My favourite thing to eat in Asia
One of my favourite dishes throughout South East Asia was fried morning glory, or Thai water spinach. It grows in abundance and so is a very cheap dish to buy if you are on a budget and eating out. So I was a little bit over excited about finding it in my local Thai supermarket. There are apparently two versions the Chinese version has long and skinny leaves and the Thai one has more heart shaped leaves at the top and that is the one I am familiar with.
First of all wash and chop up your greens into long pieces and keep the stalks and leaves separate as they need slightly different lengths of time to cook.
Next prepare the sauce, you will need:
3 garlic cloves finely chopped, I chopped red chilli (this can be optional if you don’t like things too spicy), 1 Tablespoon of yellow bean sauce (soy bean paste), 2 tablespoons of Oyster sauce, a splash of fish sauce to taste (this works as the seasoning) and a sprinkle of palm sugar (soft brown sugar would work just fine to).
Firstly mix all the wet ingredients together in a small bowl and add in the sugar mix well.
Gently fry the garlic in a little oil on a medium heat for a minute or two. Then turn up the heat add the chilli and the stalks from the morning glory stir fry for a couple of minutes then add the leaves and the sauce mix. Continue stir frying for another minute or two to heat the sauce thoroughly through. It is really important not to over cook it there should be a bit of a crunch left when you bite into it.
Serve immediately!
If you are a fan of mushrooms the same recipe works very well with them too, to be honest it would work well with most vegetables. The only difference is that I added a slash of gluten free soya sauce as well to the mix as it just gives the mushrooms an extra boost. If you really like mushrooms it makes for a great main dish especially if you splash out on a range of interesting mushrooms such as oysters, enoki, wood ear, shiitake or chestnut. It is also lovely as a side dish with the morning glory and satay chicken served with steamed jasmin rice.
