My husband wrote a very kind post on Facebook last night. (Thanks, Sweetheart!)

I also posted something about our meal, and this led to a few requests for the recipe. One person thought he saw squid in there, but I assured him that it was just little baby corn…although I do love squid and could have bought it easily at the grocery store here. ;-)

In the past, I’ve always used bottled sauces (for instance, soy sauce and some terryaki blend) to season the stir fry, but this time, I made the sauce from scratch. It was delicious! For those who wanted our stir fry recipe, here it is.

Homemade Asian Stir Fry

1. Choose veggies and meat that you like. For last night’s recipe, we picked carrots, mushrooms, green pepper, broccoli, and baby corn for the veggies. For our meat we used thinly sliced beef which is very easy to find in any grocery store in Taiwan.
2. Cut up all of the veggies, and place them in individual bowls. Slice the veggies relatively thin so that they cook quickly in the pan.
3. Prepare the sauce. I used a recipe from a great food blog I found. The blog post listed 15 different delicious stir fry sauces, and I chose one that was a basic Asian stir fry sauce, good with any meats. See the recipe below.
4. Cook one type of vegetable at a time in a large pan or wok. Use vegetable oil or canola oil in the bottom of the pan, and pour 2-3 spoonfuls of the stir fry sauce over the veggies while they cook. Slightly under-cook the veggies because you will heat them all again at the end. When the vegetables are cooked but still crispy, put them back into their original bowl and move onto the next item. You could potentially cook all veggies together, adding them at the right times so they are all cooked the right amount, but I’m not that good at the timing.
5. The last thing to cook is the meat. Again, put a little oil in the pan, and add the thinly cut meat. Pour a bit of the stir fry sauce on top so that the flavors cook into the meat. Don’t cook the meat all the way yet because it will have time to finish cooking through once you heat everything together.
6. Drain off excess grease from the pan.
7. Add all ingredients back into the pan and mix together. Add plenty of stir fry sauce at this point to saturate the veggies and meat with flavor. Don’t overcook your stir fry! Asian stir fry should have crisp, bursting-with-flavor veggies. I’ve always had trouble with soggy vegetables in the past, but this time I got it right!
8. Serve over rice, and enjoy!

The Sauce I Used

2/3 cup soy sauce
1/2 cup chicken broth
1/3 cup rice wine or rice vinegar
3 1/2 Tbsp. sugar
1 Tbsp. sesame oil
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon minced ginger
2 Tbsp. cornstarch

Note: We didn’t have any chicken broth on hand, so we just added a little extra soy sauce and water for the liquid. I’m sure this recipe would taste wonderful with the chicken broth, but it was plenty tasty without it too!

A Very Colorful Meal

looking good!

an eager Emi waiting for food to fall

all together in the pan

dinner for two

the finished product