Stir-fried Rice Cakes

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! Spent a few days back in NJ with the family and had a nice relaxing weekend, caught up on a ton of sleep, just what I needed. We had a pretty traditional Thanksgiving meal with turkey, roasted root veggies, salad, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and my mom’s special string beans. Not to mention what you can do with leftovers, day after Turkey Congee is always a huge hit!

I’d like to try my hand at cooking a Thanksgiving dinner sometime, maybe that’s a project for next year. But it’s enough work for me to just cook for a couple people, I couldn’t imagine trying to cook for 10+!

But anyway, back to what I’m posting about today =P

Being that noodles are one of my favorite dishes to eat (any kind of noodle really), I couldn’t believe that I haven’t had rice cakes until just a couple years ago! Rice cakes (Nian gao) are thicker slices of pressed rice noodle, almost like diagonally sliced carrots (best analogy I could come up with…really!). But anyway, they’ve got a more chewy texture to them and they soak up sauce very nicely, and are ridiculously easy to cook with.

You can buy rice cakes in packages from your local Asian food market. This time, I had rice cakes from H-mart, a Korean grocery store up in Burlington, MA.

One of the local restaurants in the Boston area, Shanghai Gate, prepares rice cakes a couple different ways, both of which are excellent. I’ve been trying to figure out one of their versions, the sliced rice cake with pork, and sauce, and some green vegetable I couldn’t figure out. So I wanted to go back and pay closer attention next time =)

But for today, I scoured online to find a good recipe to use and came up with this one from use real butter. It looked really good (and I’d been looking for an excuse to use some napa cabbage I picked up at Russo’s) so off I went.

Stir-fried Rice Cakes

20 minutes
Serves 4

Ingredients:
2 pounds rice cakes (prepared according to package)
1 pound pork sirloin, cut into matchsticks
1/2 head of napa cabbage, chopped thinly
5 scallions, julienned
1 1/2 inch piece ginger, julienned
5 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp sesame oil
5 tbsp canola oil
Salt and white pepper to taste
1 1/2 tbsp cornstarch
2 cups chicken broth (About 1 can)

Method:
1. Mix the pork, soy sauce, sesame oil, and cornstarch together until the pork is evenly coated. Set aside.
2. Heat 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil, half of the ginger and half of the scallions over high heat. After about 30 seconds to a minute, add the cabbage and stir fry. Add some salt and white pepper.
3. When the cabbage is almost cooked, remove from wok and set aside.
4. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil to the wok and add the rest of the ginger and scallions.
5. When the ginger and onions sizzle, add the pork and stir fry until the meat is nearly cooked through.
6. Add the cabbage back into the pot and stir to mix.
7. Add the rice cakes and along with a cup of chicken broth. Add more broth as needed or desired.
8. Continue to stir fry to keep the rice cakes from sticking. Add more salt or white pepper as necessary.

Note : The rice cakes are done when they’re slightly chewy but with no crunch and are firm but not quite mushy.