Friday, January 21, 2011

Chinese Beef in a Rice Cooker

My name is Jon C, and I am the office chef at dawjee.com. Due to health and safety regulations, the only cooking utensils we're permitted are a rice cooker, egg steamer and combination microwave oven (it can do grills and roasts). I try to use these tools to provide our staff with cheap healthy meals. Local dining establishments serve low quality, expensive food, that can have a noticeably negative impact on the afternoon performance of my staff.

In this article I shall describe a Chinese beef recipe that I cooked a couple of weeks ago. The seasoned strips of beef provide a tasty source of protein. While the rice and vegetables complete the meal to make it healthy and balanced. It cost under £5 to feed 3 hungry workers. And one of them ate enough for two. I shall not list quantities in the ingredients list as I just take a guess and chuck things into the pot. Just use a sensible estimate and experiment until you have the balance of flavors that you require.

Ingredients

For beef:

rump steak
ginger
garlic
sesame oil
light soya sauce
ground black pepper
Chinese 5 spice

For the rest:

rice
water
bean sprouts
mushrooms
bell pepper
Bouillon vegetable stock
chopped coriander

Instructions

Beef Marinade

Slice the beef into thin strips about 1 inch with.
Chop the ginger and garlic finely, and mix with the garlic, sesame oil, light soya sauce and ground black pepper to form a delicious marinade.
Mix the sliced beef with the marinade and set aside in a fridge for a few hours. If I'm planning on serving lunch at 12pm, I'll normally prepare the beef at 9am.

Cooking

Rinse the rice in the rice cooker a few times, and fill with water until there's about a finger nail's breadth of water above the top of the rice.
Add about half a teaspoon of vegetable stock to the rice,
Chop the mushrooms and bell pepper. I normally chop them into lumps between 0.5cm and 1.0cm in diameter.
Add all the chopped mushrooms, bell pepper and unchopped bean sprouts to the rice.
Add the marinaded beef to the rice.
Mix everything up.
Turn on the rice cooker start cooking.
When the food is cooked (this normally takes about 30 minutes), turn off the rice cooker, add the chopped coriander, and give it all another good mix.
Serve!

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