Recipe 14
Black pepper beef and celery stir fry
It is a while since I’ve cooked a new recipe.
There isn’t any excuse, really. We’ve spent a lot more time at home than we did last year. We have cooked a lot, and only occasionally gone to restaurants for dinner. We never really order takeaways; only get kebabs late at night after too much to drink. Perhaps I am in a cooking rut. I am the first to admit that my cooking of late has been fairly boring, pretty rinse and repeat stuff. And simple.
Last week when we were eating a bowl of noodle soup (fresh egg noodles, homemade chicken broth, choi sum, spicy stir fried minced pork, spring onion and coriander), I said to Phil that I didn’t think I’d been cooking very well lately. The night before we’d had a terrible carbonara - I did such a bad of job of it - and I was still going on about it. Phil is usually quick to shutdown my protestations about bad cooking, but this time he didn’t seem so swift. I mean, the carbonara really was terrible, but perhaps I am just projecting my own thoughts onto Phil. Anyway, he told me that he’s very grateful for my (good) cooking but that we should have red meat and salmon (he doesn’t like UK fish very much) more often. Noted.
On Monday when we were sitting in Bratislava Airport I asked Phil what he wanted for dinner. He said “a simple stir fry”. But when I went to the supermarket late on Monday afternoon the shelves were virtually bare - well and truly picked over after the long weekend. You couldn’t buy coriander or asparagus or a red pepper, let alone one of the bags of pre-chopped stir fry vegetables that you can buy here (and which, I should add, I had no intention of buying). So, we ended up having crumbed chicken and salad wraps for dinner - a cobbled together meal that I could make with what I could buy at the shops. Stir fry was deferred to Tuesday night.
I spent the time waiting for our flight back to London trawling through various stir fry recipes on Google. Now I know you don’t really need a recipe to throw together a good stir fry, but the trouble is I’ve set myself a challenge of cooking 52 new recipes this year, and I would say that at this point I am well behind schedule. I saw a recipe for a good looking Thai chicken and cashew stir fry on Recipe Tin Eats, and stumbled across my favourite New York Times Cooking recipe for a stir fry of chicken and asparagus with turmeric, black pepper and honey. But it was Andy Baraghani’s black pepper beef and celery stir fry that appealed to me the most. Two boxes ticked: red meat for Phil, a new recipe for me. (Recipe published on the Bon Appétit website).
On Tuesday morning before I got solidly into work I did a quick trot up to the shops to drop off a couple of films to have processed (one needs their holiday photos immediately), and on my way home I picked up a big bunch of celery from the great wee greengrocer on Chapel Market. I needed a leafy bunch of celery, rather than one of those helpless bags of pre-cut sticks, because the recipe calls for celery leaves - which, I’ll confess, was another thing that drew me to it. Ever since Lezhong and Liuxin introduced me to the joys of eating celery leaves at The Beijing I have loved using them in cooking.
The stir fry is easy to make. You thinly slice up sirloin steak, which you toss with a mixture of garlic, ginger, sesame oil, vegetable oil and freshly ground black pepper. You cook that in a hot pan, and then add sliced celery and spring onions, which you cook for a minute or two so that they don’t lose too much crunch. Then you take the pan off the heat, add some soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, butter, a little bit of water and stir everything together, before stirring through a big handful of celery leaves until they’re ever so slightly wilted.
I think I have restored Phil’s faith, and mine, in my ability to cook. The stir fry was delicious - peppery, buttery, and yet fresh because of all of the celery. We had ours with rice, and ate every last grain of rice that I cooked so we could mop up all of the very good peppery sauce.
This is, as my grandparents would say, a “do again”.