A cheat code for savoury flavour: preserved mustard greens. An adapted stir fry with pork and string beans for making a week’s worth of lunch in under an hour, including clean up.

Time: 2/5
Make enough for a week’s worth of lunches in 45 minutes.

Effort: 2/5
Everything comes from the store more or less ready to toss into the pan.

Southern Chinese savoury cheat code

Preserved mustard greens and olives (欖菜; laam choi in Cantonese or lan cai in Mandarin) is an interesting condiment that hails from the southern coast of China, where my family is from. The preserving process gives it a salty and savoury taste, and it comes in a jar that makes it super convenient to add to a dish to flavour other ingredients.

The vegetable oil that it comes packed in clings to the slender filaments of mustard greens, and lends a richness to whatever it is cooked with. Here I use it to flavour string beans and ground pork, but other wonderful uses for it including as a topping for steamed tofu, or in fried rice.

This recipe is a reliable workhorse that I fall back on when I need to whip up a batch of meals on a weeknight and can’t think of anything else. The mustard greens is a shortcut for delightful flavour, the beans provide fiber and crunch, and the ground pork is an easy, no-fuss protein. It’s a quick meal that is easy to scale up, and great for topping rice. As a bonus, everything fits easily on a spoon, which makes this a meal that can be shovelled into my mouth and consumed quickly – a quality essential for a packed meal intended for consumption during a hectic lunch break.

This is a dish that is popular in Cantonese diners as a stir fry, that results in beans blistered and caramelised by intense heat. However, rare is the home kitchen that has access to the jet-engine burners required for such a treatment, so I have modified the method and made compromises in order to make it meal prep friendly.

This recipe is part of a series I call Carnivore Rehab, which is written for those of you who are looking for ways to reduce your meat intake or learn to like vegetables. If you’re looking for other Chinese condiments that pack a flavourful punch, check out this Edamame, Pork and Preserved Snow Cabbage Stir Fry and learn how to elevate dishes with briny, tangy snow cabbage.

For other ideas on how to use ground pork, check out this Minimalist Bulgogi-inspired rice bowl, this Chinese steamed meatloaf with shiitake mushrooms, or a bold and spicy Mapo Tofu. But if you want to skip the meat entirely, green beans simply sautéed with garlic make a nice dinner too, as Claudia at Join Your Life elegantly demonstrates.

Dramatis Personae

Preserved mustard greens – 1 tablespoon pax

The titular ingredient, and non-negotiable. I can’t think of anything else that would give this dish the same texture and taste. However, you could swap out mustard greens for other strongly flavoured ingredients while keeping the overall method the same to create different recipes. For example, the same technique but with Thai Basil and fish sauce instead of preserved mustard greens will give you the Thai dish Prad Kra Moo.

String beans – 100g to 150g pax

The length of the string bean segments you decide on will be a compromise between ease of preparation and ease of consumption. I have seen it cut as short as 0.5cm little cubes, which makes it very quick to eat. If speed-eating isn’t a concern, longer segments may be more aesthetically and texturally pleasing.

Because I am working with large quantities, it is simply not practical to stir fry. Instead, I blanch them in salted water before tossing with the rest of the ingredient later. I will miss out on the blistered, caramelised, almost deep-fried goodness of a good stir fry, but a small concession in quality is well worth the large gains in quantity.

Ground Pork – 100g to 200g pax

Fattier cuts such as pork shoulder will taste better, but leaner cuts will have less calories. Choose according to your needs. Also, since beans also have some protein, the amount of beans relative to pork is arguably a sliding scale that you can adjust according to how much or how little meat you wish to consume. If you’re trying to shift your diet to something more plant based, making this dish with a lot of beans and just a bit of pork is one way to do so. You certainly won’t be missing out on flavour with the preserved mustard greens kicking around.

Aromatics

Garlic is the most important. Make other additions such as shallots, ginger or chili peppers to your liking.

Sauce

Any combination of dark and/or light soy sauce, and/or fish sauce, plus optional sugar will work. Basically, add stuff until it tastes good to you. I tend to include at least some dark soy sauce for colour.

Executive summary

1. Get rice cooking
2. Get salted water boiling; prep beans and aromatics in meantime
3. Blanche beans; drain. Balance beans precariously on the rim of the sink because there’s nowhere else to put it.
4. Stir fry aromatics in some oil, followed by pork, on highest heat possible
5. Knock into colander with elbow while stirring the pork. Curse gently while transferring beans from sink into pan.
6. Stir preserved mustard greens and sauce into the pan. Adjust seasoning.
7. Assemble. Bon appetit.

Play by play

Giving the beans a rinse and a chop while the water comes to a boil. I don’t know why cooking shows never show the vegetables being washed and it really bothers me. Look! I wash my beans and so should you.

Grind your own pork if you want, but I just can’t be bothered on a weekday. Why go through all that work when you can get it from the store all locked and loaded and ready to roll?

At the quantities we are working with, it would be much more efficient to pre-cook the beans before stir-frying everything together. Salt your blanching water.

Drain well. You could shock them in some ice water to retain that bright green flavour, but that’s extra effort. Maybe I’ll do that for a special occasion meal.

Some salt got left behind after I poured off the blanching liquid, but that’s ok because we need to season the pork anyway. Just keep the residual salt in mind when seasoning later. Sautee garlic in some oil, because what’s a stir fry without garlic?

Ground pork in. This is definitely crowding the pan, but I got priorities. If you only have one pan like I do, blanching your veggies before cooking the meat means not having to deal with greasy blanching water. Although, for this production method I wouldn’t even bother to blanche the beans in parallel even if I could afford to, because it doesn’t take that long anyway.

Give it all the heat you got and toss every now and then. With this much pork in the pan, it’s hard to burn things. I still got some browning, which is better than nothing. Again, there are compromises one must make for quantity over quality.

Break up the chunks of pork as you stir. Once it’s about 90% done, combine it with the beans, preserved mustard greens and the sauce components and stir to combine.

Check out how the dark soy sauce gives everything a nice light brown colour and makes it look more appetising.

Not too bad for an hour of work (including clean up!)

Rice absolutely mandatory.

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