Ok so I have this idea and clearly I haven’t thought it out clearly yet but this year I want to blog about different stuff. Just go outside what I normally write about. So I decided as part of that I was going to review Pinterest recipes. I’m surely not the only person who does this. But I just feel like trying it so I’m going to.
I need to be better about taking pictures of the food before we all dive into here at Glory View Farm. I have a Frittata recipe that I cooked but forgot to take pictures.
The fun thing is that I often make changes to recipes and sometime that’s a blunder. The frittata was one of those. Well people ate it but – maybe I’ll write about that one next! No pictures.
So maybe I’ll get better at this as I go along. But here goes.
I posted the recipe link above. I love Pinterest it has been my guide to many things in my life especially redesigning our home. Much of my inspiration comes for there.
So I pin and pin recipes. And I’ll warn you I am no chef. Not even a great cook I like to cook but don’t want to have to cook – does that even make sense?
So when I want to cook I plan out my meals and I use Pinterest a lot for ideas.
Case in point. I got a new stir fry pan for Christmas. Thank you Santa! And I wanted to try it out. So I picked out a chicken and broccoli stir fry from Pinterest. And I wrote the ingredients on a shopping list.
I want to also say that now the my boys are in college (home now on break) we shop more often but buy less stuff. So I try to plan 2-3 meals and shop for this while picking up other sundries like almond milk and bread as needed. It may be helping our bottom line grocery expenditure i am still in the process of figuring it out.
I mention this bc I was in a hurry to plan these meals that included the chicken broccoli stir fry and I had another chicken meal planned so last minute so I decided to make it pork instead of chicken because I don’t want an overload of chicken. I try to vary it’s up. I’ve Been eating less meat as well. I haven’t had the taste for it for some reason. So anyway I digress -we decided to change to pork so we picked up a pack of pork stew meat and that was that.
Stir fry is very easy. You cut up stuff and toss it in oil until it cooks up and you throw in some sauce. I love that something this simple yields such a good outcome.
We started by cooking the jasmati rice first as that takes longer to cook. Obviously you could serve this with many types of rice and I am also a big fan of rice noodles too.
My husband -Kevin- acts as my asst and cuts up the veggies and washes most of the dishes. Sometimes when I cook I create a huge mess. I use so many dishes. So I say yes to anyone who wants to help me clean up. Sadly bc Of arm nerve damage I really can’t always complete the full task of prepping, cooking and cleaning up. So it’s nice to have help.
In this recipe I learned to cook the veggies first in the oil. In the past I had done it backwards. I like this because the meat doesn’t have to be warmed back up the veggies do but that is faster.
So we began with some oil on medium high heat in my stir fry pan (it’s not an official wok so I won’t call it that! ) we tossed in the veggies. Oh I forgot to mention we added peppers to the broccoli just because we had some in the crisper. I think I should have done the broccoli first and then added the peppers halfway through the broccoli stir fry but I added them all together. Nothing got mushy but that was luck and me watching closely.
When the veggies were cooked we set the then aside in a bowl that I covered with a paper towel in hopes they wouldn’t get too cold. And then we added the meat into some more heated oil in the pan and throughly cooked it up. This is when you add the sauce. It asked to move the pork to the sides of the pan and put the sauce in the middle and let it thicken.
So about the sauce. I mixed that up in a bowl. The hoisin, soy, cornstarch and garlic-etc. We had twice as much meat and veggies so I did double the recipe- but in the end I feel I should have made more. I like my stir fry saucy. I added more hoisin onto my portion but it wasn’t as good as the sauce.
Going back to the pan and adding the sauce. Mine thickened fast. So I tossed the meat with it then added the veggies. Let it cook covered on low medium for a minute or two (until veggies coated and heated back up ) and it was ready to serve. Some rice and then the stir fry on top.
I really liked the outcome even with less sauce than I would have liked.
I did place soy sauce and hoisin and toasted sesame on the counter for people to add as the desired.
It was a hit with the family as well. The boys don’t tell me but if it’s almost gone I know.
I didn’t even take pictures of this until we had dug into it. But the recipe is attached here and there are plenty of photos in that.
I will get better at this or maybe I won’t! But I’ll try.
I give this recipe 👍👍👍👍 thumbs up. It could be a five if I had been better with the sauce. But it was a 👍👍👍👍👍 as far as the family food consumers were concerned.
Thanks for reading!
(Def my photos need to be better!)
Not Ready for AARP 