Home-made Mongolian ground beef transformed into a chili, lightened with béchamel (itself enriched with onions and cream), topped with broccolini (blanched and drained yesterday) stir-fried hot and hard in garlic oil, sesame seeds.
No starch! Great for @Supership79 diabetes.
Hearty!
Precisely! It began life as a classic quick-night Mongolian beef but made with ground beef (a trick Asian families have been doing for years).
But I thickened it and reduced it and let it cook slow so the collagen in the beef broke down, turning it into much more like a chili, but with Mongolian beef spices and flavor profile.
THEN it was time to go crazy and add my version of a cream sauce, which started as a classic béchamel, but then I cooked lots of onions in it (turning it into a "sauce soubise") and then adding cream (turning it into a sauce suprème), then blending and straining.
That makes it creamy and rich and earthy, with LOTS of mushrooms--all added to give it a sort of Euro-Asian Fusion stroganoff quality.
Went great with the lightly stir-fried greens.
These days I pretty much never make a straight-up béchamel. Why, when it has onion flavor already? And why not give it that 'suprème' hit of heavy cream? DO BOTH!
I'm not sure if doing both has a name, but I almost always do it.
Don't get me started: Worcestershire sauce, fish sauce, soy sauce, bullion, "chicken powder," "umami powder," mushroom liquor/likker (I used that in this one, after prepping all the mushrooms I put into the chili)--there are no ENDS to the enrichments.
Even a cream + egg yolk liaison if you want for stupendous richness...however, then you can't bring the sauce much over 160F because it might curdle the yolk (not that such a thing would ever stop me!).
Yeah, it's my favorite warm sauce hands down.
Axiom
Purple Skies