Homemade Yuen-Yang Beef

Preface:
Last night, Husband picked me up from work to go get my car after repairs. As part of the deal, I had to help him with dinner. I was instructed to look up a recipe for this dish but wasn't able to, so instead was asked to find a recipe for a basic Chinese brown sauce. We decided to start with this one and then modified it for what he had in mind. He wrote most of this post. I only wrote down the sauce ingredients and instructions.

Introduction:
This recipe was inspired by a signature dish served at Bamboo Restaurant in Bedford, MA.   I enjoyed it enough to want to share it with my family. 

On the Heat:
It is tamed down from the chili peppers due to being a recipe for mixed palates.  The slices of ginger do add some heat without it being pepper-hot.   Due to the overall volume of food involved, the pepper, peppercorns, and chili powder spread out the heat more evenly than having whole chili peppers. 

On the Ginger:
Ginger is, like most spices, intangibly healthy for you.  It belongs in your diet, and calms your stomach.  This is definitely the main draw of the dish for me.

On the Meat:
Chuck roast is a cheap, stewing meat.  It is difficult to create a meal with an inexpensive cut of beef.  Paying for ribeye steaks isn't always in everyone's weekly dinner budget, so this was a surprisingly enjoyable meal for 1/4 the cost per pound for beef.  It could certainly be made with more expensive cuts of beef, however. 

Ingredients

2 pounds chuck roast
1/2 tablespoon sesame seeds

2 bell peppers
1/2 large sweet onion
1/2 cup thinly sliced fresh ginger
2-4 tbsp vegetable or peanut oil
1/4 tsp sesame oil

2 pounds green beans

rice

Sauce
1/3 cup soy sauce
1/2 cup chicken broth
1/3 cup cooking sherry
4 1/2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1/4 teaspoon white pepper
1 tablespoon whole black peppercorns
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
2 tablespoon cooking oil
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1/3 to 1/2 cup finely chopped fresh ginger
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 cup water

To make the sauce:

• Heat cooking oil and add garlic and ginger for about 30 seconds.
• Combine soy sauce, chicken broth, cooking sherry, brown sugar, sesame oil, white pepper, peppercorns and chili powder in a separate container. Add this mixture to the cooking oil after briefly mixing.
• While this mixture is cooking, combine the cornstarch and water in a separate container.
• Once the sauce is boiling, stir in the cornstarch mixture.

Meat preparation:

• Slice into thin strips, aim for the length of your green beans.  Under 1/4 inch in thickness
• When working with chuck roast, if there are fibrous portions in it, since you're slicing it up anyway, make sure you cut the tough bits out ahead of time.   
• Add the meat to the sauce and simmer for perhaps 20 minutes.  
• Make sure to stir the meat occasionally to ensure even cooking.
• Once the meat is cooked, add the sesame seeds

Vegetable preparation:

• Slice the ginger to 1/8th inch medallions.  
• Chop the bell pepper into short strips.
• Chop the onion similarly to the bell pepper.
• Heat a wok to high and add vegetable or peanut oil enough to stir-fry, and 1/4 tsp of sesame oil.  At these temperatures, some oils will smoke. 
• Cook the ginger and onion together and first for about seven minutes
• Add the green beans* and bell peppers and cook together for another ten minutes.  

• The onion should be translucent, the green beans a brighter green and swollen, and the ginger should be tender, having soaked up some of the liquid from the onion.  The bell pepper should be shiny and somewhat firm.  

Serve this with the green beans and vegetables on the bottom and the meat on the top.  Serve the meat with a ladle so the sauce involves the vegetables.  Optionally serve with brown rice.

*Adding the green beans to this isn't what happened the first time this was cooked. This is a modification to help in the future. The green beans were unsuccessfully steamed when they needed to be stir-fried.

Chicken fried pork

Husband has been on a strange kick lately. He's been talking about chicken fried steak like a man possessed. One night, he decided that this was what we were going to have for dinner. There was a small problem with this plan-no steak. He ended up using ground beef. Instead of flour, he used some sort of dried corn meal. They were tasty, though a bit crunchy.

The obsession continued and I decided I needed to find a meat tenderizer. I had joked that if I found one at a thrift store I was going to, that I would buy it and we'd have chicken fried pork chops that night for dinner.

I found one. He missed out because of work.

While he was on a plane to California, my bonus daughters and I multi-tasked by cleaning out the fridge and pantry, putting away groceries and cooking chicken friend pork chops.

It was a lot of fun and very tasty. During our cleaning, I found some corn flour, which was going to work much better than the corn meal. Both girls loved it and ate it as leftovers the next day.

As with the all the "best" recipes, nothing was measured out, but here's an approximate idea of what we did, for the sake of documentation of course.

Ingredients

 Pork chops
Corn Flour (about a cup and a half, I think)
Paprika (about a tablespoon)
Salt (a health pinch)
Garlic Powder (less than the amount of paprika, more than the salt)
Vegetable Oil (enough to cover meat when in the pan)

Directions

• Use meat tenderizer to pummel pork chops into very thin pieces.
• Combine corn flour, paprika, salt and garlic powder together. Mix them up.
• Put vegetable oil into a frying pan and heat
• Thoroughly coat the pork chops in the corn flour mixture
• Place coated pork chop into the oil. Cover.
• After about 2-4 minutes, flip pork chop
• Remove from oil once both sides appear golden
• Repeat until all are cooked
• Eat and enjoy

Orange Pork

Early on, I had this brilliant thought that I would write not just about my knitting and sewing projects but also my baking projects. Well, this isn't quite baking but it was a huge success, so I feel it must be written about.

On Mother's Day, a friend and I met up to go to the Shepherd's Harvest Festival, which was guaranteed to bore our husbands. The promise of llamas convinced them to stay through that and then they were gone to do "manly" things and drive the Telsa around. The original plan was to have our friends stay over for dinner so I took out some pork chops to grill. My husband is a genius when it comes to cooking meat with fire. Sadly, being responsible adults prevailed and our friends headed home.

So the meat sat for a few days. Come to this past Thursday (4 days past thaw out) and we needed to cook the meat. I ended up with a horrible headache but was determined to marinate the meat for at least 12 hours and then cook it on the wood grill/smoker outside. I mixed things together and stuck it all into the fridge to sit for 12 hours.

The next morning, I successfully made a fire though it took longer than normal. The main goal was to smoke the meat. Once the fire was convincingly not going to die, I seared both sides of the and then removed them from the fire, sticking them over to the side. This I have learned from my husband and there's some sort of chemistry change in the meat by doing this, but I'm honestly not entirely sure how to explain it. I know that I didn't hover over the meat and managed to give it just enough time to be done but not overcooked. The husband even gave me an A+ for my work. It was then that he realized that I actually am paying attention to what he is doing when I stand outside chatting with him as he grills.

So that I can recreate this later, this is roughly the recipe of what I did.

In a large bowl, add the following to pork chops:
-fresh grated orange rind from 3 Cara Cara oranges
-fresh squeezed juice from 3 Cara Cara oranges (same ones the rind came from)
-pulp from one orange
-Light coating of vegetable oil
-Soy sauce, roughly equal to the same amount of orange juice

Place in fridge and let marinate for at least 12 hours

Grill and smoke on wood fire. Gently sear each side and then remove from flame. Let smoke until pork is firm.

Orange Pork Chops, fresh off the grill.