This thread is relevant to my interests.

SGT RJ,

If you don't end up making your poblano corn soup for this cooking club, please post it in the Cooking a Good Everything Else thread. It sounds great. I make soups as meals all the time.

Was going to make stir fry already this week, so I'll try and remember to take some pictures.

Cool thread idea, hoping to participate. Yeti may be right about the thread setup but it will work itself out in the first few weeks imo.

In. Possibly with shrimp.

In, I'm not veggie but don't like to have that much meat in my diet (< 1/2 of my dinners) can we have some veggie options too?

Also, I'm a sandwich-maker (started up my own sandwich business), are sandwiches acceptable itt? Some of them are meal-sized. That's about all I could contribute to this thread.

Sandwiches are pretty cool imo, might be best in the cook everything else thread which has a lot of gems.

Wazz you can stir fry tofu.

In.

Maybe a mod can edit the current meal of the week, into the thread title, every week
ie.: "Weekly Cooking Club: Stir Fry this Week! - Join Anytime"

Will do.

I plan on lurking this thread heavily.

me too. Seemed like a Mexican type of soup to me. I'd eat tacos with it.

I think it could work, I just wonder if as many people would want to make a soup as some other things. One of my main concerns with the soup idea is that it isn't as easily modified to taste as some other dishes are without actually changing the whole recipe.

I would say go for it. Remember, if you don't cook it this week there will be another dish next week though.

perhaps. If it really takes hold multiple threads might clutter the forum though. I think once a week still gives people the option of doing it every other week and also allows them to sit out the less appealing dishes without feeling like they missed a lot.

I guess we don't need someone to make a dish beforehand, but I thought pictures and a TR would provide a lot more encouragement than just a recipe. Could easily be wrong though.

so the noodles are pre cooked or something and don't need to be boiled before added to the stir fry?

also the ginger you just mince with the skin part on, weird!

cool idea, i'll try to participate as well!

Asian noodles ime just need to be soaked in a hot bath. I usually throw them in a pot and pour water over them that was heated in my electric kettle. (also, add some salt to the bath)

Fair enough. I'll post it in the other thread if it doesn't work well here.

If you get the "fresh" stir fry noodles from the refrigerated section they're pre-cooked and don't need boiling, they get enough moisture from steaming in the water you add pan. If you use other dry noodles you have to cook em first. Usually the package will have directions but for ones made in asia those directions in english can be a little ambiguous.

Ginger I peel UNLESS it's frozen and grated on a microplane and then the peel just gets obliterated. Plus this way the ginger keeps forever.

This is a good idea. Also the first post can be edited each week with a link to each week's dish and maybe to the results post too so people can quickly go to see the dishes they're interested in.

cool idea
in

This seems like a great thread

such an awesome tip. i make stirfry about once a month, always with some ginger. problem is i never need enough ginger and end up throwing > half of it away. I'll be getting a big piece next time and freezing!

Wazz, I am a vegetarian and make stir fries all the time--I think it's a staple for most vegetarians. I used to put too many vegetables into my stir fries. Onions, zucchini, broccoli, eggplant, mushrooms, red peppers, green peppers--the more the better, I thought. But I was wrong. Now I limit myself to onions, plus a couple other main vegetables, and then throw some other stuff as an accent for some colour or texture, but in much smaller amounts than the main veggies I'm using.

I had some Udon noodles I'd bought the other day that I really like with "vegetarian oyster sauce," which is basically oyster sauce with mushroom powder instead of oyster extract, and goes well with mushrooms. So mushrooms were veggie #1 and I had some cabbage leftover from a soup I'd made, so that was veggie #2.

Udon noodles, oyster mushroom sauce, onions, cabbage and mushrooms are all a bland brown/beige/grey hue, so I was in need of some colour. So I julienned some carrots to brighten things up, and to add a bit of texture as I won't cook them long enough for them go very soft. I also wanted some green in there. Green onions would have been perfect, but I didn't have any, so I thought, why not try some peas?

Since I didn't have anything red, I added some tomatoes. That's something I never would have put in a stir fry until recently, but they're so good in the rice biryani from the curry place near me that I've started using them with rice stir fries sometimes. The key is to just add them at the end of cooking, so they get warm, but are still a little firm. If they're overcooked at all or too ripe to begin with, they'll just be mush, but if they're a little firmer they add a nice texture and a little bit of juice when you bite into them. That's nice in a biryani, which is dryer than the stir fry I made. Here they were fine, but didn't add much except the colour and I probably wouldn't use them again. When I'd finished dicing them up, it looked like too many, so I only used about half.



For protein I used tofu. If I'd had time, I would have gone to an Asian market and got some fried tofu like this:



But instead I had to make do with some medium firm tofu I had, which has too much water content to brown nicely. I pressed it under a plate with some weight on it to get rid of some of the moisture. I fried it separately from the vegetables in some sesame oil, since the moisture from the tofu would have made the veggies steam and simmer and make them too soft, and then just threw it in with the veggies at the end.

Fried the onions with some garlic and ginger, and then added the cabbage and carrots, and then the mushrooms since they have a high moisture content and will stop things from frying like the tofu would. Since I make more than one portion at a time, everything won't fit in a pan, so I make my stir fries in a pot with a pretty thick bottom so it fries stuff okay. I just have to stir a lot to make sure everything gets some surface time, and can't just toss and flip like I would in a pan. It's really important to not overcook the veggies so that each veggie still have some texture or crunch to it.



Along with combining too many veggies, I used to use too much sauce. Now I don't even put sauce in the stir fry part. The veggies--especially with the moisture from the mushroom--create their own sauce, and there's no need to drown out all the flavours of the veggies. I just tossed the noodles with the sauce, and added the peas, which I'd heated up separately, to the noodles for some colour. The peas didn't add any flavour, and it definitely would have been better with some green onions, or fresh thai basil or cilantro, but in the absence of anything else green, the peas were okay. Instead of tomatoes, a better red accent would have been a few thai red peppers on top:



Served with sriracha and hoisin sauce on the side, which I can add as desired without drowning everything in sauce, with some genmaicha (or popcorn tea), which is a japanese green tea mixed with toasted brown rice.

We always have udon noodles on hand. Big fan of those here.

Good job Gregory

I'll post my version of stir fry sometime this week.

lol vegetar... damn, that looks delicious.

It's been pointed out that I need to get a wok.