stir-fry … deconstructed

It’s amusing to me how, on shows like “Top Chef” and “Chopped,” contestants (or “cheftestants,” which has to be the most annoying word ever) are always making deconstructed dishes. In my plebeian understanding of cooking, this means they separate all the elements of a dish to be … fancy or something, I don’t know. So a deconstructed clam chowder would have a pile of clams, a stack of potatoes, and a swirl of whatever chowder is made of, and everyone would coo over how wonderfully inventive and imaginative it is to deconstruct things.

So I decided to get in on this fancy action and make a deconstructed dish for dinner the other night. I found a recipe for balsamic-roasted broccoli and went from there, ultimately choosing to make beef stir-fry. At the grocery store, I picked up a container of baby corn, which I love because it always makes me think of this image macro:

The only problem with this plan is that the only baby corn the grocery store had was pickled. We bought it anyway and threw it in with the broccoli, some garlic, and a little toss of olive oil:

While that roasted, The Husband took care of sautee-ing the beef in garlic and olive oil, and I poked at the rice a little bit and tried to keep it from boiling over. We ended up with this:

Deconstructed!

The best reaction I can dredge up for this dish is: meh. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t the most amazing thing I’ve ever eaten either. What was truly amazing was the accompaniment I had to this dinner. Allow me to explain myself before you see this picture, because I imagine when you see what I was drinking your brain will refuse to comprehend anything else I have to say.

When I was a sophomore in college, I spent a semester in Germany as an exchange student. Each of us were assigned to a student who was supposed to be our mentor, but most of them only did it for the extra money they got. My mentor ditched me shortly after picking me up at the train station on my first day there, so I was unofficially adopted by Jon, an American from Nebraska who’d been living in Germany for the past several years. Since I was of legal drinking age in Germany, we would go to bars to play chess (seriously) and have some awesome German beer. One day, he ordered a Bananenweizen, which is a combination of banana juice and wheat beer (Weizenbier). After my initial revulsion, I ordered one … and was sold. It was delicious! I’ve spent the nine years since looking for an acceptable substitute, and last month at Jungle Jim’s in Cincinnati, I found one:

It was incredible — just like I remembered it, except without a chess game going on in the background. (Those of us who weren’t so good at chess invented and patented a new move — the Flying King — that enabled us to win every time.)  One of these days we’ll get back to Germany and I can have a real Bananenweizen, but until then I think there will be another trip to Jungle Jim’s in our near future.