Stir Fry Tonight....Yucky Sauce, Leave it and the Calories Off Your Plate

Tonight I tried another recipe from the Feb. issue of Cuisine at Home. I have to say I am excited about this issue for the first time in a long while. I find that when Tracy first sent me a gift subscription that I would hate waiting the month and a half or so (bi-monthly publication)for the next issue because all the recipes where so great. Then somewhere in there I got less interested and not as intrigued by what I saw. This issue however has restored my enjoyment and I can't wait for the next.

Onto the Sirloin Steak Stir Fry and Sauteed Red Cabbage on pages 38-39. Tracy first pointed it out and said she thought she would try it which surprised me as she is not normally one for Asian style cuisine. I read over the recipe and decided to add it to my weekly list. Preparation was very easy for both the stir fry and cabbage, here are the beginnings before cooking.

Both the cabbage and meat looked great while cooking and I was getting hungry.....as was Peter who constantly asks how long it will be....as if at 31 years old he has ever starved to death.

Everything was close to being done as was the sauce which smelled strangely sweet and vinegary, but not in the good way that one would normally think. The recipe called for this sauce on the side so I tasted it and decided it tasted worse than it smelled. After closer study of the recipe I saw that with the sauce we were looking at 830 calories per serving...YIKES!!! After that little discovery, can't believe I missed it when I originally read the recipe, I decided then that if I didn't like it, Peter would for sure think it was horrible and that if I was going to eat that amount of calories in one sitting it would have to be something so good I couldn't possibly live with out it. In the end, I decided to just add a little soy sauce and sesame oil to the beef and vegetables which already had a little brown sugar and red pepper flakes and it was delicious and far more friendly to the hips!

Another bit of exciting news to make this meal more memorable, while eating it my best friend Jamie, from back home in Wisconsin, called to say that her ultrasound looked great....and it's twins!!! I almost choked, such great news, I am totally ecstatic! It is times like this I hate being so far away from her!

Tonight as all other nights Lucy helped make dinner. Well, more accurately, she was under foot the entire time I was making dinner. Here she is to say hello, half naked and all (notice her favorite pose, one ear back!)

That's all for now, possibly more tomorrow when I try "slimmed down" meatloaf which is made with ground pork & chicken rather than beef. Peter has agreed to try meatloaf for what I am pretty sure will be his first time but I think he has already convinced himself he won't like it which is a totally typical thing for him to do. I still hold out hope that he will one day not be a picky eater.