Recipe: Stir Fry sauce

Here's a recipe for a pretty simple, yet tasty stir fry sauce. Because the key is to reduce the sauce, you should make this up before cooking up the meat and veggies of the main dish.

Ingredients:

• soy sauce (about 4 oz.)
• water (about 6 oz.)
• garlic (4-6 cloves)
• fresh ginger (about the same mass as the garlic)
• brown sugar (2 oz.)
• corn starch slurry (1 tsp of c.s.)
• hoisin sauce (1 tbsp)

Preparation:

Peel and dice the garlic and ginger. You don't need too fine a dice as you'll be straining this out of the final sauce. In a sauce pan over low heat, sweat the garlic and ginger together for about five to ten minutes. Add the soy sauce, water, hoisin sauce and sugar to the pan. Bring to a boil for 4 minutes. Add the corn starch slurry (which is just cold water and corn starched mixed together thoroughly). Whisk or stir vigorously to thicken. Let the mixure simmer on a low boil until it's the consistency of maple syrup. Strain garlic and ginger bits out of the sauce and store in the fridge until Judgement Day.

I promise this simple sauce made with fresh ingredients will beat anything else on your local mega-mart's shelves. Lord knows, that's not a tall order in my neighborhood.