Prawn and Leek Stir Fry

Prawns are very popular over the summer months and are wonderful to enjoy just on their own.  However, another way to enjoy prawns is in a stir fry.

In a recent edition of Woolworths Fresh magazine, there was a recipe for a delicious prawn and leek stir fry, packed with delicious, colourful vegetables.

If you would like to try this different way to serve prawns, you will need:

1/4 cup soy sauce
1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1 teaspoon brown sugar
2cm knob of peeled, grated ginger
1 crushed clove garlic
600g green prawns, shelled and deveined, tails on
dark green part of 2 leeks
1 tablespoon peanut oil
1 carrot sliced into matchsticks
1 bunch broccolini, sliced
1 deseeded and finely sliced red capsicum

Put the soy sauce, vinegar, sesame oil, ginger, sugar and garlic in a medium bowl and stir to combine.  Add the prawns and stir to coat. 

Wash and roughly chop the leeks.  

Heat the peanut oil in a wok, and add the vegetables, cooking until they start to soften. Add the prawns and cook for ~3 minutes or until they change colour.  Serve with rice or noodles.

Chicken, pumpkin and basil stir fry

Sometimes it would be nice if I could subsist on the things that I bake - life would be delicously sweet indeed! However, the reality is that my baked goods are often missing a few food groups, and I would no longer be able to fit through my doorway - sigh ... I have been feeling rather flabby after winter, and although this has not held me back in the baking and tasting department (hell no!), it means that I have been turning to lighter alternatives for dinner.

The dish pictured at the top of this post is a lovely chicken, pumpkin and basil stir fry that featured in the October issue of BBC Australian Good Food. I thought that the recipe was too light in the sauce department, and I was fully prepared to go a little more heavily with the sauce - but I tasted it as is, and it was just perfect. There is no runny sauce, just a surprising amount of flavour.

If you would like to try this, you will need:

1 1/2 tablespoons cooking oil
400g pumpkin, peeled and cubed
300g trimmed green beans
650g chicken breast, sliced into strips
1 sliced chilli
1 cup fresh basil leaves
1 1/2 tabelspoons fish sauce
1 teaspoon sugar

Put 1 tablespoon of oil in a large wok, and once hot, add the pumpkin and stir fry for roughly 10 minutes until soft, adding the beans half-way through to cook concurrently. Remove the pan from the heat, and put the veges aside, covered, so that they keep warm.

Add the 1/2 tablespoon of oil to the wok, and once hot, and the chicken and stir fry it until browned, then add the chilli and half a cup of basil, and stir fry for one further minute. Finally, add the vegetables, fish sauce and sugar to the wok mixture, and stir it through to coat the veges and meat with the sauce. Serve with the rest of the basil leaves and lime (if desired).

I really liked this - basic but good. The only slightly palaver-part about making this dish is peeling and cutting the pumpkin (never my favourite thing), but the result is worth it. Bon appetite!

Tried, Tested and True ... Take Two - Beef & Vegetable Stir Fry; Music MeMe

Giz and Pyschgrad of Equal Opportunity Kitchen are once again hosting Tried, Tested and True . This time, they ask us to post a dish which is not only a sure fire hit in our households, but one which is health-promoting as well, to raise awareness of organ donation.

For this event, I have decided to share my beef and vegetable stir fry recipe. It is basic stuff, but I can definitely say that it is healthy and it is a hit - I lived on it almost continuously for the 13 months that I lived in Sydney. The sauce, which makes the dish, originally evolved from a Jamie Oliver bake-in-the-bag recipe for chicken, of all things. So how did it get to become the basis for stir fry beef? Well, a little imagination and a particular liking for the sauce led to it escaping from the oven into the fry pan with a totally different meat. It is also incredibly versatile - you can change meat, vegetables and sauce components to suit yourself. However, the recipe (if you can call it that!) that I will give you is the basic one that I started with before I fiddled with it.

For 5 small girly serves (~100g meat per person - you can serve larger amounts, depending on the people and how hungry you are), you will need:

500g frying beef (eg steak), sliced into strips
220g packet of fresh udon or hokkien noodles, separated
1 brown onion, diced
1 carrot, sliced thinly
1 zucchini, sliced thinly
1 mild red chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
4 large mushrooms, sliced thinly
3 bunches bok choy, chopped roughly
8 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons honey
squeeze of lime juice
salt and pepper, to taste

Spray a frying pan with cooking oil and heat until hot. While the pan is heating, ensure that all of your ingredients are ready to go so that you can work quickly. First, cook the beef in the sizzling pan, and once brown, remove from the pan and set aside. Next, add the onion to the pan and cook until transparent, then add the chilli and carrot, and cook until the carrot has softened. Add the zucchini and cook, stirring continuously, until soft.

Return the beef to the pan with the vegetables, then add the soy sauce, honey and juice. Stor the sauce through until all ingredients are coated. Finally, add the bok choy, mushrooms and noodles, and while tossing all the ingredients to coat with sauce and combine, continue to cook until the bok choy has wilted and the mushrooms have softened and shrunk slightly. Remove from the heat and serve immediately. Dig in!!

Thanks to Giz and Psychgrad for once again hosting Tried, Tested and True. You can check out the amazing roundup and Giz's organ transplant story here.

Seguing into totally different topic, my friend Ivy of Kopiaste has tagged me for a music meme. The rules of this meme, which I think is kind of fun, are this:

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring (or whatever season). Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

My difficulty is in narrowing it down to just seven songs!! I am a music lover, and have some rather divergent taste, which swings depending on my mood, what's going on in my life, what I recently heard on the radio or TV etc. I have a radio and CD player in my kitchen, and there, I listen to music while I am cooking, baking, ironing, mopping the floor, washing up or while I am on the computer (which is just in the next room). Music is a big part of my life. However, I am listing seven songs that I have recently listened to, and which always get me singing along when I hear them. These songs are as follows:

1. Weather With You by Crowded House. Crowded House is my favourite all time band, in that I like nearly all of their songs. They have been claimed as an Aussie band and a Kiwi band, but now they are very international, with two US members in the recently reformed group. Lead singer and song writer, Neil Finn, is an absolute legend, who has collaborated on many other projects with other musical identities and for films. It's hard to choose a favourite song from a repertoire like that of Crowded House, but Weather With You always reminds me of home, regardless of where I am in the world.

2. Never Tear Us Apart by INXS. INXS were a legendary Aussie band when fronted by the late, great Michael Hutchence, who had a magnetic swagger and an irresistable pout. This song is a powerful ballad, with a classic film clip filmed against a cold, wintery European backdrop.

3. The Flame by Cheap Trick. This is a golden oldie power ballad from the 1980s that I had forgotten about until it was chosen as "Song of the Day" at work recently. The team that I am in selects one song towards the end of every day to be the song of that day, with lyrics or a band name that relates (sometimes very loosely!!) to events that have occurred during the day. The Flame was chosen for the name of the band which sang it, Cheap Trick. Don't ask me why!!

4. Flowers In The Window by Scottish band, Travis. I just love the lyrics and melody to this song. It is very gentle and understated, and the sentiments of the song are beautiful.

5. Let's Fall In Love, written by Cole Porter and performed by many, including Alanis Morrisette for the movie De-Lovely. I am a huge fan of music from the Art Deco era, and Cole Porter was a master of this genre. This song is light and bubbly, and the words are kinda silly, but it is a delightful, mood-lifting song.

6. All I Want Is You by U2. The first time I heard this song was in the movie Reality Bites, and I have loved it ever since. It is powerful and beautiful.

7. Here Comes the Sun by The Beatles. I love the Beatles, even though they broke up before I was born, and again, they have so many great songs that it is hard to pick a favourite. However, I have chosen this song, written by George Harrison, because it is a great tune to hum for a lift in the midst of a cold, grey winter, like I am experiencing now. It makes you hope that the sun and warmth are just around the corner (although George Harrison actually wrote this song about escaping from the recording studio, as he had come to loathe being there towards the end of The Beatles).

There is so much other music that I love, but the list would way exceed seven, so I am sticking with these songs that have recently been on the airwaves or on my mind.

Rather than tagging seven specific people, I throw it open to anyone who is reading this and who would like to do this meme to share their favourite seven songs with us. It's fun, so I encourage you to go for it.

Fat Chefs or Skinny Gourmets? Stir Fried Pork and Noodles

Ivy of Kopiaste and Ben of What's Cooking? are hosting an event called Fat Chefs or Skinny Gourmets? For this event, you have to make a dish that you consider to be "diet food" for its nutritious value (high in vitamins and other nutrients and low in calories).

For this one, I dug out my trusty The Australian Womens Weekly 501 Low Fat Recipes. The hardest thing was deciding what to make, as so many of the options sound good. I chose a dish called Stir Fried Pork and Noodles, but my version steers away from the recipe because (a) I added carrots, which are not in the original; and (b) when I came to make it, I remembered that I had run out of soy sauce, and found that my oyster sauce has been abducted by aliens - it was nowhere to be found. I substituted hoisin sauce and fish sauce instead (yup, no relation to the originals, but they were in the cupboard).

The end result was really yummy and filling - it just goes to show that most dishes are fairly forgiving, and unless you choose "out there" flavours, you can get away with almost anything. Because of all the veges and the low fat content, and the fact that there are less than 2000kj per serve (according to the recipe), this dish falls within my definition of "diet food".

To make this dish, you will need:

250g fresh hokkien noodles
2 teaspoons canola oil
1 teaspoon crushed garlic
1 1/2 teaspoons Chinese 5-spice powder
500g pork fillets, thinly sliced
1 capsicum, sliced thinly
2 carrots, sliced thinly
2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 tablespoon hoisin sauce
2 teaspoons cornflour blended with just enough cold water to make a thick paste
1 1/3 cups chicken stock
6 shallots, sliced
1/2 a wombok (Chinese cabbage), thinly sliced

Heat half the oil in a large wok or frypan, and stir fry the garlic and 5-spice powder until just fragrant. Add the pork, and stir fry until browned. Remove from pan and set aside.

Add the remainder of the oil to the pan, and stir fry the capsicum and carrot until soft. Add the pork back to the pan with the sauces, cornflour and chicken stock and stir fry until the mixture starts to boil and thicken. Add the noodles, shallots and wombok, and stir fry until heated through. Enjoy while still hot.

Thanks to Ivy and Ben for hosting this event. You can check out the roundup of great diet dishes here.

Beef, broccoli and orange stir fry

This week, I tried yet another recipe from the National Heart Foundation's The New Classic Cookbook - a beef, broccoli and orange stir fry. As the name suggests, this is a basic beef stir fry flavoured with zesty orange.

The sauce is 3/4 cup orange juice, 2 tablespoons of soy sauce, 3 tablespoons dry sherry, 3 teaspoons of cornflour and 1/2 teaspoon of sugar.

Brown 500g beef strips in a wok, and set aside. In the same wok, stir fry 4 cloves of garlic, 1 tablespoon fresh grated ginger and 2 chopped chillies. Add 800g broccoli florets and i/3 cup of water, cover the wok and cook for about 3 minutes. Add one capsicum cut into strips and stir fry for another minute. Add the sauce (described above) and the zest of one orange, and bring to the boil while stirring. Continue cooking until the sauce thickens then stir in six sliced green onions and the browned beef. Ensure that all ingredients are coated thoroughly.

Serve with boiled or steamed rice.

While this is a pleasant dish, it did not excite me greatly. Taking into account the amount of preparation work involved for the rather lack-lustre end result, I don't think that I will make this dish often.