices in my leftover vegetable dishes, I decided to use them to cook another dish.
I don't have to use the whole pack to cook my drummets. For about 6-8 pieces of drummets, I use only 1 1/2 tablespoons of the Kam Heong chillie paste. After fyring the paste with garlic oil in a wok, I added:
2 Tbsps of water 1 Tbsp of dark soya sauce 1/2 tsp of sugar 2 Tbsps of corn starch slurry to thicken the sauce before adding the drumettes.
This is how they turned out once some of the liquid is cooked up.
To convert my leftover dish of Winter Melon into soup, I poured it into the chicken broth to boil and added salt or soya sauce and pepper to taste. It is ready once it is boiling.
I have added glass noodles to the soup. You can check out other optional ingredients you can add to the soup by looking at this chart:
I cook green, red and yellow peppers almost every week, so, I need to discover different ways to serve them.
So far, I have used them to cook:
-Sweet and Sour Pork dish -four different stir fry dishes by changing the sauces used -add celery to leftover stir fry dishes to change the flavour -use any leftovers to make Korean Street Toast or as toppings for my pizza
This is my latest discovery. I add any leftovers from my Sweet and Sour Pork dish to leftovers from my Ayam Percik dish. They blend in very well in flavour.
I discovered Brahim's Percik sauce from TESCO (now known as Lotus). When it was sold under TESCO, their site was very informative as it included ingredients in the paste and cooking instruction, which you can also read off its packaging as follows.
I usually make my decision to buy prepacked paste based on the ingredients used and whether it is easy to cook with. By looking at the table I have created based on the above packaging instruction, you can see that it takes only 3 steps and 2 ingredients to cook this dish:
If you are going to use Brahim's method, it is best to keep the remaining sauce in the fridge till it is ready to be used.
That was how I cooked it till I discovered that I can cook it with my airfyer. I marinate my chicken tighs with the whole packet of sauce in a round metal container and keep it covered overnight in the freezer. The following day, I removed the cover and placed the container, without thawing it, in my air fryer to cook for 15 minutes. Then turn the chicken over to cook for another 15 minutes. I then pour the chicken in a pot or wok and add just enough water to make sure that there is enough liquid in it to simmer till the chicken is tender. It is ready when you see that the sauce has reduced and thickened.
You can read my cooking instruction more clearly from this table.
Should I use drumsticks to cook this dish, I will cut each drumstick into 3 sections. I use the middle portion for the Ayam Percik dish and the bony ends for making soup.
When I bring some Ayam Percik dish to the bike shop to eat, I usually pack it in a metal container because I can heat it up by steaming it in a mini electric pot.
Don't throw away the sauce as you can add it to your rice to eat. It is very flavourful. Sometimes I mixed the sauce into my rice to reheat in a mini rice cooker.
If I served Ayam Percik dish for lunch and there is some leftover for dinner, I can change its flavour by adding it to my Sweet and Sour Pork dish. I can enhance the flavour further by adding BBQ and black pepper sauce to it.
I was inspired to do this after checking out how chicken fajitas dish is cooked.
If I am to use pork to cook a version of it, I will most likely just be cooking the Sweet and Sour dish with strips of the meat and add the Percik sauce to taste.
So, if the peppers I bought are large enough, I will prepare all three different dishes on the same day. They are:
1) Sweet and Sour Pork 2) Stir fry dish 3) Korean style toppings for toast or pizza
The Korean style toppings can be served for breakfast while one will be served for lunch and the other for dinner or stored in the fridge to be served the following day.
