Helen RandellChinese Style Beef
April 3rd 2011 08:21
Does anyone out there remember the time, back in the 80s mainly, when microwave cooking was all the rage? Once a month I volunteer at a community book shed, where people donate their unwanted reads, and other people come and pay low prices to take said books home. The number of microwave cook books we receive is just phenomenal, but, we don’t sell a whole heap of them. Microwaves just aren’t big in a culinary way these days, and a combined uneasiness about radiating your food, as well as the pictures which feature in these books (you know what I mean) I guess it’s no surprise.
Last time we did a big cook-off at my grandma’s she gave me her copy of Margaret Fulton’s Microwave Cookery. There were some absolute shockers in there, including one recipe which called you to make a white sauce, which you spread over chicken marylands, keeping a small portion of the sauce aside, which you added some green food colouring to, allowing you to decorate the white, icing like, surface on the chicken with leaf like images. The whole thing looked like a very wrong Christmas cake with fondant icing.
One recipe that did catch my eye though was for Chinese Beef. Combining the flavours of Chinese cooking into a stock based sauce, the recipe is actually quite similar to something you might order off the menu at a Chinese takeaway as black bean beef. I didn’t cook it in the microwave, instead completing each step on the stove.
Chinese Style Beef
- serves 2
1/2 tsp sesame oil
1 medium onion, sliced
1 small garlic clove, peeled and crushed
200g sirloin steak, cut into strips
3 mushrooms sliced
1/2 red capsicum, sliced
1 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp grated nutmeg
1 tbsp cornflour
1/4 cup dry sherry
1 tbs lemon juice
3/4 cup beef stock
1 tbsp soy sauce
Place the oil in a frying pan and saute onion and garlic over a medium heat. Add beef, mushrooms and capsicum, stirring to brown. Stir in dry spices and cook a few minutes more.
Combine cornflour, sherry, lemon juice, stock and soy sauce. Pour into the pan and cook until sauce is heated through and slighting thickened. Serve with rice or steamed greens.
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