Epicure Recipe Card #40: Sizzling Beef with Celery

Welcome to the first account of my Recipe Card Challenge for 2010! I’m a bit behind my planned posting schedule but I have legitimate reasons. Firstly, I started a new job just last week and, secondly, I didn’t start off tackling this challenge in quite the correct manner. Instead of planning ahead, choosing a recipe card for the week and making sure I had all the ingredients required, I kind of winged it and suddenly started panicking when I realised I should have been cooking something already.

So one night, when I had defrosted a piece of scotch fillet steak for dinner without any particular culinary direction for it, I went searching through the recipe cards on the prowl for something involving beef. What resulted was this stir-fry which couldn’t be further from what Jill Dupleix had described! I attribute my tweaking of her recipe due to my stubbornness about Cantonese stir-fries and, as always, not having all the stipulated ingredients on hand in order to follow the recipe word for word.

The stir-fry still tastes juicy and characteristically Cantonese despite my fiddling with it. My personal preference is to use beef skirt steak but, Iike I said, I just happened to have some scotch fillet steak at the ready that particular evening.

Beef Stir-fry with Shiitake & Chinese Cabbage

(adapted from The Age – Epicure 50 Best Recipe Cards, recipe by Jill Dupleix)

Ingredients:

·         250g beef, thinly sliced

·         1 portion of My All-purpose Cantonese Marinade

·         6 dried shiitake, soaked in cold water overnight (I’m lucky to have pre-soaked ones by my mother-in-law sitting in the freezer for when desired!)

·         ½ tsp sugar

·         6 medium Chinese cabbage (‘wom bok’/’wong nga bak’) leaves, shredded

·         1 tbs cooking oil

·         finely shredded ginger (optional)

·         ½ tsp salt

·         1 tbs oyster sauce

Method:

1. Toss beef with the marinade and set aside 20-30 minutes.
2. In the meantime, remove stalks from shiitake and slice the caps to about 3mm thick. Toss sliced caps with the sugar and set aside. (This helps to remove a ‘fishy/bitter’ flavour that the Chinese describe.) 

3. When ready to cook, heat the oil in a wok or saucepan to almost smoking on high heat. Add ginger, if using, for around 10 seconds before adding the beef. Stir-fry until most pieces are cooked to medium-well before removing beef from pan and setting aside.
4. Add shiitake slices to the hot pan and toss until starting to brown before adding cabbage strips and tossing the whole lot until cabbage looks half wilted. Sprinkle in salt and toss evenly.
5. Return beef to pan along with oyster sauce and stir-fry the whole lot until cooked. Serve with steamed rice.

happy cooking!