Stir-fry vegetables have become a weekly staple in our diet. It's a quick and easy meal to prepare, and it's quite wonderful on the taste buds. We used to have stir-fries when broccoli was the star of the show. I still like broccoli in a stir-fry, but it isn't my husband's favourite vegetable, though I try to stick it into meals now and again. But we discovered a substitute that he really enjoys eating, and use that instead of the broccoli.

Since living in Tokyo away back when, the vegetables that we most often used then, and the rice that he began to prefer, stems from our culinary experiences in Japan. I really like long-grain rice, but he much prefers the oriental sticky-type short grain rice, particularly koshihikari type, imported from abroad the best, but California-grown calrose acceptable.

It requires far less water than other types of rice; and generally cooks for about 24 minutes. And when it's cooked to perfection, my husband swoons over it. He prefers it cool, even cold, to hot.

The vegetable mix I used for last night's dinner was two cloves of garlic, chopped, one medium size onion chopped and quickly stirred in olive oil; introducing then a yellow bell pepper and half a red bell pepper chopped, a cup of fresh sliced mushrooms, a cup of cauliflower florets, and the bok choy, chopped into rough pieces. When I introduce the bok choy as the last ingredient once the others in succession have had their time in the skillet, I use monosodium glutamate which has suffered such an undeservedly bad rap sprinkled over it, and freshly ground black pepper.

For yesterday's meal, earlier in the day I had cut a turkey breast fillet into small half-inch-square pieces, and marinated them in a mixture of honey, chopped ginger, soya sauce and olive oil. Which I set to await later use, in the refrigerator. I sauteed the turkey breast bits separately from the stir-fried vegetables.

The idea is to pile rice onto a serving dish, cover it with the stir-fry vegetables, then scatter the turkey pieces overall. A colourful, appealing presentation, and an extremely tasty and nutritious one as well. My husband prefers his rice portion to be set aside separately in a wide-brimmed bowl, to cool.

The only oops in the situation is that my husband likes to scatter those oriental dried noodles over the medley, and drizzle sweet and sour sauce over it as well. I demur.