Beef with Snow Peas - Hell Yeah!

I made this last Saturday night and am just now posting about it. I'm the worst kind of procrastinator... I have been crowned the queen of procrastination. Right now I'm writing this because what I should be doing is organizing and cleaning, but that sounds hideously boring so I shall write about glorious beef and snow peas instead.

This is one of the Pioneer Woman's most favorite recipes and I have to say it is one of my favorites too! For this recipe I already had the Soy Sauce, Cooking Sherry, Brown sugar, cornstarch, crushed red pepper and rice on hand. Shhhhhh.. don't tell anyone, but I made this recipe a couple of months ago and LOVED it. So I remade it so I could 1, blog about it and 2, eat it again!

I had to purchase the snow peas, beef, ginger and green onion.. so my total per serving only came out to 2.20! Woo hoo! PW says this makes 8 servings and she's probably right about that.

A note about the rice. The recipe calls for Jasmine or other long-grained rice. Save yourself some time and effort and buy this rice. Most of the time when you use Jasmine or Basmati rice, you have to rinse it, and rinse it, and rinse it, and rinse it some more until the water runs clear so you don't get sticky, icky rice. But, the Mahatma brand Jasmine rice is so easy to cook and it is delicious and fluffy and you will want to eat the whole pot! If you made the Pasta with Bacon and Mushrooms you should have some chicken broth left over. If you do, use 1/2 chicken broth and 1/2 water for the liquid. Also, if you add a tablespoon or two of butter (depending on how much rice you are making) and some salt you won't be disappointed. It really brings out the wonderful flavor of the rice.

Okay, enough about the rice. Let's get to the beef. For this recipe you need a Flank Steak. Flank steak is VERY tender when sliced VERY thin. It's not so tender when you don't slice it thin. So please for the love of all that is good and holy slice the flank steak thinly. You need a SHARP knife to do this and not a serrated knife. Please do NOT use a serrated knife. You will destroy the meat and you will hate this recipe. Cut the meat against the grain and it'll be a very easy task.

Ree calls for peanut oil or sesame oil to brown the beef and the snow peas. I actually used about a TBSP of sesame oil and two TBSP of olive oil. I love, love, love sesame oil and i think it gives the dish a nice flavor.

Speaking of the oil, please take note that when she says the pan needs to be VERY hot, it needs to be VERY hot. If it's not you won't sear in the flavor and your beef and snow peas will be very, very sad. So since you have oil in a VERY hot pan it will spit and dance around in there. Please don't let kids near the stove when cooking this.

The other thing that I modified was the soy sauce. I used a 1/4 c of full sodium soy sauce and a 1/4 c of low sodium soy sauce. I did this so i wouldn't have to add salt at the end. You should NOT have to add any salt at all to this recipe if you make it this way.

Everything else I did according to Ree's recipe and it was very easy to follow and really, really delicious. If you make this, I expect an invite for dinner :)