JAM*stir fry

I think I'll rename this blog to JAM*stir fry. Seems like that's all we've been eating these days. It's never the same stir fry, not even close. In fact I don't know that I've ever made the same stir fry twice, but still... I'm kind of getting bored with cooking the same type of dish.

Besides being quick, healthy and appealing to all three of us, stir fries have been the perfect way to use up veggies before we pick up our crop share each week.

Although I'm dying to get in the kitchen to preserve some more produce for the winter, our share each week (which we split with my sister) combined with the harvest from our little garden really doesn't justify preservation. Unless of course, I wanted to preserve one jar at a time. Seems like the embodied energy of one jar of tomatoes or string beans just wouldn't reconcile, you know?

So, stir fries usually win. And seriously. What else could I have possibly made with a package of seitan and this?:
This is what we had in the fridge and on the counter. A handul of this, one of that, two of these. It's not enough to do a whole meal with just a couple ingredients - we need to use up a few of these. Stir fries are good like that :)

Last night's stir fry included some of the above, with the Blooming Glen long red sweet peppers and our own garden green string beans co-starring. Like I said, I've been getting bored with stir fries, and in order to compensate for that, I've been doing little things like cutting up the veggies in unsuspecting ways.

While I lightly fried some purple onion and the above green onion in a couple drops of olive oil, I cut the peppers and string beans into disc shapes. Once the onions were tender, I added torn up seitan strips and fried for seven or eight minutes, until the seitan was just starting to crisp on the edges.

I removed the seitan from the pan, added the pepper, beans, broccoli and some water, covered the pan and steamed everything for five or six minutes. Meanwhile, I pricked the potatoes with a fork, microwaved them for a few minutes (until tender, but not baked, so they could hold up in the pan) and diced them. I diced tomatoes as well, then added them with the potatoes, a bit more water, fresh chopped basil, some nutritional yeast and the cooked onions and seitan to the pan, covered and let simmer for a couple minutes.










Now, usually Jason eats the veg*n meals I cook exactly as they are. However, there is the rare occasion that he wants to make additions or adjustments. Such was the case for this meal. He wanted scallops. How does an omnivore and a veggiesauraus both get what they want? Like this:Separate, but together. See how we did that? :)

Jase seared his scallops in some earth balance, green onions and hot banana peppers from our garden. Once they were done, I scooped some of the veggie and seitan mix into his pan and he mixed it all together.

Tolerance, people. It's always a good lesson :)