Healthy Low-Calorie Dinner Options: Beef & Vegetable Stir Fry
In just a few minutes, you can prepare a delicious, low calorie, nutritious and flavorful meal for your entire family
Ingredients:
1 1/2 lb of Broccoli
1 lb of cut beef (flank steak, sirloin, whatever the grocery store has cut for stir fry)
Soy sauce
Minced garlic (comes in a jar – great stuff)
Stir Fry sauce (lots of varieties out there)
Pepper
Vegetable oil
First- take your steak out and put it in a shallow pan and cover it with soy sauce and some vegetable oil (3 parts soy sauce, 1 part oil) – some people prefer to toss in a teaspoon of corn starch to bind it all together. Add some pepper to taste. This is just a marinade that will put some nice flavor in the beef. You can even do this the night before. Put all those ingredients together and store in the refrigerator – the longer that you marinade the beef, the more tender it becomes, but don’t marinade for longer than a day.
Cooking vegetables in a Wok is easy. For this recipe, you’ll need broccoli. Like most vegetables, broccoli has few calories — about 27 calories for 1/2 cup of chopped broccoli.
Put about 1 1/2 inches of water in the Wok and cover it. You won’t find a Wok cover – so use any pan cover you have. Crank up the heat. Once the water comes to a boil, add the broccoli.
In 3 minutes your broccoli is ready — easier than using a steamer because it’s faster, and tastes fresh.
I then toss the broccoli into a colander and leave it there. Dry it with a quick wipe of a towel – don’t get burned! Your Wok is now hot, so add about a tablespoon of vegetable oil to coat the bottom of the Wok (ok, here is confession number one: I don’t measure much) – just be sure to coat the bottom.
Add the minced garlic and stir. Once you can smell it (in about half a minute), you are ready to add your beef.
Take the marinated beef and toss it in the wok. The Wok has a large surface area – and you want each strip of beef to have contact with the Wok. In 30 seconds the beef will be done on that side, and then flip them with a kitchen tool, like a wooden spoon or even a large metal one. Stir the beef so it gets done on all sides, this will take one or two minutes.
Now, pour in the stir-fry sauce and simmer for 30 seconds. Put the broccoli back in and stir it so the sauce coats everything. You are ready to serve! (Recipe serves 4 people).
Calorie Count — 200 calories for the beef, 27 calories for the broccoli, 10 calories for the stir fry sauce, and maybe 5 calories for the oil. Dinner for less than 300 calories and done in five minutes!
