Main Ingredients- 1 x 16 oz Rib-Eye Steak
- Sugar Snap Peas
- Bok Choi
- Broccoli
- Egg Noodles
- Beansprouts
- Black Bean Sauce
My first attempt of a New Food Monday actually happened on a Tuesday, after a long weekend of Christmas food. Jamie Oliver's 30-minute stir fry seemed like the perfect antidote to the festive overload, and was surprisingly easy to make. For this Oriental dish, I had to buy 13 new ingredients which was fairly expensive, but has left me with plenty left over to use in other meals. The total cost of £4.15 per head is pretty dear, but considering that £2 of that went on steak, the rest is quite cost-effective.
I failed to keep my cooking time under 30 minutes, mainly due to my lack of veg preparation, but the overall cooking time of 34 minutes wasn't bad. We used Tesco's rib-eye steak which was lovely and rare after two minutes on each side, while the sugar snap peas and broccoli added some healthiness. The big failure was the Bok Choi (I used Pak Choi, unsure of the difference...), which was horribly soggy and probably overcooked.
My other main criticism was that the whole thing wasn't that hot by the time I brought it to the table, which wasn't great for a cold December evening. Nonetheless the whole meal was full of exciting flavours, from lime and chili to ginger and coriander, and I felt well-fed and healthy afterwards.
Best for... A warm summer's evening
Taken from... Jamie's 30-Minute Meals
Helen says... I'd never understood the point of beansprouts before but they made a really crispy contrast to the noodles and steak - I inhaled my portion!
Love the blog idea but having not been in receipt of a bumper christmas crop of the exact same cookery books as you guys I find myself pining to know more about the recipe :P you'd surely be fine posting (or at least paraphrasing) the recipe used - especially if you add a link to purchase the book on your online book shop of choice (getting a cut for the clickthrough of course) oooh: http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/12/blogger-integrates-with-amazon.html
ReplyDeleteI try to keep things interesting by trying out new recipes but it is an expensive pastime. Since one of my housemates went on a health regime and demanded "COMPLETE CONTROL" of her evening meals we've stopped doing a 3-4 person informal cooking rota so recently reverse economies of scale etc => personal food expenditure has gone up. I do try to make enough to last a couple of days and even with that a cost of £4.15 per meal would be impressively low once you've bought all the additional crap required. Basically: you're doing something right.
Sounds yummy btw. Love pak choi (pak/bok are the same I think) - favourite way to cook is to stir fry with garlic, ginger and red chili in sesame oil til the leaves have wilted. The stems stay crisp and it's v tasty.
Sorry to ramble but incidentally I tried out a first time recipe today too - all the celebrity chefs seem to be getting a bit desperate in the past few years, obviously thoroughly fed up of constantly trying to reinvent the same tired old turkey recipes (to be fair there are only so many ways you can cook a fucking turkey) so it seems like they've all suddenly noticed the existence of another thing-we-could-possibly-be-persuaded-to-cook-at-christmas: Glazed Ham! My mum bought a gammon joint and presented it to me during the ancient getting-back-from-asda ritual with the timeless getting-back-from-asda ritual mantra: "I thought you could maybe do something with it..." I went with this one in the end: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/168623/gordons-honey-glazed-ham i was disappointed that it didn't in fact include the helpful instruction "scour the ham in one direction til it resembles my face, turn imaginary face 75 degrees, and scour again." addendum: "if you wish your glaze to be extra crispy simply replace the image of my current face with an image of my pre-cosmetic surgery face."
Absolutely fantastic. Not sure whether it would work for two, maybe a smaller one could be used but did this for the family and went down a storm. Ate hot with other roasty stuff. The caramelised juices/glazeyness left in the roasting tin + some of the original stock + reduce = excellent sauce (for the record the word "jus" is banned... "sauce" already exists to allow you to describe basically the same thing without sounding like an idiot) for serving, v tasty.
sorry again.