I am sick of our food again. We are eating at home every night, because it's cheaper and because I don't want Boogie thinking that restaurant dining is a normal part of her week. It should be a special-occasion type of thing, not something we do all the time. Luckily she's been to enough of them that she is mostly inclined to behave herself. We don't go to fine dining restaurants, even if we could afford it, but we do stick to the types of chain restaurants and local places where there is the reasonable expectation that kids might be there and they might get a little rowdy. But lately we've been strictly eating at home, and eating homemade food, so we're starting to fall into a rut. Pasta, red meat one night, chicken or pork another night, meatloaf or some other ground-beef dinner (it was tacos this week), something a little different once or twice, then pizza. I always know we've hit the wall when we give up and order pizza.
So I'm sitting here thinking about what we can have that would be a little different, while also being somewhat affordable and quick to prepare, and I have decided on Teriyaki Beef. It's just as easy to make the teriyaki sauce as it is to buy it, and you can have the ingredients on hand in large quantities so you can vary the taste according to your preference. Teriyaki sauce is just soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, mirin (Japanese rice wine, or you could use sherry, which is what I do) and ginger, and it's easy to find recipes for the proper quantities on the internet. My recipe comes from a book called Substituting Ingredients- An A to Z Kitchen Reference, by Becky Sue Epstein & Hilary D. Klein. This book has been priceless to me- I bought it on a whim when I first moved out on my own, and it is just... people, I love this book. It's an alphabetical list of ingredients both exotic and commonplace, and the ingredients you can use to substitute if you don't have something or if it's something so specific that you just don't want to buy a lot of it. Like, say you for some reason ran out of ketchup. Look up ketchup and it lists all the different things you can use instead to achieve the same taste. Or if a recipe calls for something you don't have in your spice cupboard and you don't want to buy a quantity of it 'cause you're not sure when you're going to use it again. Look it up and chances are good there will be a substitution involving more common ingredients you have on hand. I don't usually gush about cookbooks to people-- I collect them rabidly and read them like novels, but it's not something I babble on about to others-- but this one is gold, people. Seriously go out and buy this book if you can find it.
But I digress. At length. I use their recipe for teriyaki sauce, which I will share with you when I have access to the book. The neat thing about making your own sauce, to me, is that depending on your choice of protein you can vary the quantities of the ingredients. I'm making beef tonight so I want a heavier flavor-- thus, more soy sauce. If I were doing chicken, seafood or tofu, I might put less soy sauce and more mirin and vinegar for a lighter flavor that doesn't overpower the food. For pork, maybe more ginger than I would put with other proteins just because ginger and pork go so well together, and I might add some citrus juice instead of the vinegar. It isn't the true Japanese way, obviously, but I'm not striving for authenticity here, just good tasting food.
A tip about ginger if you haven't heard it before. If you like to use fresh ginger but don't use it a lot, there are two ways to store it long-term. The first involves sherry and the refrigerator. When you're putting the ginger away, put it into a non-porous container (like a glass jar) and pour in enough cooking sherry just to cover. Store it in the fridge and you can save it for another day, up to a month. If you need to store it longer, put it in a zippered bag in the freezer and squeeze all the air out. When you need to use it just chop off what you need and put the rest back. I do this and the ginger is usually good for about 6 to 8 weeks before it gets all freezer-burny and dull-tasting. Fresh is always best, but wasting perfectly good food is never a good idea.
The preparation is really simple here. Put together the ingredients for the teriyaki marinade and slice your protein thinly. I am going to use a flank steak, cut across the grain into thin slices. Place the meat or tofu in a zippered bag, add your marinade and let it soak until the rest of your ingredients are prepped. I happen to have leftover white rice, so to perk it up before I serve it I'll be placing it in a big serving bowl, covering it with a wet paper towel and putting it in the microwave for one minute. Then I'll just leave it there til I'm ready to serve dinner.
The rest of the ingredients: Broccoli, garlic and scallions. The broccoli will be cut up into bite-size chunks, garlic will be minced and scallions sliced into thin ribbons. I've been watching Kylie Kwong lately and I like the way she chops things. Rather than slicing the scallions into rings, I will cut on the diagonal so the pieces are bigger but still thin-- more scallion in a bite. And pretty. Common stir-fry instructions state to cut up all your components and have them prepped before you cook. Do this. It's worth it just for not having to scramble while you're cooking, and you get to play Cooking Show Host while you make your dinner. But don't narrate unless someone's actually in the kitchen with you. Otherwise you look like a dork.
When you're ready, heat up your wok and drizzle some oil in it. Use a light oil- no need for the olive here unless that's what you've got on hand. Canola oil or another flavorless oil work wonderfully. Add the garlic and scallions and stir to release their flavor into the oil. Take the meat from the marinade- put the meat in the wok and the marinade in a separate saucepan to cook. You need to cook it to lose the chance there might be bacteria from the raw meat (not likely, but who takes chances with that?) and also so you can thicken it. Stir-fry the meat, add the broccoli and any other veggies you want- sometimes I add carrots or snow peas if I have them. Meanwhile, mix together a teaspoon of corn starch in enough water to make a slurry, and add it to your teriyaki marinade in the saucepan. Stir until thickened and pour the whole thing over the meat and veggies in the wok. Stir to coat evenly, then cover and let it steam until the broccoli is tender.
Go back to your rice in the nuker. Toss it with a fork, replace the wet paper towel on top and re-nuke up to a minute if necessary.
There you go! Tasty teriyaki dinner for me, and a recipe for you.
Have a special weekend!
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