Hoisin beef stirfry

I think I posted something very similar to this a while back, but I’m revisiting it. I’ve changed up the ingredients a bit, including the amount of hoisin sauce and spices, as well as adding a can of water chestnuts (which were a fantastic addition!).

Stirfry lunch or dinner is a nearly no-guilt meal for me. So long as I watch the sodium, don’t add much in the way of oil, and am careful with what sauces I add (and how much), I think it’s a pretty healthy way to eat. And loading it up with veggies but just a little bit of meat allows you to spread out a small portion of meat (especially if that’s all you have) between more people/portions.

You see, I’m not much of a raw-veggie fan, but stirfry needs to be crunchy. Warmed through but still undercooked enough to have that crunch. A floppy, mushy stirfry is just nasty, so the key here is a high enough heat to warm quickly while preserving the crunch of the veggies, but not so high that it burns, along with cooking it very quickly. Cooking it on a lower heat just boils or simmers it in whatever you’re cooking it in. I am by no means a master at this. I just kind of eyeball it and judge by how the food feels against the spatula.

So I had some strips of an Eye of Round roast in the freezer that I hadn’t cooked up yet and decided that was going to be the meat of the dish. Here’s what I did…

Low-carb adventures: quick sweet beef stir-fry

I was craving Chinese food one lunch-hour while I was on vacation. But Chinese can get expensive and I’ve been trying to cut back on MSG (which gives me migraines), sodium, and extra spending. 😉 So I raided my fridge and freezer to see what I could do. Before long, I had drummed up the fixings for a really quick stir-fry for lunch. Here’s what I did…

Crockpot lasagna!

Even with the air conditioning running 24/7, it has been a brutal summer. Brutal enough that I cringe at the thought of turning on the oven, as I’ve mentioned in earlier posts. I’ve been missing lasagna. So, I decided to experiment with my crockpot (slow-cooker) today. Here’s what I got.

Apple-baked chicken & noodles with apple cream sauce

Before I start to explain, go to this Food Network recipe for Apple Cider Chicken by Sunny Anderson. This is what I based my chicken dish off of. The main difference is that instead of finishing the entire dish off on the stove, I baked mine in the end. I still seared the chicken breasts (and I had 6, not 4) in the pan and sauteed the apples, onions, garlic, seasonings, etc. in the pan. Then after the apple cider was added and cooked down a bit, it was then poured over the chicken , I added a bit more cider, and I baked it all off at 350F for 30 minutes until the chicken’s internal temperature was 165F.

Then, while the chicken baked off, I got to work on a sauce for some egg noodles as a side dish. Here’s what I did: 

My totally fake slowcooker “Stroganoff”

There are going to be people who look at this and say, “That’s not Stroganoff!!” and I will say, wholeheartedly, that they are correct. This is more of a Stroganoff-inspired dish that was more about using up some ingredients in my fridge before their best before dates and less about being authentic.

Here’s what I did…

Thai-inspired dinner

Thai food is not something I normally indulge in. I can’t handle spicy-spicy foods. (Yeah, I’m a wuss.) But I was in the mood for something different tonight, so I poked around online for a dipping sauce recipe that would strike my fancy and dove into whipping something up.

First, I cannot claim the Thai Peanut Sauce as my own. I did cut back slightly on the amount of chili powder and added more brown sugar for my own tastes, but otherwise, check out the recipe at tasteofBBQ.

All I did with the chicken was cut it up into strips and then marinaded it in a bowl in the fridge filled with half a bottle of low fat Italian dressing for about an hour. Then I skewered them on metal skewers and grilled them on my indoor grill for a few minutes. Carefully, I removed the chicken from the grill with tongs (as those skewers would be hot)! and pulled the chicken off the skewers into a serving bowl, sprinkling it all with a little bit of coarse salt.

How I saved my overcooked chicken

So last night, I knew I had several boneless, skinless chicken breasts which needed to be cooked up but I rapidly found myself running out of evening to cook them in. I thought I’d be clever and throw them into the crockpot with some honey-garlic sauce (VH), onions and a can of pineapple, let it on low and wake up in the morning to fantastic chicken.

Boy, was I wrong. Boneless, skinless chicken breasts are not good for the crockpot, because they dry out very easily, despite being drenched in liquid. I didn’t realize this.

Hubby said he’d eat it, but I told him to leave it alone, let me think about it and I’d see if I could salvage it and make it more palatable. I had a few ideas after searching through my cupboards. Here’s how I saved my chicken…