Beef and Broccoli Brown Rice Bowl & The Canadian Living Blogger Network

Some of you may have noticed the new badge on my site for The Canadian Living Blogger Network.  This is something I'm very excited about.  I was chosen to be part of this new blogger network.  Today I am doing my first post for them by recreating in my kitchen Canadian Living's recipe for Beef and Broccoli Brown Rice Bowl.  I was a little nervous before attempting this recipe as I have never cooked steak before.  Usually when I make a recipe that calls for steak I substitute pasanday which I believe are veal cutlets.

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.

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.

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.