Midweek stir fry

This week I had bought some lovely eye fillet steaks for dinner with Mr Shady Pine. Eye fillet is my favourite cut of steak. I only like a small amount of red meat, so I find this to be the prefect little medallion of meat.


I was looking forward to getting home and having this gorgeous steak with a side of crushed potatoes and a green salad. Mr Shady Pine has been working long and hard of late on a huge bid with his team and it was at a critical stage in their preparation. So I wasn't surprised to get a late call that afternoon to say that the entire bid team was working late into the night and that Mr Shady Pine wouldn't be making it home any time soon.

And with that news, I decided to turn the dinner plans around as I didn't want to cook just one of the steaks and leave the other one. So I started chopping away in preparation for a stir fry. This was a way to take care of all the beef and have a ready and complete meal for Mr Shady Pine for later.


So tell me, do your dinner plans ever get switched around at short notice and what do you do in that situation?

Beef & Singapore noodle stir fry


350g beef, cut into strips
200g Singapore noodles, prepared according to packet instructions
1 small red capsicum, cut into thin strips
1 small red onion, sliced
2 carrots, sliced
3 Tbs soy sauce
3 Tbs sweet chilli sauce
1 Tbs Chinese Cooking Wine
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 red chilli, deseeded and finely diced
1 Tbs peanut oil
Pepper

1. Heat oil in a wok until very hot.
2. Add the beef strips and stir fry until browned. Add the vegetables, garlic, chilli and pepper. Stir fry for about 3-4 minutes.
3. Add the noodles and all the sauces. Stir fry for another couple of minutes and serve immediately.

Lazy beef stir fry

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.