Sam and I tend to get stuck in a food rut. It’s not that we cook the same food every week but we tend to cook the same genre of food all the time. Roasts, mexican food and a pasta dish. In an effort to change things I’ve been searching for recipes to shake things up a bit. Heidee from the Snail Mail Collective sent me a great book of recipes from Singapore which I’ll be attempting to make as soon as I get my hands on some of the ingredients.
I know it’s tacky, but in America I love eating at PF Chang’s. That reference means NOTHING to Sam, but this is a copycat version of their Mongolian Beef.
Mongolian Beef
Ingredients:
4 teaspoons of vegetable oil
1 1/2 teaspoons of ground ginger
2 tablespoons of garlic, minced
1 cup of soy sauce
1 cup of water
1 cup of brown sugar, packed
1 cup of vegetable oil
2 lbs of flank steak
1/2 cup cornstarch
3 large green onions
rice to serve it over
The diced flank steak “soaking” up the cornstarch. Sam said it looked like Turkish Delight.
It does.
Instructions:
Make the sauce by heating 4 teaspoons of vegetable oil in a medium saucepan over medium/low heat. Don’t get the oil too hot. Add ginger and garlic to the pan and quickly add the soy sauce and water before the garlic scorches. Dissolve the brown sugar in the sauce, then raise the heat to medium and boil the sauce 2-3 minutes or until sauce thickens a little bit. Reduce to a very low simmer and continue to stir occasionally as you prepare the rest of the dish.
Lovely little salad diced salad onions.
Slice the flank steak into 1/4 inch slices. Dust the steak pieces in cornstarch to apply a very thin layer to both sides of each piece of beef. Let the beef sit about 10 minutes so the cornstarch sticks. The beef really starts to soak up the cornstarch! As the beef sits, heat up 1 cup of oil in a large skillet. Heat the oil over medium heat until its hot, but not smoking. Add the beef to the oil and saute for just 2 minutes, or until beef just begins to darken on the edges. Stir the meat around a little bit so that it cooks evenly. Sous chef Sam did this step of the recipe because he didn’t trust my clumsiness around hot oil.
The sauce simmering away.
After a few minutes, take the meat out and put it onto paper towels, then pour most of the oil out of the skillet. Pat the beef lightly with the paper towel to absorb excess oil. Put the pan back over the heat, dump the meat back into it and stir-fry for 1 minute. Add the sauce, cook for 1 minute while stirring and add green onions. Cook for 1 more minute. Now at this step, PF Chang’s removes the beef and discards the sauce. But that is absolutely NOT what Sam and I did. Why would we discard such deliciousness? So I thickened the sauce with a tablespoon or so of cornstarch to desired thickness as excess sauce.
He didn’t like this picture. That’s the perks of getting to make final blog decisions.
Yes, we both own and use aprons.
Hopefully you’ll already have been preparing your rice so as soon as your sauce is thickened and the beef is cooked you can immediately serve it!
This will definitely be a new dinner standard! It was divine!
We seriously demolished this dish. Leftovers didn’t make it to the next day. We both love a guilty pleasure take-out and the beauty of this dish is that it does taste like take-away.
Do you have any secret embarrassing savoury family dishes?
