Japanese Zucchini and Onion - Updated

This is another old recipe on my blog where the picture didn't do the dish justice.  Here is the link to the old recipe.  Definitely does not look appetizing but it is one of our favourite ways to eat zucchini.  I use a vegetable peeler to make the zucchini into ribbons.  You could also use a spiralizer but I prefer this method.

Chicken Pad Thai {SRC}

It's the last Monday of the month which means it's time for The Secret Recipe Club!  This month I was assigned the blog Flying on Jess Fuel.  I was really excited when I got Jess' blog since she was assigned my blog last month!  She made my Vegetarian Pot Stickers.  Click here to see Jess' version.  I have to say her's look much better than the ones I made :).

Sweet and Sour Chicken

When we go out to eat Chinese food Sweet and Sour Chicken isn't a dish we normally order.  We usually order something spicy.  I saw this recipe on Rasa Malaysia.  I had already tried General Tso's Chicken (with a few modifications) and it turned out really good.  It has become a family favorite.  So I thought I would give another recipe a try and settled on this recipe.  I made a few changes.  I don't like to deep fry, so I used the same method in General Tso's Chicken for frying the chicken and made some changes to the marinade.  It turned out really well.  It didn't have the strong sweet and sour taste which I was expecting but we all enjoyed it.

General Tso's Chicken

We love eating Chinese food.  More specifically we eat Hakka Chinese but lately it's just has not been very appetizing..too much grease and bored of the same thing.  I've been following the blog Rasa Malaysia for awhile and thought it was time to give one of her recipes a try.  Whenever we get together with my family and we have Hakka Chinese we always seem to get General Tso's Chicken.  The recipe seemed very simple and quick to make.

Szechwan Fish

We love Hakka Chinese.  Everyone I recommend it to ends up loving it too.  Hakka Chinese is Indian Chinese Food.  One dish that is on all the menus is Szechwan.  Every restaurant I've had it at has a totally different recipe so I'm not exactly sure what is it that defines a dish as Szechwan.  I suppose I could Google it but I'm just too lazy to do that.  I came across this recipe at AllRecipes.com and made some changes and used fish instead of shrimp.  This recipe is very quick to make.

Beef with Broccoli Lower Sodium Version

I am always trying to make our dinners more healthy so it can be something we can enjoy over and over.  A while ago I made Beef with Broccoli which was so yummy but it was loaded with sodium.  I wanted to try this again but reducing the soya sauce.  I cut the soya sauce in half.  It turned out very good but the original was still above and beyond this.  In this version, the orange flavor was more pronounced.  I love how quick this is to make.  This is a dish I can make regularly.

Lettuce Wraps

I love trying new foods.  I saw these lettuce wraps at a Chinese restaurant years ago.  I've been thinking about them lately.  They looked so refreshing.  I wanted to give it a try at home.  I searched online for a recipe and found one at The Pioneer Woman.  Of course I settled on this recipe because I've had such good experiences with all her recipes.  As usual her recipe had alcohol in it so I had to make some adjustments.  I replaced the Chinese cooking wine with a combination of orange juice and rice vinegar.  The recipe also called for peanut chilli or satay sauce.  I have neither and I wanted my one year old son to be able to eat it so I left it out.  As always I increased the garlic.  The recipe called for 1/2 cup of diced water chestnuts.  I had every intention of doing this but as I was chopping up the water chestnuts I ended up just dumping in the whole tin.  This was a more than half a cup.  I also added some red chilli flakes and freshly ground black pepper to spice it up.  This recipe is quick to make.  The most time consuming part is the chopping.  I also tried this with ground chicken and it turned out really good.
 

Beef with Broccoli 2

I really enjoyed Beef with Broccoli. But the amount of soya sauce was just way too much to be eaten on a regular basis.  I found another recipe which had a reasonable amount of soya sauce.  So I thought I would give it a try.  It had a more Chinese food taste than Beef with Broccoli.  I feel Beef with Broccoli was a much more tasty dish but I would make this version again too.  I used veal since I don't buy beef.  I used pasanday which is where they take a piece of meat and slice it really thin.  We don't have a lot of options of different cuts of meat at the Halal butcher.  I had to make a substitution for the Chinese rice wine. I used diluted apple cider vinegar.  You can also use orange juice as well.  I don't have Chinese black vinegar so I used balsamic vinegar (I got this substitution from The Pioneer Woman).  Something tasted like it was missing so I added sesame oil and sesame seeds at the end.

Vietnamese Spring Rolls

When I was working for a consulting company my friend Julie and I would love to go out to eat.  We would usually go out for Dim Sum but one time we went to a Vietnamese restaurant where I had these spring rolls for the first time.

These spring rolls are so light and refreshing.  I hadn't had them since that first time and then when I got married my husband and I went to Ottawa for a weekend.  We had dinner in a Vietnamese restaurant one night and ordered these spring rolls.  My husband loved them.  They are so simple and easy to make.  With a few tips from Julie, I started to make them at home.  I haven`t made these for awhile.  A couple of weeks ago I found Brown Rice Vermicelli noodles at Longos and thought about those spring rolls I used to make.  I love how the noodles are made from brown rice...add some fiber to the meal.

Beef with Broccoli

I recently started looking at The Pioneer Woman blog.  The recipes look amazing.  As I looked through them I started noticing a lot of them had lots of butter, cream or alcohol.  This one looked really good.  When I started cooking I noticed it had a half cup of reduced sodium soya sauce.  Even with the sodium reduced that is still a lot of sodium.  But I wanted to try the recipe as close as possible to the original.  The recipe had 3 tbsp of sherry.  I used orange juice instead.  The original recipe uses snow peas.  I don't like snow peas and my son has trouble eating them.  So I used broccoli instead.

The recipes says that it cooks in 15 minutes.  I couldn't understand how you could cook beef in 15 minutes. With Indian cooking you cook beef for so long to get it nice and tender.  So I was curious to try the cooking technique in this recipe.  I used pasanday and sliced it really thin against the grain.  The meat turned out really tender.  I had started out using a stainless steel wok but the sauce was burning at the bottom.  Thankfully there was no burnt taste in the dish.  Next time I'm gonna try to reduce the soya sauce in half. 

Japanese Zucchini and Onions

This recipe is really quick to make.  The most time consuming part of this recipe is peeling the zucchini into strips.  It tastes great on it's own.  You can easily halve this recipe.

I adapted it from a recipe I found at AllRecipes.com.  I added garlic, omitted the teriyaki sauce and increased the soya sauce.