In the colder months I crave food that will warm me up. Naturally, I want lots and lots of chilli, so it is lucky I live in a country that will provide me with such dishes whenever I want.
Chillies come in all different shapes and sizes but I want to draw your attention to my favourite that I have discovered here; the Sichuan long dried chilli. What’s so great about this type of chilli is the heat you get from it, as drying chillies intensifies their natural fiery flavour. When I see them in any dish, I know it is going to provide me with the mouth burning, nose running, eye watering heat I have grown to love. As a result, it was very easy to choose which dish to go for; Stir Fried Beef with Spring Onions, Peppers & Chilli. Here is the recipe I used.
Serves: 4
Method: Stir Fry
Time: 15 minutes
Difficulty: 4/10
INGREDIENTS
- 1 packet of really thinly sliced beef
- 1 tbsp shaoxing rice wine vinegar
- 1 tbsp soy sauce
- 5 cloves of garlic (finely chopped)
- Ginger (a thumb sized piece cut into slices)
- 8 Sichuan dried chillies (use more or less depending on how spicy you like it!)
- 1 tsp cumin
- 1 tsp sugar
- 4 spring onions (both the white and green bits chopped)
- 1 pepper (cut lengthways, thinly sliced)
- 1 tbsp oil
DIRECTIONS
- First, defrost the beef. Get the oil in the wok and wait until it is hot. Add the garlic, chilli, cumin and ginger to the pan and cook for around 5 minutes until you can smell the aromatic spices. Watch the pan constantly and always keep the ingredients moving.
- Next, add the white parts of the spring onions, peppers and beef and cook for a further 2-3 minutes and keep stirring to make sure nothing burns in the pan!
- Add the green part of the spring onions, soy sauce, sugar and vinegar. Cook until it coats the beef and the liquid has almost evaporated from the wok.
- Tip onto a plate and serve while still sizzling!
- This dish from prep to plate took around 15 minutes and was extremely simple to cook. It is pretty much throwing ingredients into a pan in a certain order to produce a knock out dish that serves around 4 people.
One word of caution; for any of you whose mind has a tendency to wander off along other trains of thought while cooking (my mind a is prime example of this!), try to focus your attention on the cooking at hand!
This is a very speedy dish to cook which requires constant watching and stirring of ingredients. I managed to burn both the beef, the garlic and chillies on several occasions which made my flat smell disgusting and the dish taste, well, burnt!
Make sure to also follow the order of cooking above. If you add the liquids first, they cook out too quickly, leaving an overly sour and salty taste in your mouth.
Aside from that, I found this dish extremely tasty while also delivering the fiery kick I want in the cold winter months. During my research I discovered that some believe chillies to be highly addictive; why don’t you try this recipe and find out if these rumours are true?
