I made more not-really-Chinese cookery last night, and it got some compliments, so I thought, hey, people deserve to know. This is Chao Francais -- chao is Mandarin for "stir fry" and where we get the English word "chow" for food. Francais is from France.

I had some leftover vegetables and fresh thyme from the farm, and I had this idea -- what if I just used Chinese cooking techniques without any Chinese seasonings? And it worked. A Euro-trash stir-fry that doesn't taste like it was made by hippies.

(Whether or not I'd qualify as a hippie is up for grabs, but hippie stir-fry has a long culinary pedigree as fake Chinese food. This emphatically ain't that.)

So here's how it worked:

Take a small stalk of broccoli and about half a head of cauliflower. Chop into more-or-less bite-sized pieces. Toss in some boiling water. About a minute later, add a handful of string beans. Boil *only* until the string beans turn bright green (two minutes at most).

That's enough time to take a third of an onion (I used a purple one) and chop it into wedges.

Drain veggies.

In a big frying pan, heat something like 1 Tbsp olive oil on high heat. I like stir frying because getting as hot as possible pays.

While oil is heating, get a broth together -- 1/3 cup balsamic vinegar and 1/3 cup bouillon (I make mine with a spoonful of vegemite and hot water, but a cube of Oxo would do), with the leaves from 4 stems of fresh thyme and a pinch of oregano. If you don't have fresh, add about a third of that quanitity in dried leaves, and give it a little extra time to soak in the liquid. Add a little bit of your onion to the broth, and a little bit to the veggies.

Toss a pinch of fennel seeds into the oil. It should be hot enough that this stuff'll start browning.

Quick, quick, get 1 tsp. corn starch into a little cup. If you're fast enough, stir in a little bit of hot water (what, a quarter of a cup?) so it dissolves nicely. Put that down -- the fennel is brown! Add the remaining onion to the pan! Dig up a spatula and start stirring!

As soon as the edges look a little glassy (a minute, maybe less maybe more), add the veggies to the pan! Stir! STIR!! It's hot in there!

About three minutes should pass. Do they still look crunchy and good? Great! Chuck in the broth with the leaves and last few floating bits of onion! It should nearly immediately start boiling furiously, evaporating and reducing around the veggies. When the broth is about half gone, quickly stir in the corn starch/water to thicken it up, and less than a minute later YOU ARE DONE.

I served this with Cajun brown rice that came out of a box, but I suppose any rice would do. It definitely tastes like simple European cooking, but has that feel of Chinese food -- fresh, crunchy vegetables in a sticky, light sauce.

This is my family: simple and sticky.

Enjoy.