Flash-Fried Green Cabbage

Not difficult. Not simple either.

My friend Jip stared at the plate of green cabbage stir-fry—hot off the wok, glistening, fragrant—in front of us and sighed. She said she got mad at herself every time she spent over a hundred baht for a small plate of stir-fried cabbage. But Jip could not not order it; it was just too good. “I’m its slave,” she said.

That was 2012. We were having lunch …