Spicy Pork Stir-Fry

When it is cold out, I crave two kinds of food - hot food or spicy food.  Since I was working from home on Wednesday during the blizzard, I decided to make something that was both hot and spicy - pork stir-fry.  I took out four small thin pork chops out of the freezer and let it de-thaw during the day.  I needed a few ingredients and Bret graciously volunteered to heat across the street to Savenor's to pick up a white onion, red bell pepper and a habanero pepper. 

A few hours before dinner, we decided to prep the ingredients for the stir-fry.  First, Bret trimmed and cut the pork chops down into small strips.  While Bret was working on the protein, I got to work on the marinade for the pork.

In a medium-sized bowl, I mixed together three heaping tablespoons each of chili garlic sauce, rice vinegar and soy sauce.  I also added three cloves of minced garlic and one finely chopped habanero pepper with the seeds.  I gave the ingredients a stir and it looked a little thick so I added a splash of roasted chili oil to loosen it up.

I put the strips of pork in the marinade and gave it a good mix.  I put a plastic wrap over the bowl and let the pork marinate for about an hour and a half.

Since we had plenty of time, we decided to prep the vegetables ahead of time too.  I sliced and halved a stalk of celery and put it in a small container in the fridge.

In a large plastic container, we put the rest of the fresh vegetables that we prepped for our stir-fry.  We put the vegetables in the reverse order of how we would cook it.  In other words, we started out with the vegetable we would cook last in the wok.  Bret cleaned and sliced up a little more than half a package of button mushrooms.

I sliced and halved up one medium-sized red bell pepper.

And Bret finally sliced up half a white onion and added it the container.

We put all of the vegetables in the fridge and headed back to the living room to relax while we waited for the pork to marinade.  When we started to get hungry, I warmed up a wok on the stove with some vegetable oil.  I learned from my most recent Chef Matt Barros of Myers + Chang that the key to using a wok is to get it as hot as possible.  When the wok was hot, I added the marinated pork and it smelled unbelievable.

After a few minutes, I added half a bag of frozen broccoli to the wok.

Then Bret added the sliced onions to the wok.

I then added the sliced red bell pepper to the wok.

And I finally added the last vegetable - the sliced mushrooms to the wok.

Bret thought that the stir-fry needed some more liquid so he added some more soy sauce,  and a few additional spoonfuls of chili garlic sauce.  I let the stir-fry continue cooking and when it was just about ready, I added generous shakes of sesame seeds and the celery.  I didn't want to over-cook the celery because I wanted it to retain its crunchiness.

When the stir-fry was done, we scooped a heaping serving into the bowl and dug in. 

Bret and I are still trying to limit our carb intake so we opted out of having any rice with our stir-fry.  This might have been the best stir-fry we've made to date.  I'm not sure if it was cutting the protein in strips (instead of our usual chunks), heating the wok up extra hot, or the use of the habanero pepper in the marinade.  Regardless, the spicy pork stir-fry was super spicy and definitely warmed us up as we watched the snow fall outside.  The leftovers were even better the next night for dinner as the ingredients soaked up all of the spicy flavors.

What foods do you crave during a winter storm?