Pork and Peach Stir Fry

Spicy chili crisp adds zip to this quick, healthy summer dish

It’s peak peach where we live. So while the local supply lasts, we’re using fresh peaches as often as we can. That means plenty of desserts, yeah. But peaches also shine in savory dishes.

Like this stir fry. Peaches pair particularly well with pork. When you add chili crisp? It makes a delightfully spicy dinner. And one that’s quick, so you can make it anytime.

Cause even weeknights should be special, no? 

Sweet Potato and Chickpea Stir Fry

Quick, healthy, and tasty – an ideal vegan weeknight dinner

When dinner time rolls around on a weeknight, veggie dishes can be a great go-to. Especially if you’ve been eating less than optimally during the day.

This stir fry (aka sauté or skillet dish) is ready to step up. It doesn’t take much prep work and the cooking time is fairly brief. So you can whip up dinner in a jiffy.

That’s our kind of short-order cooking.

Asparagus, Bacon, and Tomato Stir-Fry

This quick, easy dish is a terrific spring side or main

Fresh, local asparagus? We can’t get enough of it. Asparagus season is short, so we enjoy it while we can.

In this dish, for instance. It combines asparagus with bacon and tomato in a quick stir-fry.

Asparagus and bacon. What more could we want in life?

Cabbage and Ham Stir-Fry

Ginger, garlic, and jalapeño perk up this quick and tasty dish

Need a quick weeknight dinner that you can assemble from what’s in your pantry and fridge? Here you go!

This dish combines green cabbage with cooked ham. Because we always seem to have extra cabbage around St. Patrick’s Day, and often have ham in the freezer.

Mix in some spicy Asian flavors, and it’s stir-fry for the win!

Chili-Spiced Vegetable Stir-Fry

All the flavor of chili in a fraction of the time

It’s cooling off in our part of the world. And chilly means chili!

But what if you don’t have time to make a big pot of the hearty stuff? Enter this Chili-Spiced Vegetable Stir-Fry. It has all the ingredients you’d find in vegetarian chili. Minus the liquid — and the simmering time.

Chili you can eat with a fork? Works for us.

Summer White Bean and Vegetable Stir-Fry

A Mediterranean one-skillet dinner that’s quick, easy, and healthy

We’re enjoying summer’s bounty of vegetables and herbs in our part of the world. But the weather is unremittingly hot, so we don’t want to spend much time cooking.

Fortunately, we have stir-fry. It’s a quick and easy way to showcase almost any vegetable you can think of.

This dish takes only about 20 minutes total for prep and cooking. Stress-free weeknight dinner, anyone?

Chicken and Celery Stir-Fry

Ginger, garlic, and fermented black beans add sizzle

Lunar New Year arrives on February 16. So how about some Chinese-inspired stir-fry?

Asian cooking can look complicated to Westerners, but it’s actually pretty simple. It’s all about the prep – the cooking takes very little time.

So fetch some flavor for the Year of the Dog.

The Best Darn Tofu Dish Ever: Mapo Tofu

A Vegan Remake of a Sichuan Classic

The name of this dish translates as “pock-marked woman’s bean curd”— so-called because it originated with a roadside vendor who was scarred by smallpox.  English spellings for the dish vary and include Mapo doufu, Ma po dou fu, and Ma-po tofu.

But however you spell it, Mapo tofu is the best tofu dish.  Ever.

Traditionally, Mapo Tofu includes ground beef (sometimes ground pork).  These versions are good, but they gild the lily; the meat seems superfluous to me.  Classic Mapo Tofu is also oil-laden and fiery hot — not a dish that suits everyone’s digestive system.

My version eliminates much of the oil, tames the heat, and replaces the meat with portobello mushrooms, which pack a flavor punch of their own.

The result is a vegan beauty that your whole family can enjoy.  And they probably won’t even realize it’s vegan unless you tell them.

Simple and Quick Vegetable Stir-Fry

Fear of Chinese

Many American cooks (even experienced ones) are intimidated by Chinese cuisine.  Some are scared away even before they start — by that long list of unfamiliar ingredients.

Then there’s all the preparation required.  Mise en place is a French term, but surely the Chinese must have invented the concept.  You can’t cook Chinese unless you first do your mise en place, and a lot of it.

And, of course, there are some unfamiliar cooking techniques.  (A stir-fry is like a sauté — but not quite.)  So that can be a bit scary, too.

Stir-Fry for Dummies

Well, good news!  The stir-fry method I use here is easier than the “classic” technique.  It’s more of a braise (the pork is stir-fried but the vegetables are braised in liquid).  And the flavor is excellent.

As for the rest?  Let’s just jump into the recipe, and you’ll see.  Everything will become clear as we go along.