Yang's Favourite Thing #10 - Blanching vegetables
Somehow, someday, me and Kirin developed a liking for the colour green. And that love translates into our green-theme home. We have an apple-green wall along the aisle to the bedrooms and study room (where Kirin played "You light up my life" on his violin for our wedding night), a silver and green textured wallpaper in the living room, decorated with a built-in TV and a wall clock, a common washroom with a wall of apple-green tiles and a full set of lime-green built-in kitchen cabinets. So green it is, that a gigantic grasshopper once mistook the kitchen cabinets as its grassland, flew in (yes grasshoppers don't just jump, they can fly!) and rested on two tree "branches" - my clothes hanging from the ceiling rack. Masked with "chlorophyll", lots of photosynthesis takes place in here, making it a lively, nourishing and endearing home.
Kirin's violin against our apple-green wall
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Gigantic grasshopper resting on my clothes hangers
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As much as I love my green-theme nest, I love to see vegetables looking healthily green. So back to the subject: Blanching vegetables. It's a cooking technique for the greens to enrich their greens, seal in their natural taste and maintain their crunch. I blanch spinach, french beans, asparagus, broccoli etc in advance, before they go into a stir-fry for dinner. It's great for a novice yet perfectionist in cooking like me, as the blanched, deliciously-green vegetables just need a few more minutes of stir-frying to be tender-crisp and ready to complement soft, velveted chicken, pork, fish, shrimps... All I need is to make sure I get my broth mixture right for the stir-fry.
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So how to go about blanching vegetables? Here's a good general guide from wikiHow. The same technique applies for all vegetables, only difference lies in the length of time to boil and "shock" them in the ice-cold water bath.
Some general blanching time guides from wikiHow are reproduced here for your easy reference:
Asparagus, 4 minutes for a large spear
Green Beans, 3 minutes
Broccoli, 3 minutes (boiling water); 5 minutes (steamed)
Brussels Sprouts, large head, 5 minutes
Carrots, small, 5 minutes
Carrots, sliced, 3 minutes
Corn, large ear, 11 minutes
Corn, kernels, 4 minutes
Green Peas, 1 1/2 minutes
New Potatoes, 3 to 5 minutes
Summer Squash, 3 minutes
Cabbage, 30 seconds to 2 minutes
Yes, not just the greens, you could blanch yellow corn, orange carrots and squash as well.
I always use the boiling water method in a saucepan. Here's another good reference from wikihow for blanching green beans specifically, using the boiling water method. However, depending on the quantity and size of vegetables, and the amount of water in your saucepan, blanching time may differ slightly. Try it out by yourself and come up with your own record of blanching time guides!
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The sunshine song, Jason Mraz
Well sometimes the sun shines on
Other people's houses and not mine.
Some days the clouds paint the sky all gray
And it takes away my summertime.
Somehow the sun keeps shining upon you,
While I struggle to get mine.
If there's a light in everybody,
Send out your ray of sunshine.
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Some general blanching time guides from wikiHow are reproduced here for your easy reference:
Asparagus, 4 minutes for a large spear
Green Beans, 3 minutes
Broccoli, 3 minutes (boiling water); 5 minutes (steamed)
Brussels Sprouts, large head, 5 minutes
Carrots, small, 5 minutes
Carrots, sliced, 3 minutes
Corn, large ear, 11 minutes
Corn, kernels, 4 minutes
Green Peas, 1 1/2 minutes
New Potatoes, 3 to 5 minutes
Summer Squash, 3 minutes
Cabbage, 30 seconds to 2 minutes
Yes, not just the greens, you could blanch yellow corn, orange carrots and squash as well.
I always use the boiling water method in a saucepan. Here's another good reference from wikihow for blanching green beans specifically, using the boiling water method. However, depending on the quantity and size of vegetables, and the amount of water in your saucepan, blanching time may differ slightly. Try it out by yourself and come up with your own record of blanching time guides!
**************************************************
The sunshine song, Jason Mraz
Well sometimes the sun shines on
Other people's houses and not mine.
Some days the clouds paint the sky all gray
And it takes away my summertime.
Somehow the sun keeps shining upon you,
While I struggle to get mine.
If there's a light in everybody,
Send out your ray of sunshine.
**************************************************
Return to full list of Yang's Favourite Things.
