KITCHEN PRACTICE 1 — Planning and Cooking the Full Family-Style Meal
==================================================
Chapter: Chinese Cookery 10 — Capstone: A Family-Style Chinese Meal

TASK
----
Plan and cook the full family-style meal — a hong shao braise, a
steamed fish, and a stir-fry, plus rice — writing out a backward
timeline anchored on the braise before you start cooking anything,
and bringing all the dishes to the table together.

WHAT TO DO
----------
1. Decide on a target serving time — for example, 7:00pm.
2. Working backward from 7:00pm, plot out each element:
   - Braise: needs blanching, caramelizing sugar, and at least an
     hour of simmering plus a final uncovered reduction — realistically
     1.5-2 hours of total time, most of it unattended. Start this
     first, around 5:00pm.
   - Steamed fish: needs comparatively little active time. Plan to
     prep and steam it once the braise is safely simmering, with
     enough buffer to finish well before 7:00pm and simply hold warm.
   - Stir-fry: the fastest element by far. Prep the mise en place
     ahead of time, but don't actually cook it until the last 10-15
     minutes before serving.
   - Rice: start it in a rice cooker or pot early enough to be ready
     and resting by 7:00pm, needing no real attention in between.
3. Write this timeline down before starting.
4. On the day, follow the timeline, cooking the stir-fry last and
   bringing everything to the table together.

WHAT TO EXPECT
--------------
- The braise's own long, mostly unattended simmer should create real
  windows to handle the fish and the stir-fry's own prep without
  feeling rushed.
- The stir-fry, made last, should come together in minutes once
  everything else is ready and waiting.
- All three dishes, plus rice, should be ready to serve within a few
  minutes of each other — a genuinely different goal than the
  staggered course timing of this Subject's own sibling capstones.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
----------------------------
Anchoring the day around the braise, and deliberately cooking the
stir-fry dead last, is what makes a family-style meal genuinely work
— every dish needs to be ready at roughly the same moment, not in a
staggered sequence. This is the same backward-planning skill from
Italian and French Cookery's own capstones, applied to a fundamentally
different serving structure.