Monday Mealtime: Simple Stir-Fry

I have decided that I'm going to start having some regular features on my blog so that you know the direction that I'm going in. I plan to feature a homemade meal every Monday. This doesn't mean that I'm going to be making a meal every Monday night, but I will cook throughout the week and post on Monday evenings :) So here goes post 1 for Monday Mealtime.

So today I start with a Simple Stir-Fry. Everyone knows the ingredients of a stir fry -- veggies and protein served over rice with soy sauce. The one thing that I wanted to have some fun with was the sauce and make it a bit more than just soy sauce. So I loosely followed Allrecipes.com Flavorful Beef Stir-Fry recipe.

I need to clean out my freezer before I move because its never easy to move frozen goods. So what did I have in my freezer? Beef chop suey meat, broccoli stir fry veggie mix, sugar snap peas, minute rice and edamame. Chop Suey meat is chopped up smaller than stir fry pieces but it will cook just the same.

So I looked at the recipe and added corn starch, splenda and soy sauce together. I didn't have apple juice or white wine available as it suggested, so I used a dash of lime juice and water together with a little touch of Penzeys granulated ginger. I mixed that together well and then marinated the beef in it for about 10 minutes. I'm sure I could have marinated longer, but I didn't think about dinner early enough to do that.

While the meat was marinating, I dumped all the veggies in a pan with a little bit of olive oil and covered them to steam up. It ended up being pretty watery because everything was frozen. So when they were done, I dumped the veggies in a strainer to remove the excess water.

I put the pan back on the heat and used a little Misto spray in the pan. If you have never used a Misto sprayer, I highly recommend it. You use so much less olive oil and compared to the ingredients in a can of Cooking Spray its better for you. All you have to add is put a 1/4 cup (at most) of oil in the Misto. Then you pump it with a special cap to pressurize it and wahlah instant spray. I use Misto on salads, pans, meat - pretty much anything that you would use either oil or cooking spray.

Ok - so the meat and marinade then go in the warm pan and you cook the meat to your desired doneness. I had to keep stirring the meat so it would cook evenly and the sauce got very thick and started to stick to the "non-stick" pan. The meat took maybe 10 minutes on medium heat to cook through. Then I grabbed the veggies, dumped them back in the pan, and stirred it all together. I let it heat through again and meld the flavors for 4 minutes.

In the meantime, my steamer bag of Minute Rice went in the microwave for 4 minutes and I let it sit for another 1 or 2 in the microwave. From previous experience, these rice bags tend to be a little watery too, so I drained this as well in a strainer and then fluffed up the rice.

Simple enough right? And boy oh boy was it yummy. Not to mention there is almost-no-fat in the meal except the healthy olive oil and a bit in the meat. The meat was extremely lean too!

 So until my next post, Happy Eating!