Beef Teriyaki Stir Fry

I love to stir fry. I joke about how bad I am about baking meat, but why would you take 40 minutes to wait for dinner when you can fry it up in 15? The dish I am going to describe today is one of my favorites to cook. There is no recipe here because you find the stuff you have and toss them in together.

This dish revolves around an amazing teriyaki sauce by Culinary Circle (see below). The sauce is sweet, but not too sweet and whatever spices in it are perfect to hit all of my taste buds. For the beef, I tend to choose whatever is on sale, but with a preference for steak tips or other small cuts of beef. I slice it thin, and leave it to marinate in the sauce for a few minutes before I begin cooking.

My favorite frozen vegetable mix is the frozen sugar snap stir fry by Birds Eye. I will defrost the vegis a bit in the microwave, using a tiny bit of water and some plain teriyaki sauce. After the vegis have defrosted, I pour out the water (and sauce) from the bottom to keep it from diluting the sauce in the finished dish.

In today's batch, I'm going to add some old rice (not quite fried rice, but it's an easy way to warm it up). The final component is some shelled edamame. I will either shell it myself, or use frozen pre-shelled. I add this to the stir fry at the very end, and don't bother defrosting it at all. It cooks really fast and gives the dish a nice crunch.

And here you go, a nice big pan full of deliciousness. This is a well r0unded meal all in one pot, and since there are only two of us this lasts for longer than one meal!

Why am I so bad at baking meat?

Every time I have to look it up to do.

Remember, Rebecca: Cook chicken at 350 degrees for 40 minutes!

I have yet to serve undercooked chicken, but I always expect it to take less time than it actually does!

Chicken baking with a Old Bay Spice rub

Boiled Corn Beef

I love a good boiled dinner. When I make corned beef, I usually do not add veggies to the pot, I focus just on the meat. There are two reasons why I don't make corned beef more often: 1) it is expensive, and 2) it isn't that good for you.

We got a great deal on Corned Beef at Costco - $14 for 4 pounds! This was a deal that I just couldn't pass up.

The instructions that came with the cut of meat.

I'm cooking it in a very simple way, boiling. Since it supposedly takes 1 hour per pound of meat, I had to wait until I had an afternoon at home to cook it. I added the included spices to the pot (boy did it smell good.) After 2h and 45 min, the fork came out easy, so I decided it was done. I kept the pot covered until Keith came home for dinner.

I'm glad that I did not cook the corned beef for 4 hours like the package indicated, we would have had a very soft dinner, indeed!

As much fat as there is in the pot, the beef stock that remained after we removed the corned beef smelled amazing. I would have saved it if we had more space in our freezer...