Tuesday 18 January 2011

Meatballs with Vegetable Stir Fry

Forth and final installment (for now) in my Chinese cooking series. One of my major weaknesses is lack of diversity when it comes to veg so this meal also contains a very simple vegetable stir fry that I'll work on in the future.
For 4:
900g beef mince
4 Spring Onions
4 Garlic Cloves
2 Tablespoons Ground Ginger
2 Tablespoons Apple Juice
2 Tablespoons Oil
2 Eggs
2 Pak Choi (Chinese Cabbage)
6 Medium Mushrooms
1/2 Broccoli Head
Wok
Frying Pan
Mixing bowl (or use the wok)

1. Chop the spring onions. Chop or mince the garlic. Mix the spring onions, garlic, ginger, apple juice, oil and eggs with a fork until the eggs are beaten together.
2. Thoroughly mix the mince into the mix above. Ball the mince up until balls a little bigger than a golfball. Store on a plate until ready.
3. Pull broccoli florets off of the head. Chop these finely for easy stir-frying.
4. Chop the mushrooms to the same fineness as the broccoli.
5. a. Fry the meatballs in the frying pan in a little oil (they should exude quite a lot of fat as they cook). Fry on "top", then "bottom", then "sides" (obviously they should be spherical, but sides will form as they fry). They should fry through within roughly ten minutes (check the middle of the biggest one before you take them off the pan).
b. The pan probably won't contain all the meatballs in one go, so fry in batches and keep them hot under the grill. Once the last batch have been in the pan for about three minutes, start stir-frying the mushrooms and broccoli.
6. When the meatballs have roughly two minutes left to cook, tear and add the pak choi to the wok. Continue stir-frying for two minutes.

Volumise: Add more pak choi, broccoli or mushrooms. Add some "normal" cabbage to the wok.
Add carbs: Add some sugar to the meatball mix. Add a little tomato puree to the meatball mix. Serve with a sweet potato (or sweet potato mash).
Add fat: Add more oil to the meatball mix. Add some or all of the fat from the frying pan to the stir-fry.
Add protein: Add some bacon to the stir-fry. Add one or two more eggs to the meatball mix.
Make a tasty breakfast: I was cooking bacon alongside this for consumption the next morning. I added the beef fat to the bacon in its container, where it set, adding a ton of calories to my breakfast the next day.

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