Cube Steak with Vegetable Stir Fry Rice

Here is a dish I cooked up which consists of grilled cube steak, vegetable stir fry rice, and cherry tomatoes. The vegetable stir fry rice contains: broccoli, carrots, spinach, yellow squash, and garlic. They were cooked in a vegetable oil and the sauce used was Kikkoman Preservative Free Stir-Fry Sauce with Reduced Sodium. It took about 30 minutes to prepare this meal.

All I can say is... it was YUMMY!

I will post the recipe in a future blog entry.

Brussels Sprouts, Squash, and Tomato Stir Fry

Today I made a variation of recipe I found at a web site called yingsasiancooking.wordpress.com. That dish is called Brussels sprouts with Cherry Tomatoes posted on June 14, 2012. I added a few more ingredients to my version.

My father brought me the last of the cherry, grape, and Roma tomatoes from their garden. In addition, I had some Brussels sprouts in the refrigerator that needed cooking. So after a short Internet search I found an appropriate recipe to incorporate these two vegetables.

What we will need are Brussels sprouts, in this case about 8 ounces, 4-8 cherry & grape tomatoes (fresh from the garden, ummm!), a medium sized yellow squash,  garlic, a teaspoon of pepper, oil to cover the bottom of your pan/wok, and stir-fry cooking sauce. The website calls for Ying’s Korean BBQ Marinade which can be obtained from the web site. Chef Ying has a wide variety of sauces on her web site and they all look very delicious, I encourage you to try them out.

First order of business is to prepare the vegetables and heat the stove. Mince the garlic. Once completed, you will get your skillet/wok heated to medium heat with the oil in it. Place the garlic in the cooking pan.

Cut the ends off the Brussels sprouts along with any bad places on them. Cut the tomatoes and Brussels sprouts in halves. Slice the yellow squash and then quarter the slices.

Stir the garlic in the pan until its smell permeates the air. Blend in the cut Brussels sprouts and stir fry for several minutes. Add stir fry sauce and squash to the pan. Stir vigorously for several minutes. Add tomatoes and continue stirring for under a minute and move contents of pan to a plate or bowl.

Ta da a lovely vegetable dish with your main entree  In my case, a grilled steak with rice and a glass of water. It was enjoyed!

Making Concord Grape Jelly

I made my first batch of concord grape jelly earlier in the week. As the process moved along I took some pictures of some of the steps.

Here are the cleaned, ripe grapes taken from the stem. I weighed them at a little over 9 pounds.


The recipe called for taking about 4 pounds of grapes and mashing them with a potato masher to get the pulp and skins separate.


I then placed the mashed grapes in a pot and cooked them till they boiled and then simmered them for about 10 minutes.

After they started boiling, the grapes look like this. A purple, frothy mixture that is ready to be strained.

I used a screen to filter the juice out since I could not find any cheesecloth in the store. It takes about 10-20 minutes to strain. I mixed the grapes around from time to time to get the juice flowing.

This picture shows heated grapes being strained or waiting to be strained.

Here is about 32 ounces of grape juice with out any sweetener. I did not take pictures of the boiled lids, the sterilizing of the canning jars, the adding of the pectin and sugar to the grape juice, the mixing of 4 cups of sugar to the pectin/grape mixture. Also I could of taken picture of pouring of jelly into the jars but it would be hard to hold the camera and pour jelly at the same time.

The jars have jelly in them with lids and screws applied. I then boiled the jars for 5-10 minutes and then removed them with tongs. They jelly then cooled off.

I had some jelly left over that did not fill an entire jar so I poured in this one and used it to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

It is a lot of work to make jelly and grape juice but rewarding to have fresh food. In retrospect, I could have gone to the store and bought some jars of jelly for about $5-10.