Martin Yan's Mongolian Beef

One of the things, as far as cooking goes, that Amparo and I have lamented over the years, is the inability to do proper cooking with a wok. We both love Asian food of all kinds, but wok cooking requires very high heat, and the stove that we had both in our townhouse and in our current house just didn't have the BTU output to do a proper stir fry. When mulling over what to have for dinner tonight, it occurred to us that the new stove we have courtesy of last summer's kitchen remodel (an amazing GE Cafe series gas range) has two very very high output burners. We have, of course, been aware of this all along, but with the temperatures outside being in the mid 90's with heat index well over a hundred, even going outside to grill seemed unnecessary. So we decided it will be a wok testing weekend.

Very simple palette of ingredients

While Wimbledon was on in the background, I pulled a few cookbooks off the shelf to skim for recipes. One of the books was the 1995 paperback edition of Martin Yan's Culinary Journey Through China, by KQED Books. This is one of those books that I have always enjoyed paging through, but have made very few recipes from. Part of this is because of the wokking issue.

One of the first recipes that caught my attention was Mongolian Beef on page 77. Seeing as how the dish of this name is a family favorite at the local PF Chang's restaurant, it seemed like a good choice to try. A quick trip to the local Whole Foods Market for 1.5 pounds of flank steak and some green onions, and we were ready to cook. Everything else in the recipe were pantry ingredients already on hand.

Note on cookware: We have a good quality 14 inch carbon steel wok and a proper wok spatula to go with it. This helps immensely.

Excellent end result

Without infringing on anyone's copyright, this is a very simple recipe consisting basically of marinated strips of flank steak, green onion, hot red chili peppers and garlic. The marinade and sauce are soy sauce, hoisin and sherry based. Simple. As I generally do when making a recipe for the first time, I made it exactly by the book, doubling everything, with only a couple of exceptions. We did not have rice wine or dry sherry in the house, so I used a good quality cream sherry instead. And in deference to the kids, I drastically cut down on the dried red chilis, resorting to sprinkling my and Amp's plate with crushed red pepper after the fact.

This was an easy recipe to make, and a fantastic meal. We ate it with simple green beans and jasmine rice. The wine was a Hayes Valley 2010 Monterey County California Chardonnay. We loved it, as did the kids (well, no wine for the kids...).

The recipe is definitely a keeper, and is simple and quick enough to be an easy weeknight dinner. Also, it could be used as a base for any number of variants, adding in small quantities of other veggies such as carrots, broccoli, snap peas, etc...

Work - Minimal. This is incredibly easy to make, and requires very few ingredients. We keep a well stocked pantry of all sorts of things, and we only needed to shop for the beef and green onions. Prep time is minimal, and cooking time is minimal.
Time - Very quick. The beef marinades for 10 minutes, during which time all other prep can be accomplished. Cooking time is less than 10 minutes. This whole meal can be whipped up in a half hour (it takes longer to make real rice than it does to make everything else).
Cleanup - Minimal. A few ingredient bowls, one serving bowl, and the table ware. As easy as it gets.
Rating - 8 out of 10. A very very solid recipe. Flavorful and simple. Can probably be tweaked as noted above. High rating based on ease of making, ease of cleanup, and great end result. We will be making this again.