Chicken and Beef Stir Fry

We are trying to cut out a lot of restaurant eating because while we do not eat out that often, I feel guilty when we spend $40 on a meal I can easily make at home. There was a time I used to make stir fry pretty frequently but for what ever reason, I stopped. I am not sure why because we both love it and it is healthy unless you add a lot of sauces to it. Another good thing about stir fry is you can use whatever is on hand, so it does not have to be the same thing every time you serve it.

This stir fry went a little something like this:

3 chicken breasts, thinly sliced
1 sirloin, thinly sliced
broccoli
snow peas
onions
peppers
mushrooms
garlic

Marinate the meat in hoisin and soy sauce. With your pan smoking hot, add a little vegetable oil and cook the meat quickly and stir constantly. Remove the meat from the pan and add the vegetables, cooking them the same way. Add a little toasted sesame oil, more hoisin, and soy sauce. Mix about a tablespoon of cornstarch in 1 cup of beef broth. Mix it all together adding the meat back to the pan.

Serve over jasmine rice.

Firecracker Chicken

Sometimes it pays to tag along with your husband to Lowes. We had already spent the better part of the morning there looking some kind of screw fitting thingy and he still didn't have just what he wanted.

On the next trip to Lowes, I picked up a magazine out of the rack and parked myself in the patio furniture while he searched for the right thing. I grabbed a Cook's Illustrated because I am always on the look out for a new recipe. I thought I'd found the one. Firecracker Chicken. It sounded yummy. I planned on purchasing the magazine but my husband had already checked out and I didn't want to get back in line. (Our Lowes never has more than two cashiers working at any time) There were only two recipes in the whole magazine I thought I would actually try, the firecracker chicken and a chocolate black out cake. I decided to do without it for now, but I couldn't stop thinking about the recipe.

What is a girl to do?

Google it!

I found the recipe at Recipezaar. I was so excited and I had everything on hand. So Firecracker Chicken became what's for dinner tonight. The chicken by itself had a great flavor from the marinating.



The sauce is DIVINE! I will be making this sauce for so many meats. The one change I made was not to add a habanero, I used a jalapeño instead. I like heat but I'm not interested in burning off my taste buds.

To round out our dinner we had roasted Brussels sprouts and sweet potato fries. I think there is also a piece of leftover PUSDC for dessert.