Braised Potatoes with Minced Meat

Peel the potatoes and cut them into pieces. They don't need to be cut so large, and try to cut them into pieces of even size. These are homegrown, and I don't know why many of them are green.

Prepare minced meat, making sure some of it is fatty, as pure lean meat doesn’t taste good. I usually buy a bit more meat each time, chop and mince it, then divide it into portions for one meal each and freeze them. I just take them out to thaw before eating. This way, I don’t have to go through the whole process of buying meat, washing it, cutting it, washing the knife, and cleaning the cutting board every time if I only buy a small amount. I find it troublesome and feel it takes too much time.

Prepare some garlic.

Boil some water, and after the water boils, put the potato chunks in to cook for about two minutes. The purpose is to cook the potatoes just right or partially cook them, so that when simmering later, they will cook evenly without needing to cook for a long time. You can also skip this step and directly simmer the raw potatoes in the pot.

Remove the cooked potatoes and place them on a plate.

Heat the oil in a hot pan.

After pouring in the minced meat, turn off the heat and use the residual heat to quickly break up the minced meat. The residual heat will cook the surface of the minced meat, making it less likely to clump together. This stir-frying method makes it easier to separate the minced meat.

After the minced meat releases some oil, add the garlic and continue to stir-fry over low heat until fragrant.

After the garlic releases its fragrance, add light soy sauce and dark soy sauce, and stir-fry evenly.

Put the potatoes in, add some salt and sugar. The amount of salt should be based on how salty you want the potatoes, because the minced meat has just had soy sauce and dark soy sauce added, which should be enough for flavor.

After adding salt, stir-fry the minced meat and potatoes evenly, at this point you can use medium heat or higher.

Add some water, cover with a lid, and simmer over medium-low heat for a few minutes. At this point, the main purpose is to let the potatoes absorb the meat flavor and to soften the potatoes. When they were just cooked, the potatoes were only cooked or mostly cooked, but had not started to become soft. Personally, I think potatoes that are soft but not mushy taste better.

When the potatoes are stewed to the right consistency, let the sauce reduce, add a bit of oyster sauce before taking it off the heat, stir evenly, and then you can turn off the heat.

I didn't like using oyster sauce before, but after using a certain Jinji's Old Village oyster sauce, I started to like it.