A Similar Yet Different Stir Fry

Lately I have been in the mood for a stir fry with lots of veggies and some warm brown rice. Since we have an abundance of ripe green peppers in our garden I wanted to find a stir fry recipe that would use them as a main ingredient. I did a search and ended up deciding on an older CL recipe called Three Pepper Beef.

One of the great things about making a stir fry is that it cooks very quickly. Brown rice on the other hand takes about 45 minutes. So to get things started I got the rice going first. Then I sliced the flank steak (across the grain and very thin) and mixed it in a bowl with a little cornstarch, sugar, and salt. In a separate bowl I whisked together cornstarch, sugar, soy sauce, beef broth and soy sauce. I then prepped the rest of the ingredients by slicing the green onions, cutting the peppers and onion into thin strips (green, red, and yellow ones), trimming the sugar snap peas, and mincing the garlic and ginger. Then in a non-stick skillet I heated the oil (I used dark sesame oil instead of veggie oil) and sautéed the onions, ginger, and garlic. I then added the beef mixture and let it cook for a couple minutes. You then remove the beef mixture and stir fry the remaining veggies until they are almost done. Lastly you add the beef mixture and sauce into the pan and let everything cook together for a couple minutes until the sauce has thickened. Serve it over the rice.

I was excited to not only use the green peppers from our garden, but also to try cooking sugar snap peas for the first time. Unfortunately the green peppers from our garden had a distinct bitter taste to them. I am not sure if they were not ripe enough or if we they are simply not allowed to grow to their full potential in both size and flavor due to being in pots... I am still working on a green thumb. As far as the stir fry we both really liked it, however, Russ thought I had served it before... It was a new recipe for us, but I believe he was confusing it with the Ginger, Beef, and Green Bean Stir Fry I made not too long ago. While the two are similar I actually prefer the flavor of the sauce from the ginger stir fry over tonight's. Tonight's was good, but the sauce was a little too plain for me. I did however love the flavor and color of the red and yellow peppers and sugar snap peas in it. Maybe next time I'm in the mood for stir fry I'll combine the two recipes. Russ rates tonight's stir fry a 8.

Maybe I do have a green thumb....

While I have cooked some recently, although not a whole lot, I have some exciting food related news to share! As I have mentioned before Russ and I are planning on having some work done on our backyard in the coming months and I have a spot already picked out for my herb and vegetable garden. Earlier this summer I decided that I didn’t want to wait on the yard to be complete to have a garden. So I used three large pots to plant herbs and vegetables. The herbs have done amazing and I have more jalapenos than I can handle, but my tomatoes and green peppers have been a little slower. A couple weeks ago my first tomatoes started turning red. I was ecstatic at first only to later be totally bummed when my new nemesis, the chipmunks, ate them! I was finally able to harvest three small, red tomatoes that the chipmunks hadn’t eaten earlier this week. We ate one on a salad the other night and used the other two on tacos last night. They were not only beautiful, but also very tasty!

This little success with my potted herbs and vegetables gives me a new found hope that despite the many plants that have died under my watch that maybe just maybe I inherited the family green thumb. My maternal grandparents both had green thumbs and had the most spectacular garden filled with flowers, fruits, vegetables, and herbs. My mother, like her parents, has a green thumb especially with flowers. I have been hoping that I inherited this green thumb too and after harvesting and eating my little tomatoes the other night I am thinking that maybe I do have a little bit of a green thumb after all.