Beef and Asparagus Stir Fry

You know I love to cook with beef! Today, I'm sharing one of my favorite healthy beef recipes with all of you: Chinese Takeout Style Beef and Asparagus Stir Fry!

Hey! I'm getting a little better at photo editing! Ha.

One thing that I really miss about living in a larger city or town is access to a variety of restaurant food, especially ethnic cuisine. I'll admit that I have a guilty pleasure for Chinese food. I love it. When I lived in Jackson, there was a Chinese restaurant that actually had a drive-through! I didn't know a ton of people when I lived there, so the drive-through was the perfect option for me. Quick service, and I didn't have to awkwardly sit alone in the restaurant and eat by myself. When I lived in Bozeman, the mall that I worked in had the standard Chinese fast food restaurant in the food court that I frequented more often than I probably should have.

Havre does have an assortment of fast food taco joints, so I guess that counts as Mexican, and they have two Chinese buffet restaurants. I'll hit up the buffet once in a while when I'm in town for errands, but I'm not likely to drive an hour just for Chinese takeout, guilty pleasure or not. So, how to please those cravings for Chinese takeout at home? Learn to cook it!

As a follow up to yesterday's Thankful Thursday post where I told you all how thankful I am to be able to eat my own home-raised beef, I thought I'd share with you an easy at-home recipe for Chinese food. This stuff tastes just like the real deal, guys. And, it's a little healthier than the gut-bomb that Chinese takeout can sometimes be. Best of all, you can customize the recipe to use whatever ingredients you have on hand. I used beef (of course!) and some fresh, seasonal veggies. I wrote in detail about the recipe first, then the actual recipe itself is listed all together at the bottom of the post. Let's get started!

First, gather your ingredients. You'll need four cups of vegetables and one pound of beef. For the veggies, you can use whatever you like in a stir fry. I used asparagus as my star because it's in season and we have a big community asparagus patch down the road, so it's also free for the picking. :) I paired the asparagus with some slivered red bell pepper for color, and about 1/4 cup of slivered onion for extra flavor. I recommend checking your garden or local market for whatever veggies are fresh right now. You can also just look in your fridge at what you need to use up, or use a bag of frozen stir fry veggies for an extra convenience factor. 

Before starting any of the actual cooking, I like to prep the sauce. Pour the soy sauce into a glass one-cup measuring cup, then add the rest of your ingredients, brown sugar through garlic, to the soy sauce. No need to pour into another bowl- then you have one more thing to wash. Plus, it's easier to pour out of a measuring cup anyway when you go to pour your sauce on your stir fry later on. So, measure all of the sauce ingredients into the measuring cup, stir with a whisk, and set aside.

Clean your produce and cut your veggies down to bite-size pieces. For the asparagus, that meant each piece was between 1-2 inches long, depending on the thickness of the stalk. You want the pieces to be close to the same size so that they cook evenly. As you're chopping and prepping, preheat a skillet or wok to medium-high and swirl some oil in the pan. I used a mix of chili oil and olive oil. Then drop in your veggies and saute for a few minutes until they are crisp-tender. Remove from skillet into a bowl and set aside. You don't want to completely cook them at this point because they'll get more skillet time later and there's nothing worse than sad, soggy overcooked vegetables, especially asparagus.

You gotta love fresh veggies! There is nothing like home-grown asparagus for freshness and flavor.

Now, let's talk about the beef. I used a round steak which I cut in half length-wise, then cut into strips about 1/4 inch thick , cutting against the grain. You could use about any type of steak--sirloin or flank steak would work well, too, and both are lean cuts. You can also pick up pre-cut stir fry or stew beef at the meat counter of your local store. Again, you want your beef pieces to be close to the same size so they cook evenly, and you want them to be close to bite-size so you don't have to bring a knife into the picture later when you're eating. Let's say you don't want to use beef-- you could use any meat you like in this stir fry, but I personally feel the soy-sauce based sauce lends itself best to beef. (If you want my recipe for Orange-Basil Chicken, I'll gladly share that one sometime, too!)

Anyway, after you've sauteed and then removed your veggies from the skillet, you can add just a bit more oil to the pan and then drop your beef pieces in. Cook until they are browned through and fully cooked. You may have to drain some excess liquid. 

Once the beef is cooked through, add the veggies back to the pan and give everything another minute or two to stir fry all together. Now, remember your sauce you made? Give it another brisk stir with the whisk and then pour it over everything in the pan. Stir it all up so that everything gets coated with the sauce, then let it sit for a few minutes. You want it to come to a simmer because that really helps the sauce thicken and gel together. Once you get to that point, turn off the skillet and give everything another big stir so that the delicious sauce coats into every nook and cranny of food. 

All those tasty veggies and beef playing together so nicely in the skillet! Can't wait to eat it!

Now you're ready to eat! Spoon your stir fry over rice or noodles and top with cashews, peanuts, or toasted sesame seeds, and enjoy! 

 Chinese Takeout Style Beef and Vegetable Stir Fry
All You Need:
4 cups of cleaned, chopped vegetables of your choice
1 lb beef, trimmed and cut into bite size pieces
1/3 cup lite, reduced sodium soy sauce
2 Tablespoons brown sugar
1 Tablespoon corn starch
1 Tablespoon water
1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
1 teaspoon ginger powder
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes, optional.
Minced garlic, to taste. (I typically use about 2-3 cloves)

All You Do:

1. Prepare sauce using soy sauce through garlic, stirring with a whisk. Set aside.

2. Preheat a large skillet or wok to medium-high and swirl some oil in pan. Add veggies and stir fry to crisp-tender. Remove from skillet and set aside.

3. Swirl a bit more oil into pan and then saute beef pieces until browned and cooked through. Add veggies back to pan, stir frying for about one minute. Pour sauce into pan. Stir fry to coat and bring to simmer to allow sauce to thicken. Remove from heat and let sit for a few minutes before serving. Serve with rice or noodles and top with cashews, peanuts or sesame seeds.

Chinese Takeout Style Beef and Asparagus Stir Fry.
YUM!

This recipe is a little healthier than a typical Chinese takeout recipe. It uses fewer oils. The sauce is packed with flavor, which means you don't need as much of it, too. Really loading up on the veggies, such as high-in-iron and folic acid asparagus, and Vitamin-C packed red bell peppers, give it more of a nutritional punch, too. Add in the lean beef and rice, you've got close to all the food groups covered! Let me know what you think of this recipe if you give it a try! What are some of your favorite beef recipes?

The Food Post

I know I have been writing a lot about food and baking lately on the blog, so I wanted to take a post here to show some photos and share a little bit about what I have been up to. Some projects have been solo endeavors and others with either Stephanie or Carol. There is something very satisfying about making a home-cooked meal from scratch, especially when using ingredients one has grown oneself. 

Again, as a disclaimer: I'm no food photographer! I'll try to get better if I keep posting food images, but... no promises! 

One of the first things Stennie and I did when she got here was mix up a batch of pie crusts. We made four crusts and formed them into discs. Three went into the freezer and one was made into a crust for this delicious pie:

Wishing I had taken a photo of a slice of pie so you could see the key lime part... 

This pie is a key-lime pie topped with fresh raspberries. The limes came from my Bountiful Basket and the berries were from Carol's raspberry thicket. Stennie and I did the crust together, but I whipped up the custardy lime filling on my own. I had never made anything custard-like before, and was really pleased with how it turned out.

It was a big hit at dinner that night, too. I carried it over to Tom and Carol's in this wonderful food carrier:

Made by Nancy |Olson

This was something I received at my bridal shower up here on the Hi-Line about three and a half years ago. It was made by a local woman who has since passed away. It's a perfect carrier for harvest-time meals, potlucks, or any time one is taking food to and fro.

Another plentiful garden vegetable right now is green beans. A few days after Carol returned from her vacation, we picked and canned these green beans as bean pickles, or dilly beans as some people call them. The contents are simple: green beans, dill heads, garlic, red pepper flakes, sugar, salt, cider vinegar. Canned using the hot water bath method, they are pretty simple and very delicious! I like bean pickles on grilled brats especially well in the summer, but they're also delightful eaten plain. 

The beans, garlic, pepper flakes, and dill have been packed into jars and are awaiting the hot cider vinegar solution, then to be processed. 

Carrots are also plentiful in the garden this year. I am really loving these rainbow carrots we planted. I think the colors are very beautiful. They look like a sunset in carrot form, some of them. We have been noticing that they vary in strength of carroty flavor depending on the color. The white ones are very mild, yellow is slightly stronger, orange tastes like a normal carrot, and the red ones are even more carroty. They are all delicous!

With the most recent Bountiful Basket, I also ordered a case of peaches. I have had a few questions from people as to the quality of the peaches, so I thought I'd answer those here. The peaches came from Washington. They were very sweet and lovely flavored. They weren't too big or too small in size. There was not a single unusable peach in the box. The whole thing was great in every aspect. 

Including, baked into peach pie! 

This was another tag-team effort between me and Stennie. We pulled two pie crust discs out of the freezer ahead of time and rolled one into the bottom crust and the other into a top-crust, destined to be a lattice crust. We had a lot of fun cutting the strips for the lattice top and weaving them together. It can be a bit tedious to accomplish, with several trips back and forth between countertop and freezer to keep the butter in the crust cool, but.... 

In the end, the pie turned out so beautiful and delicious, that it was well worth the effort! 

We shared the peach pie at a neighborhood dinner with some dear friends and family. It was a nice treat, especially with a little ice cream! 

My recipe made 9 pint jars of peaches in a light simple syrup.
I used those two books as references. 

With the remaining peaches from my case, I decided to tackle another canning project. I had never canned fruit straight-up before, so this was a fun process. I was delighted at how simple it was, too, especially contrasted with making marinara sauce, which is highly involved and usually takes me about two days to get through all the steps. The peaches only took about two hours, including blanching and peeling, packing into jars, making simple syrup and filling the jars, and processing. Stennie's help is also another big reason why the canning process went quickly and smoothly. I can't wait to open a jar on a cool fall or winter day for a little bit of canned sunshine and love from summer!

We've had many other delicious meals and baked goods, from homemade pizza to canned meat dinner. Stay tuned to the blog for updates on all our culinary adventures! 

The Madness Begins!

Man, oh Man has it been busy around here!

Since arriving home from our trip to Wisconsin on Sunday, Jeff and I have been going non-stop. You can read about the trip in my post from a few days ago: Four States, Seven Days!

Carol is out of town since Tuesday and will be gone for about ten days, so that adds some extra work for me maintaining the garden and making sure the guys eat. I quickly settled into a routine: Wake early (usually around 6:00 a.m.) and water the garden/pick produce at Tom and Carol's, return home and pick a section of yard to mow for about an hour, then it's lunchtime. Maybe a quick nap after lunch, then I try to do some work around the house or putting up of produce that was picked in the morning, one way or another. Late afternoon is usually time to workout, then it's time to start preparing dinner for everyone.

Of course, I call it a "routine" as if each day has been the same. Ha!

The mornings have been pretty much the same, but afternoons are more volatile in terms of scheduling one's day. Best thing to do is plan to be flexible.

We actually started HARVEST yesterday (woohoo!) so that changes everything. The madness begins!



The rest of this post is just a smattering of photos I've taken this week. I apologize that this post is fairly unorganized. I suppose it matches my brain and my overall mood right now... That's sort of how it goes during harvest. You can plan all you want, but in the end, the wheat, the weather, and the machinery will decide for you how your day will go. We're fools to think we're in control. I have learned that the best attitude to have during harvest (and really, all the time on the farm) is to just go with the flow and stay positive. Situations can change in an instant.

Enjoy the photos!

Mule deer doe and a small buck as viewed from my car, just down the road from our house. 

Green Pea Hummus

Some of you may remember when we made That Wierd Green Smoothie last spring for Shape Up Montana. The above photo is actually not a reprise of that concoction, but something much better. With the abundance of peas this year in the garden, I made Green Pea Hummus as somewhat of an experiment. We go through hummus pretty fast in our house. I figured, Why not try Peas? Since they are also pulse crops and very similar to garbanzos. Green Pea Hummus turned out to be pretty good! 

I think I mentioned a nap time somewhere in there... Harvey also excels at taking naps! 

Quincy was napping on the steps until I woke him up. He's a pretty cool cat. 

 Raspberries are starting to peak right now, so I spent some time yesterday morning picking berries. Raspberry picking for one of our neighbors who grows and sells berries as a business was actually my first job after moving up here. Here's a post I did about that: Five Senses of Raspberries. One of my earliest blog posts, actually. It's not as easy as one might think, but once you get into a rhythm of picking, it's not so bad.

Zucchini!

 So, when my parents came to visit back in June, my mom brought some zucchini seedlings with her, on the plane, through security, in the car, all the way from Iowa to our farm. Just so we could plant them in our garden! Well, two months later, I'd say they're doing pretty good! We have had a ton of zukes already and there are about a billion blossoms. Relish-making is in our future...

The next two photos are about as random as it gets, but hey-- that's life!

When I went to get the mail today, I noticed a jar of jam in the mailbox, too. It was made by our mail carrier's wife. I have no idea if Tom and Carol were expecting any jam, but regardless, there it was. It just made me laugh. How many people can say their mailman brought them some homemade jam with their mail? How many people can even say they know their mail carrier by name? That's rural America, folks!

You'll have to excuse the shadow of the photographer partially blocking the image, but isn't that thing cool? Apparently that windmill-esque thing is some sort of fan from inside the combine. If I were enterprising and creative and good at fashioning things out of metal, I'd make that into some sort of cool yard art or wall hanging or something. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, let me know. It looks like a sunflower or something... pretty cool.
 Since harvest has begun, I leave you with this image. Jeff's driving the combine, unloading on-the-go into the tandem, which Tom is driving. All underneath a giant, puffy cloud. Even though our days are hectic, madness, and never go as planned, we still live a pretty sweet life around here. I've got the photos to prove it. :)

Winter is for Meat Processing

It's January. Snow is on the ground (Yay!) and the air is crisp.  Football season is over in our house, and basketball is just starting to get good.  Big game hunting season has long been out of our minds.  Time to hunker down and enjoy the solitude of winter.



Mmmm... summer sausage!

Big game hunting season my be out of our minds, but now is the time to process the meat into tasty, tasty treats.  After several years of processing his own animals, Jeff has really become quite proficient in the art and science of home-butchering and meat processing. One thing I can say about it is that it is A LOT of work- the perfect type of work for a deep winter day.

This year, another young couple we are friends with came over for a long weekend and the four of us worked together at processing autumn's game harvest into manageably eatable portions. They had been out earlier in the fall and took a very large deer while they were here. We all agreed at the time to get together again for the processing.



Summer sausage and assorted snack sticks.

Jeff and I are not ones to enjoy a wild game steak or roast, but quite enjoy encased meats and sausages of wide variety. Of course, this means a lot more work on our part to process the meat, but we think it is worth it in the end. Fortunately, our friends agreed, and with four people processing the meat instead of two, it went smoothly. Not to mention, it was a lot more fun! Between the two couples, there was meat from two deer, one antelope, and some leftover meat from an elk-- well over one hundred pounds. In the end, we had snack sticks, summer sausage, cheddar polish brats, regular brats, loose breakfast sausage, loose Italian sausage, and plenty of jerky. We spent three days grinding, smoking, and cooking the various meat products.

These are either the regular or cheddar Polish brats...

Jeff received a very nice new meat grinder this year for Christmas, along with some very useful accessories such as a very large metal industrial mixing bowl, and some sausage seasoning mixes. These greatly aided the process- definitely were put to good use right away.  We used these with some of the other supplies we already had- jerky guns, a smoker, and a food dehydrator, among other small items. I think we also used nearly every metal tray and wire cooling rack that I own, and also managed to dirty nearly every rag or towel as the house and shop were consumed with meat-making.

Breakfast sausage on the right, Italian sausage on the left.
Approximately eight pounds of each.

 I don't think any of us are planning on quitting our day jobs to become butchers any time soon, but there is a great sense of pride in processing the meat all on one's own. To me, the next step in our process would be to create our own seasoning blends from scratch as well.  Right now, we primarily use pre-packaged mixes from Hi Country, which is a Montana-based company, located near Lincoln, MT.  Check them out at http://www.hicountry.com/ or if you're in Lincoln, stop by their store. Their jerky and meat products are also found in convenience stores and food stores throughout Montana, if not further afield. The seasoning mixes from Hi Country are really good, and as the saying goes, why mess with success? We may never stray from buying their packages, but the experimental cook in me loves the challenge behind creating delightful or unexpected flavor combinations on our own. Something to think about for next year, anyway.

Some finished product, packaged and ready for the deep freezer.

One thing that greatly appeals to me is that hunting, processing, and eating game couldn't be more "local." The animals used were taken within a few miles of our house, were processed at our house, and will be eaten at our house. Beef or pork that we added to some of the products also came from nearby sources. The only non-local ingredients would be the seasonings. To take it further, wild game is also grass-fed and free range.

We have sampled all of the products we made this year except the cheddar Polish brats, which I am very excited about. Everything so far has been excellent, and an improvement over last year. That is the best we can hope for, anyway- improvement over last year. So far, I think we nailed it.