This takes a little planning and shopping, but it is so easy and quick. My hubby and I work on this one together...he does some peeling and chopping while I am out taking care of the goats, then I come in and cook it up. I also cut and marinate the meat in the morning before going to work, or the night before.
I basically go to the store and see what looks good....or to the garden, depending on the time of the year. I started this one with diced salt pork, fried until crisp, to grease the pan (bacon would be wonderful, too.) Then an onion, 3/4 inch dice, and garlic from the garden. Then lots of sliced celery, thinly sliced carrots, and the meat. Next I added chunks of red peppers and some fresh broccoli florets and asparagus, snapped into three pieces each. Finally, I added fresh snow peas. All this needed to finish it was a few good shakes of sea salt and black pepper. We at the whole thing, filling two large dinner plates to almost overflowing. It was so good for such a simple, one-pan meal.
A couple of days later I made it again, this time using pork. I marinated the pork in a combination of raw apple cider vinegar and onion wine and lots of minced garlic. I think that was even better than the grass fed beef!
I can't wait to make this with snow peas from the garden along with our shiitake mushrooms and fresh scallions, along with some store-bought veggies. Ooo, maybe some nettles from the woods would go well with this, and some wild ramps (small wild leeks) and fiddleheads. Yum!
I woke this morning and wondered when the fiddleheads would be ready to pick....
ReplyDeleteMy husband loves his wok and will do stirfries as often as I let him. :))
I wish I could find fiddleheads here. When I lived in Maine up froze many, many quarts of them each year...one of the easiest things to forage when you live near a river!
ReplyDeleteThey are around, in abundance. The little farm stand on RTs 5 & 10 in Deerfield near the Butterfly Conservatory sells them, as does Atkins Farms.
ReplyDeleteI have lots of ferns in the woods behind my house, but I don't know if they are the right ones. I wish I had someone who could show me, because I would freeze some too!
They are easy to identify....I'll try to catch mine at the right stage and take a picture. I bought a couple plants a few years ago to establish here. I put them in a spot by my side door that gets NO sun ever, and they are spreading. This year (should do it today, actually) I'll dig up a few and bring them out to plant by the stream in my woods and let them spread there. It is a very, very slow process.
ReplyDeleteOstrich ferns are the ones you are looking for. They are fairly easy to identify once you know what to look for. Start with a google search for images. Ostrich ferns are very similar to the very common interrupted ferns. Both are huge and graceful, but the latter has a patch along the stem with no leaves, hence its name.
Ostrich ferns grow almost exclusively along the banks of rivers and streams and are under water in the very early spring. The fiddleheads are different from those of other ferns in that most are covered in brown "hair" but Ostrich fern fiddleheads have a bit of brown papery stuff on each side that you can pick off.
I would remove the papery bits by winnowing the fiddleheads in front of a box fan. I've known of some serious pickers who would keep an old dryer in the garage or shed for this purpose, and would tumble them without heat to get all the papery stuff off.