Episode 0194
Summary
Two speakers discuss their preferences for stir-fry. Speaker 1 enthusiastically praises his wife's vegetable-rich stir-fry, detailing its ingredients and flavors. Speaker 2 interjects, stating a preference for meat and describing his wife's version, which includes beef, bell peppers, and onion. Speaker 1 reacts angrily, dismissing Speaker 2's dish as an insult to traditional stir-fry, comparing it to a fajita without the wrap.
Transcript (Click timestamp to jump)
Oh man, I had the best supper last night. My wife made a stir-fry and it was amazing.
I love stir-fry. Crispy bite-sized vegetables covered in a mixture of soy sauce and oyster sauce, wilted greens and fresh bean sprouts, throw in some onion and garlic and ginger.
It's almost lunchtime. I would die for a plate of stir-fry right now.
Well, you can keep the vegetables, I'll take the meat. The stir-fry my wife made was really hearty with chunks of beef and slivers of bell peppers and onion.
What? You call that a stir-fry? More meat than vegetables? That's the worst insult you could throw at a Chinese stir-fry. What a disgrace to the wok she fried it in.
What you had is equivalent to a fajita without the wrap.
Summary
This podcast episode from English Pod discusses Chinese food, specifically stir-fry. The hosts, Marco and Catherine, introduce common ingredients like soy sauce, oyster sauce, and bean sprouts, along with the traditional cooking utensil, the wok. They explain specific English phrases used in the context of cooking, such as 'throw in' and 'I would die for,' and also define 'disgrace.' A humorous debate arises when one speaker criticizes the other's stir-fry as being too meaty. The episode also highlights that some items widely considered Chinese, like chop suey and fortune cookies, are actually American inventions.
Transcript (Click timestamp to jump)
Hello everyone and welcome back to English Pod. My name is Marco.
My name is Catherine and today we're talking about one of our favorite subjects, food.
That's right. And on this occasion we are going to talk about Chinese food, specifically stir fry.
Okay, this is a common dish in America and all over the world thanks to the many Cantonese people who came over from Hong Kong or Southern China and brought these delicious foods to our cities.
So, this is a very popular dish you'll be learning more about. So let's jump right in and listen to today's dialogue and don't be worried if you don't understand everything. We'll be back in a moment.
Oh man, I had the best supper last night.
My wife made a stir-fry and it was amazing. I love stir-fry.
Crispy bite-sized vegetables covered in a mixture of soy sauce and oyster sauce, wilted greens and fresh bean sprouts. Throw in some onion and garlic and ginger. It's almost lunch time.
I would die for a plate of stir-fry right now.
Well, you can keep the vegetables, I'll take the meat.
The stir-fry my wife made was really hearty with chunks of beef and slivers of bell peppers and onion.
What? You call that a stir-fry? More meat than vegetables?
That's the worst insult you could throw at a Chinese stir-fry! What a disgrace to the wok she fried it in!
What you had is equivalent to a fajita without the wrap.
Alright, we're back, so you probably heard a lot of different vegetables and ingredients in this dish, so why don't we take a look at some of those now in language takeaway?
The first two phrases that we have actually, they're not words, they're phrases, are the names of sauces that are very, very important to Chinese food. The first one is soy sauce.
Okay, soy sauce, and it's this black sauce, right? And it's made
Very salty.
Very salty and it's made from
Soybeans.
Soybeans. Okay.
Soy, so soy is a bean, a vegetable product, but soy sauce is a thin, black, salty sauce.
Mm-hm. Okay, and it's very, very common to use it with Chinese dishes especially. It's very related. You usually have sushi with soy sauce.
Exactly. So Japanese food uses a lot of this too.
Alright, and uh, the other sauce that's not very common in in our countries is oyster sauce.
Okay, an oyster is a an animal that lives in the sea. It lives in a shell, and we often eat oysters as a dish, but oyster sauce is stinky, thick, dark sauce that is very popular in Southeast Asian, so, uh, Vietnamese Vietnamese food as well, and Chinese food.
Okay. So it's part of the ingredients of Chinese food. It's really good. It smells terrible, but when it
It's stinky.
But when you mix it with food and you cook it, it smells it adds a very, very good flavor. Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Alright, so that's the sauces. Now, apart from sauces, we have some vegetables and some of those are bean sprouts.
Bean sprouts are very common vegetables, especially in Asian food. So you see a lot of these. They're usually almost white, almost clear, and they're crunchy and they have a little green part at the end.
Right. So they're like little straws with uh little green point at the end.
So usually those go into your dish at the very end because they cook quickly. Bean sprouts.
Okay. Now if you're cooking stir-fry, what you need is the the correct tools and the main tool that you need is a wok.
That's right. So a wok is actually a word that we take from I think Cantonese. I'm not positive, I don't speak Cantonese. But in English we normally say frying pan. But this is a special Asian frying pan that's very, very large and very thin, so foods cook quickly in a wok.
Okay, and it's it has it's not like the other pans where it's it has a big flat part. It's very, very round all over.
That's right. It's almost like a bowl that sits on your stove and you cook quickly in a wok.
Alright, so that's a wok. And well, the guy compared his stir-fry to a fajita. Now, fajita, that's a that's not Chinese.
And it's not English. Okay.
Well, it is English now. It's actually the name of a food from Latin America.
So, South America and Mexico and Central America. I think more Mexican than anything. And it's like slivers of meat, so thin strips of meat and vegetables that you eat in a tortilla uh, bread almost. The tortilla is very very thin corn or flour pancake.
Mm-hm. Yeah. So that that's a fajita. It's kind of you've probably seen it a fajita or a or maybe what's commonly known as well as a burrito.
Which actually is also an American invention. I don't think that exists in in in Mexico.
No, but they are delicious. I think the word is Tex-Mex. Texas Mexican, so Tex-Mex.
Alright. So that's what we have for you on Language Takeaway. Why don't we go back to our dialogue, listen to it again, and we'll be back shortly?
Oh man, I had the best supper last night.
My wife made a stir-fry and it was amazing. I love stir-fry.
Crispy bite-sized vegetables covered in a mixture of soy sauce and oyster sauce, wilted greens and fresh bean sprouts. Throw in some onion and garlic and ginger. It's almost lunch time.
I would die for a plate of stir-fry right now.
Well, you can keep the vegetables, I'll take the meat.
The stir-fry my wife made was really hearty with chunks of beef and slivers of bell peppers and onion.
What? You call that a stir-fry? More meat than vegetables?
That's the worst insult you could throw at a Chinese stir-fry! What a disgrace to the wok she fried it in!
What you had is equivalent to a fajita without the wrap.
Alright, we're back. So now, I think we should take a look at some of those phrases that were used in this dialogue in Fluency Builder.
The first phrase we have in Fluency Builder is a phrase that you will hear often when you watch cooking shows. So this is a term we we say throw in, to throw in.
Okay. So throw in some vegetables, or throw in some onion and garlic, and that means to just put it into the pan, put it into the pot.
That's right. But it's very general or casual or easy. You just add some. If we want to be specific, we can say, please add one cup chopped onion. Okay. One cup of chopped onion, but here's throw in just means add casually.
Okay, add some onion.
So we throw in all these ingredients and it sounds so delicious that the guy says, "I would die for a plate of stir-fry right about now."
Mm, so that means he wants some stir-fry. I would die for is a good thing. It's it's a way to say I really want some.
It's an exaggeration. It's not like you you would actually die for it or you were dying to eat it. It's just that it's an exaggeration means that you really, really want it.
I would die for a new car. My car is old and it never really works.
Alright, so you really want a new car. Okay.
And well, the guy obviously didn't really like what he was talking about and how he cooked this stir-fry and he said, "What a disgrace to the wok she fried it in."
Okay, this is a way to say that something is bad. It's a it's embarrassing. So we can say that this food is a disgrace to Chinese food because Chinese food is one way, but this this doesn't even look like Chinese food.
So a disgrace, a disgrace. So the word disgrace, it means that something is bad.
Or embarrassing to something else. Embarrassing. So a parent can say, you're a disgrace to this family. That means this family has a good reputation, but what you did, what you do, these are bad things, they make us look bad.
Mm, they're embarrassing.
They're embarrassing to us. Okay.
Okay.
So it's a it's a very strong phrase. This is a disgrace.
Okay. A disgrace. Very good. A strong phrase and you can use it if you ever want to talk about someone or something in this way. But remember, it is pretty strong, right? If you say somebody's a disgrace, it's it's pretty insulting.
It's hurtful. Okay.
So why don't we listen to our dialogue for one last time and we'll be back.
Oh man, I had the best supper last night.
My wife made a stir-fry and it was amazing. I love stir-fry.
Crispy bite-sized vegetables covered in a mixture of soy sauce and oyster sauce, wilted greens and fresh bean sprouts. Throw in some onion and garlic and ginger. It's almost lunch time.
I would die for a plate of stir-fry right now.
Well, you can keep the vegetables, I'll take the meat.
The stir-fry my wife made was really hearty with chunks of beef and slivers of bell peppers and onion.
What? You call that a stir-fry? More meat than vegetables?
That's the worst insult you could throw at a Chinese stir-fry! What a disgrace to the wok she fried it in!
What you had is equivalent to a fajita without the wrap.
Alright, so, uh talking about Chinese food, there are a lot of American inventions around uh around Chinese food as well, not only Mexican food.
For example, it's very popular this dish chop suey.
That's right. Chop suey and I think I read somewhere that chop suey is actually uh might have been a Cantonese dish that came from all of the leftovers and kind of garbage in the kitchen, we just fry it together and it was a cheap easy meal. So chop suey. It's kind of like an English it's like a pidgin English.
Mm-hm. And well this dish is is basically that, right? It's just a lot of meat, meat chunks mixed with some vegetables and you have some chop suey.
Exactly.
And uh there are also these other things that's very common, people think about fortune cookies. You think of Chinese restaurants and Chinese food, you think of fortune cookies.
That's right. But they don't have fortune cookies in China. No, they don't. One of my biggest disappointments.
So fortune cookie is a small cookie with a message inside. So you have a piece of paper, so be careful when you're eating these. You don't want to eat the paper. But the paper sometimes says very strange things like, you will have a terrific number seven.
Right, or something like that. So that's why they're fortune cookies, they usually talk about your future or what's going to happen.
Beware of whales.
So, but that's also an American invention that doesn't exist in China. It doesn't really come from China, right?
Exactly. All right.
So, if you have any other um information about food, or we're we're always glad to hear it.
Because we're always hungry.
Or if you have a favorite Chinese food, please let us know. Our website is Englishpod.com. We can't wait to hear from you and we will talk to you next time.
Alright, bye.
Summary
The audio serves as an interactive English vocabulary learning tool. It features a speaker introducing segments for listening to meanings, practicing pronunciation, and hearing words in context, interspersed with pauses for user interaction, and concludes with an outro jingle.
Transcript (Click timestamp to jump)
The English pod audio review.
Listen to the meaning, then say the vocabulary word.
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Now say the word and hear it in a sentence.
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