Thursday, November 20, 2008

Stir-fried Cabbage and Green Beans

No hard recipes here. I will just tell you a story of how I gave leftover meat a healthy makeover. 

I went on duty the other night with just a sandwich for "supper" to be eaten during my break. I am not really quite satisfied having something so light for "supper" to sustain me the whole 12-hr shift. So when one of my co-workers asked whether I would like to order Chinese food, I said yes. I ordered a D30 combo meal(chicken teriyaki with something ground beef dish,and fried rice, although when I made the order I thought I had veggies there). While the beef tasted good, I was quite overwhelmed with the amount of sauce that I even drained some off it. Imagine, I was using a fork to eat, yet I was still overwhelmed with the sauce. I could aptly call it brown sauce with ground beef.

Anyway, typical of ordered Chinese food, I had enough to feed me for at least two meals. So I brought home my leftovers. I had one skewer of chicken teriyaki left, which I combined with leftover chicken adobo and used for fried rice (ssee my previous post). My leftover ground beef was probably about 1/2 cup, still quite sauce-y. I have always like cooking stir-fried veggies with the sauce of some meaty dishes like adobo and the likes. So, I cooked this meager amount of beef with some frozen green beans and fresh cabbage, and ate that with chicken adobo fried rice. That was my supper the next night I went on duty. I loved it!

So if you are like me who orders Chinese food from time to time, here's some leftover ideas to toy with.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup ground beef with brown sauce (don't know what it was really called)
2 tbsp oil
1 medium onion, sliced
handful of green beans
1/4 of a whole cabbage, sliced
1/4 cup sherry
cornstarch-water mix for thickening
additional water as needed
salt and pepper to taste,
sprinkle of ground basil

Instructions:
Sautee onions until translucent. Add the green beans and cook for about 2-3 minutes (depending on how crisp you want it to be). Add cabbage and stir-fry about a minute, add the sherry and let sizzle. Add the leftover beef and sauce. Add some more water as needed for the amount of sauce you want (My green beans were frozen, my harvest from past summer gardening, so they rendered some juice). Adjust taste with salt and pepper. Gradually pour cornstarch-water mixture until the desired consistency is achieved. Sprinkle ground basil and serve hot.

(Thickening the sauce makes it cling more onto the veggies.)

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1 comment:

Peppercorn Press said...

What a great way to create something new out of leftovers.

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