Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Ground beef from local farm
finds good home in chow mein dish

During the summer, we bought a couple of packages of ground beef at a local farmer’s market.
   We’ve found this fresh beef from a local farm to be exceptionally good.
   After popping the packages safely in the freezer and making a mental note they were there, I waited until I found the perfect opportunity to use one of them to its utmost potential (besides the usual suspects of burgers.)
   The opportunity came along in the form of Beef Chow Mein (click for the recipe) from The Australian Women’s Weekly.
   With great-looking ingredients such as fresh vegetables and egg noodles, this dish looked like it would be a wonderful home for the farm ground beef.
   It was – the dish was delicious and family-friendly, perfect for a casual weeknight dinner. It’s a recipe that’s perfect for the one-pan-stir-fry-cook you may have in your home. If you're making it for children, be sure to use mild curry powder.
   Wombok in the recipe is another name for Napa cabbage. Not being able to find Napa cabbage, we used regular cabbage instead, and for the brown onion, we used a yellow onion. Beef mince is another name for ground beef.
   Fresh, not dry, egg noodles can be found in the produce section of many large supermarkets, although they’re not always labeled as egg noodles. You may need to take a look at the ingredients at the back of a package of fresh Asian-style noodles to see if eggs are a primary ingredient.
   Ground beef, onion and crushed garlic cloves are stir-fried until the beef is browned. Curry powder (we used mild), carrot, celery and mushrooms are added and the mixture stir-fried until the vegetables soften.
   Chicken stock (we used store-bought chicken broth), oyster sauce, soy sauce, frozen peas and shredded cabbage are added to the beef mixture and stir-fried until the cabbage just wilts.

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