I love the idea of stir frying. It's all about speed cooking but with lots of flavour. The incessant chopping of vegetables? Not so much.
That's how this recipe came about. I wanted a stir fry but didn't want to be finely juelienning vegetables. So I decided to make a stir fry paste that could come together in the food processor without any knife action.
For an extra boost of laziness I even bought precut beef strips. I threw in snow peas, a vegetable not requiring chopping. Although these were rather large snow peas so I did snap them in half. You could just as easily use baby corn, asparagus snapped in half, baby spinach or any other vegetable not needing much preparation.
This turned out to be a delicious and fragrant stir fry with quite a kick as I used the whole chilli including the seeds. Next time, I am going to make an extra quantity of the paste to see how well it freezes to be used on those nights when I want a quick meal.
Fragrant beef stir fry
Serves 4
Ingredients:
500gm beef strips
2 garlic cloves
2cm piece of ginger
½ bunch of coriander, leaves and stalks
1 long red chilli
4 spring onions (scallions), roughly chopped
1 tsp sesame oil
S&P
2 Tbs oyster sauce
2 Tbs soy sauce
200gm snow peas
2 Tbs peanut oil
1. Place garlic, ginger, coriander, spring onions, chilli, sesame oil, S&P to taste into a food processor and process until a paste if formed.
2. To a hot wok, add the peanut oil and stir fry the beef strips for a few minutes until brown.
3. Add the paste and snow peas and stir fry for 1 minute. Add the oyster and soy sauces and continue to stir fry for a minute or two.
4. Serve with rice and sprinkled with chopped peanuts (whizzed up in the food processor of course) and toasted sesame seeds if desired.