Fiery Prawns with Fried Rice and Orange Beef

Greetings For the Love of Food Followers! It’s been awhile since we last updated you all on our most recent cooking endeavors, so let’s get down to business! We love Asian food! It’s delicious and full of bold flavors. It’s also surprisingly easy to cook at home. With the right equipment and ingredients you can make the best Asian food in the comfort of your own home and you can tweak to suit your taste. Before we get into the orange beef and prawn fried rice that will make your taste buds jump for joy let’s talk first about some things you should have in your kitchen before you try this at home!

First and foremost, you need to get a WOK! Simply put – they are amazing. You can deep-fry, stir-fry and steam meals in them! You don’t need the most fancy wok out there. I think ours was twenty or thirty bucks.  The most important thing is seasoning the pan correctly. Seasoning pans is a whole other blog post so we won’t get into too much detail, but if you’re curious, you know how to contact us! So we now have a wok getting HOT on the stove. A few other things to have handy for making some delish Asian grub are: wooden utensils for the wok, sesame oil, soy sauce, corn oil, sesame seeds, sugar, and last but not least, corn starch! Again, if you have any questions about why you want any of this stuff around, reach out to us. We love talking shop when it comes to cookin’!

Fiery prawns with fried rice and orange beef. Let’s do this! The fried rice is really easy, and in our opinion, it is better than any take-out fried rice we’ve ever had. We cheat a little bit, but who cares? That’s the fun in cooking if you can’t use shortcuts to make good food even easier. Our shortcut? Uncle Ben’s Boil-in-a-Bag White Rice. This stuff makes perfect rice every time! Not sticky, perfectly cooked and it takes 12 minutes. So boil up a couple bags of the rice and let it cool a little bit. While the rice is cooking, get your veggies ready. In our fried rice we like some carrot, yellow onion, garlic and scallions. FYI, scallions are green onions. We would also add some celery and peas, however, Emily is none too pleased with these additions. Give the veggies a nice, small dice. Get the wok nice and hot and add in some oil. Peanut or vegetable oil is the best as you want to cook on really high heat in a wok and these two oils have a high smoke point (the smoke point of an oil is the temperature at which it will start to smoke, or burn). When using high heat you want an oil with a high smoke point. When the oil is hot, dump in the diced vegetables and stir-fry ‘em up. Stir-fry isn’t just called stir-fry for fun. STIR THEM! Don’t just leave them sitting there poaching in oil. Get that wooden spoon working and keep things moving. When the vegetables are starting to cook through, add 2-3 eggs that have been beat up. Think scrambled eggs here; it’s the same principal. Push the carrots, onions and garlic to the side and scramble up the eggs. Oh! We forgot to mention, don’t add the scallions when you stir- fry the veggies, save them for the end. We’re super organized as you can tell! Where were we? Ah yes, now you should have some tasty veggies and some scrambled eggs working in the wok. Get them all mixed up and add the rice! Just dump in the cooked rice and start stirring! Mix it up really well. The idea here is that you are actually frying the rice, hence “fried rice”. Now to make it have that awesome fried rice flavor we add in a few more necessary ingridents. Soy sauce, a pinch of sugar, salt, pepper and if you are really bold, a splash of Siracha sauce. We don’t ever measure this stuff out, instead we just add how much we want or think should be added. Rachael Ray refers to this method of measuring as “eye-balling it.”  If you want blander, less sodium fried rice, just add a little. If you want some bold flavorful fried rice, add more! Pretty easy concept, right? The other thing you can add a small amount of for additional flavor is sesame oil. If you have good oil, a little goes a long way. Lastly, mix in the scallions about a minute before you pull the wok off the heat. Fried rice is done, and set it aside on a dish.

Now, for the prawns. This couldn’t be easier. Get some nice, clean prawns and take their shells off, but leave the tails on! They make for a pretty presentation. Wipe out the wok (be careful not to burn yourself!), crank the heat back up, put in a little more oil and toss in the shrimp. Stir-fry them until they start to turn pink, then squeeze in some Siracha sauce and a tiny bit of soy sauce. Keep stirring until they are cooked and then set them aside. Fried rice with fiery prawns on top, done!

Now, on to the orange beef. We wanted to cook this because we both get so annoyed when our employees come back from their lunch break with orange chicken from Panda Express and rave about how good it is. So gross! That stuff is nasty! So we decided to make a version of our own. And yes, we made it with beef instead of chicken. Why you ask? Because we like to challenge ourselves to see if our ideas will turn out the way we envision them! And what we found this time, was that orange beef is actually pretty easy to make, and so good to eat! Cut up some good steak into bite sized slices. For this application we prefer to use NY strip steak or some tri-tip steak. Tri-tip is cheaper, but NY is better! Put your slices in a bowl and add some salt, pepper and corn starch, then mix it up so all the meat is evenly coated. The point here is to get rid of the moisture from the meat. When you are cooking on high heat moisture is the enemy! The corn starch dries up the meat and makes it a little crispy when you stir-fry it. After you prep the meat, you then move on to get the orange sauce ready. All we did was squeeze a few ripe oranges into a bowl, added some soy sauce, a couple cups of orange juice, a dash of sesame oil, salt, pepper, and Serrano chilies (you want to thinly slice up the Serrano’s for this use). Push the beef to one side, get the wok smoking hot and dump in the sauce. Let it boil and get crazy! You want to reduce this down so it gets thick and bubbly. Once it starts to reduce down, you can then mix in the beef. After it cooks for a few more minutes together it’s pretty much done! If you did it right the beef should be tender and moist and the sauce should be thick and sticky and tasty like real oranges with a kick. Screw that garbage, wannabe Chinese food you get at Panda Express. This took 20 minutes and tastes way better. Plus, you know exactly what ingredients went into it! No MSG, no weird trans fat, no gross, stray hair that you have to pull out. Just perfectly cooked, homemade healthy food. Check out the pic to see how we plated it all up! For garnish we used the scallions on top, some orange zest and a few sesame seeds. One final comment before you dig in…use garnishes that have something to do with the dish. Okay, now enjoy it! BOOM!

Love, Evan & Emily