High Time For A Stir Fry.

Whenever I want a quick, simple, delicious meal with lots of flavors and textures, my go-to meal is stir fry. Do not be intimidated by stir fry. Donna, I'm looking at you. ; ) Donna, of My Tasty Treasures, recently e-mailed me about stir frying, so I hope this helps her and others out there who would like to stir fry but don't know where to start. It's really quite simple. Preparation is key to a successful stir fry. Prepare (cube or thinly slice, depending on what you're fixing) whatever meat you're having - pork, chicken, or beef. Leave shrimp whole. And prepare whatever veggies you're having. As for vegetables to use, it's totally up to you. Use whatever vegetables you want - onion, carrot, broccoli, squash, celery, cauliflower, pepper, asparagus, snow peas, peas, green beans.

This is part of a roast I had in my freezer. When I stir fry beef, I slice it very thinly and the best way to do that is to have the meat slightly frozen. If I were making General Tso's chicken, or sweet and sour pork, then I would cube my meat.

Here are the ingredients I'll be using: sliced beef marinating in Tamari Sauce (You could use regular soy sauce.) carrots celery asparagus broccoli onion garlic ginger root cashews I minced the garlic and sliced the ginger, using half of each to put in the marinade with the beef. As always, my ginger is frozen. I nuke an inch cube of it for about 20 seconds then you can easily squeeze it with your fingers and add the ginger juice to the marinade.

Chop each vegetable into uniform pieces so they cook the same amount of time. (So all the broccoli pieces cook the same amount of time; so all the carrots cook the same amount of time, etc. Not so all the veggies cook the same amount of time because they don't.) I found a red pepper in the garden and added that too.

I heated my wok, added a peanut oil blend, and put the broccoli in, stir frying for about 1 minute ...

before adding in the carrots and stir frying for another minute ...

before adding in the celery

and the red pepper

and the onion.

Next I added a little stream of water down the side of the pan (maybe 1/4 cup) to steam the veggies for about a minute.

Transfer the vegetables to another bowl and cover. Always under cook the vegetables since they'll still cook a bit more from the reserve heat after being transferred to the bowl and also from being added back to the wok at the end.

Now I'm ready to stir fry my meat. As you can see, I forgot about the asparagus, but that's no problem.

Heat the wok again, add oil, and add a bit of garlic and ginger to season the oil.

Add in the beef, a few pieces at a time.

Then I added in the forgotten asparagus and the cashews and the marinade, heating through.

Previously I had made a cornstarch slurry - 2 TB cornstarch and 2 TB cold water to which I added 1/2 can of beef broth. Slowly add this mixture down the side of the hot wok, stirring to thicken.

Add the vegetables back in, stirring to coat.

Serve on a bed of rice.

Now, Donna, get back in your kitchen and stir fry! And let me know how it turns out. All stir frying is is multi-tasking and Lord knows, Donna, you're good at that.