MAKEOVER WITH LEFTOVERS: SWEET AND SOUR PORK DISH

Have you ever purchase green, red and yellow peppers at the market?  It is very difficult to find them in similar sizes. So you are likely going to have more of one than the other to cook in your dish.

I used to get my source of peppers in similar sizes from TESCO till Lotus took over. For a family of small eaters, I can cook two different dishes with them. One of them will be Sweet and Sour Pork. If you cut peppers the way I do, you will notice that their curved ends are usually thicker in porpotion. These are the parts that I used to cook this dish. 

 

I tried cooking it with a ready made pack of MasFood Sour Sweet Paste but I did not like how it turned out.

I still prefer it cooked with the following liquid/sauces:

-Mahsuri Spicy Sweet & Sour
-Tomato Ketchup
-Plum Sauce
-Juice from canned Pineapple Slices 
-soya sauce to taste
-*Worcester sauce (only if the sauce is not sour enough after cooking) 

I usually buy pork tenderloin as the meat is tender. The pork used in this dish should be deep fried but I do not like the idea of using lots of oil.  So I sliced the tenderloin into 1 finger thick cutlets and pound it flat with my meat mallet. I discovered from watching how Koreans cook in their restaurants that it will be less messy if you place a plastic over the meat or add corn starch to it before pounding.

I then marinate it piece by piece in my magic sauce:

1) Garlic Oil
2) Soya Sauce and/or Oyster Sauce
3) Sugar

I add cornstarch to the meat once it is thoroughly mixed with the sauces.  The marinated meat can be store in the freezer till it is time to be used.  

As the meat has been pounded thinly, it does not require a lot of oil or time to cook. For the sweet and sour dish, I only need 3 peices of pan fried cutlets but I usually fry more so that it can be eaten like pork chop for lunch. 

For dinner, I will use a pair of scissors to cut each cutlet into 1-2cm strips. 

When it is time to heat them up to be served, I can break an egg over the meat to fry before serving, thus changing its flavour. I can also serve the meat mixed into my sweet and sour sauce. I tend to cook more sauce than is required for the dish as I can use the sauce to flavour my leftover rice when I heat it up to eat for lunch in my bike shop.  The sauce also prevents the rice from drying out. 

I can also use this sauce to flavour my fried rice.

If I do not have the time to prepare the pork to go with this dish, I will use stored bought chicken nuggets. I air fry a small portion of them with garlic oil in a round metal container until both sides are crispy, which is for about nine minutes. Crispy Chicken Finger is our favourite choice to go with it. 

As I do not like the idea of serving the same dish for lunch and then dinner, I sometimes use the ingredients as toppings for the Four Cheese Pizza 285g that I bought from TESCO/Lotus. I quarter it up air fry two slices at a time for seven minutes in the air fryer.

You can see 2 methods for preparing the crispy pork for the sweet and sour dish in the following table.

You can see how the cutlets are prepared and deep fried for cooking "Crispy Sweet and Sour Pork" from this video.

These are the ingredients the chef used to cook the sweet and sour sauce.

This is how the Sweet and Sour Pork dish with bell peppers, pineapple and onion should be cooked.  The deep fried pork should be the last ingredient to be added to the sauce to prevent it from becoming soggy.

Other ingredients I have added to cook it are:

-1 cucumber deseeded and cubed
-1 tomato deseeded and cubed