Vegetable Spring Rolls

One of my favorite things that Luke makes is spring rolls, so tonight he instructed me while I made them.  We've made them together before, but tonight it was all me!

You can really put anything inside these spring rolls, but tonight we had napa cabbage, bok choy, onion, and carrots.  I have learned with my cooking ventures that sometimes the chopping of the ingredients take longer than the actual cooking.

After I had chopped all the veggies, I got some oil heated up on the fry pan and cooked the veggies.  I then added soy, rice wine vinegar, garlic, rice cooking wine, ginger, and sesame oil to season the veggies.  Once these were all cooked we took them off the heat to cool.

Rolling the springs rolls is pretty fun, there's many different ways you can roll them and make them look very pretty.  Now the classic way to cook spring rolls is to fry them, but seeing as to how I'm watching my figure, we baked these in the oven for about 10-15 minutes.  We even had two dipping sauces, one sweet/spicy and one salty!  YUM!

Beef Stir fry with Noodles

Last night I recieved a cooking lesson from Luke. I was craving an asian noodle dish, so lo and behold that is what we created. I have found that it's much easier to cook when you have all of the ingredients in the house (living close to Chinatown also helps).

We started with the chopping of the veggies and the beef. While we did this we put some water on to boil Then we marinated the beef in some yummy asian sauces like soy, rice wine, sesame oil and oyster sauce. We got the frying pan really hot and then cooked the beef. Then we took the beef out of the pan.

Next we threw the veggies into the fry pan (note, we do not have a wok which is unfortunate). We added some soy and oyster sauce to the veggies and stir fried them til they were nice and tender.

Ok, so then we put the egg noodles into the boiling water for about three minutes, just until they fell apart from the balls they came in. Once this happened we drained them and put them under cold water immediately.

The final step was lightly frying up the noodles and adding the beef and veggies. The outcome was super tasty and quite light. Definitely not as salty as takeout chinese.

Seared Tuna with Soy Mustard Vinaigrette

Tonight I received a cooking lesson from Luke so this is sort of a joint post. Luke taught me how to sear tuna and it turns out this is very simple. The key is buying fresh fish and not cooking it for too long. We seasoned the fish with salt and pepper and then made a light vinaigrette. The vinaigrette had soy, lime juice, dijon mustard, ginger and a little bit of vegetable oil.

We sliced the tuna and then put it on some green beans which we stir fried with some soy sauce, rice wine, ginger, garlic and chili paste.

This meal was super quick and super yummy. It was fresh and light. I love tuna!