Tag Archives: stir fry

A Cheap and Easy Meal

13 Replies

Take a bag of ready chopped stir-fry veg, a pack of noodles and some sauce. Put them in a wok, mix them together and let them heat through.

It takes ten minutes, is very simple and is safe for those of us with poor knife skills.

I ordered it from TESCO as a special offer package deal on our last Click & Collect order but they didn’t have any sauce so they just sent me the veg and noodles. I wasn’t happy and really, if they don’t have all three offer items, they shouldn’t just send you two. Fortunately I had suitable sauce so we were OK.

Cost about £2 for two large portions. It could have been cheaper if we’d cut our own veg into little strips but a few pence seems good value to avoid cutting my fingers. It’s healthy, though I’m sure the sauce has a lot of sugar in it.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Stir Fry Vegetables

Note how I have avoided mentioning flavour. It’s quite bland, even with a good helping of plum sauce, and the bean sprouts can be overpowering. It would probably benefit from some prawns or meat, but as we are trying to cut down our meat consumption, we are trying to like the taste of vegetables.

That isn’t quite fair, as I do like the taste of carrots, parsnips, peas, beans, chickpeas, broccoli, cabbage and onions, to name just a few. It’s bean sprouts I’m not that keen on, they are watery and they somehow seem to kill the flavour of the meal. They aren’t just tasteless, they seem to drain flavour and make everything else seem less tasty. When we are doing our own stir fry we tend not to use them, though I suppose we really should start growing our own as they are cheap and easy.

Stir Fry Crazy

26 Replies

I backslid yesterday morning and went shopping on the way back from the hospital. I’ve let things slip a bit on the kitchen logistics and am short of a few things. This does not include carrots. We have enough carrots to eat them every day for the next week. In fact, we are going to have to eat them every day to make sure we get through them.

Julia made tea last night. I bought a bag of beansprouts while I was in the shop because they called me as I walked past. This was one of the high points, as were the four fresh rolls, the packet of ginger biscuits and the bunch of flowers. They didn’t have any decent marmalade, I didn’t see any mustard and there was, as usual, no flour.

It was tricky shopping because it was a spur of the moment thing and I didn’t have a list. I didn’t actually forget anything, but I did fail to find a few things that were probably there, such as the mustard. It was probably somewhere in the shop but it was Aldi and the aisles are narrow so going back would entail passing too close to people. At the best of times you get too close to people in Aldi, and there were several people shopping who didn’t seem too bothered about maintaining a proper distance.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The new flowers – artistic silhouette, or badly underexposed? The blue statice is the last survivor of the previous flowers.

I probably shouldn’t have gone shopping because we could have lasted until next week, but I’m beginning to crack under the pressure of lockdown. I did want a few supplies, and I did want to get something for Julia but I also, I admit, wanted to do something normal like shopping.

As you may be able to tell from the header picture, there is a possibility that Julia is feeling the pressure too. Look past the luscious fresh vegetables and the delicious chilli tomato sauce. Where, I ask, are the noodles you would normally expect with a stir fry? It did taste good with pasta, but it was a bit of a surprise.

I think the lockdown is starting to get to all of us in different ways…

 

Dressing Up Some Leftovers

9 Replies

We had vegetarian haggis and root vegetables last night. We didn’t  particularly want vegetables dressed up as meat, but Julia fancied trying it. It tasted exactly like haggis, because haggis mainly tastes of oats and spices.

I wimped out of the traditional neeps and tatties because neeps, it seems, are Swedish turnips, better known in England as swedes, and in North America as rutebagas. I like carrots, I like parsnips and I have no strong feelings about turnips, but swedes are a bit too strongly flavoured for my liking. As a result I generally eat them with other veg. That’s what we did last night – potato, carrot, parsnip, turnip and swede all mashed together.

Tonight I mashed the leftover veg and haggis together, added half a tin of chickpeas (also mashed), an egg, cumin, curry powder and black pepper and formed them into five veggie burgers. The actual plan was to do four, but there was some left over so I added a fifth. I left the mashed bits lumpy to give plenty of texture. Then I gave them 20 minutes at 200 degrees C, turning about halfway through.

Veggie Burgers

Veggie Burgers

They were very acceptable, even if I do say so myself.

The stir-fried veg was (loosely) based on the stir-fried sprouts and chestnuts we had at Christmas, though with no sprouts I used some wilting broccoli and cauliflower. Henderson’s Relish replaced the soy sauce. I also drizzled on the end of a bottle of Hoisin Sauce because the honey has crystallised in the squeezy bottle. and threw in one  teaspoonful of chilli and two of garlic from my jars in the fridge. I also threw in a few cashews and some almonds left over from other cooking.

Stir fried vegatables

Stir fried vegetables

 

The overall healthy nature of the meal was destroyed when I sliced a baked potato, left over from Tuesday and fried it with some chicken chipolatas left over from Monday. The chicken chipolatas were not a success, being dry and bland. I will not repeat the experience.

More leftovers...

More leftovers…

 

The header picture is an example of what happens when the lens steams up as you photograph food. Or, to be more accurate, when you are hungry and ready to sit down and the lens steams up as you photograph food. You don’t bother wiping the lens, you just switch off the camera and go to eat.