I use a lot of herbs and spices in my cooking, including many products from Schwartz, so when they offered to spice up my life (or at least my kitchen ! - see here) and send through a selection of products to try out, I didn't expect to find much I'd never tried. I have to say, their tubes of stir fry paste were a new one to me though. I'd never seen those before, let alone tried them, so we were very happy to have received the Easy Stir Fry Lemon Grass, Ginger and Coconut flavour to try out.
I hastily assembled a few likely candidates for ingredients from the fridge - some mushrooms, chicken fillet and leftover cooked vegetables. I also found some Chinese noodles that needed using up in the cupboard and sent Sophie to the shop at the corner for some onions and peppers. That'll do nicely !
Some onions sizzling in the wok is always a good way to start whatever it's going to develop into. A lot of my cooking just comes together as I'm making it, so I don't necessarily have a plan before I start !!
Time to fry the chicken. A generous shake of Garlic Salt always helps bring out the flavours.
Next up is the fresh veggies - mushrooms and red, green and yellow peppers, which looked like a traffic light, as Sophie pointed out !
Once that was all cooked, I could throw in the cooked veg and stir, stir, stir !
Now, let's try out the Stir Fry paste. If you look at the twelve o' clock position in the wok, you can see the paste squeezed all over a piece of chicken but you'll have to look closely.
Ta-da, the finished dish ! I was initially a bit worried that the taste of ginger and lemon grass would overpower the taste of everything else because they are two ingredients that I often find overly pungent but it's actually a very delicate flavour that just adds a hint of Oriental flavours to your cooking.
Happy faces all round !
I was pleased to see that the paste contains natural ingredients rather than artificial flavours. The ingredients list contains : Lemon Grass (25%), Coconut (17%), Ginger (14%), Water, Spirit Vinegar, Sugar, Vegetable Oil, Salt, Modified Maize Starch, Preservative (Potassium Sorbate), Spice. 100g of product contains 217 calories and I did use the whole tube in one go (the instructions say to use half a tube, and you can keep it in the fridge once opened for four weeks, but I'd used a lot of chicken so I doubled up the quantity, otherwise the flavours weren't strong enough).
On the product page (here), Schwartz propose four recipes to try with the paste - Lemon Grass, Ginger and Coconut Chicken Stir Fry; King Prawn Stir Fry; Lemon Grass & Coconut Stir Fry with Pork Meatballs ; and Vietnamese Warm Chicken Salad.Or you can just throw it in the wok with whatever you have in the fridge, as we did !
The Easy Stir Fry range also includes Chilli ; Chinese 5 Spice, Ginger & Garlic ; Garlic ; Sweet & Sour ; and Garlic, Ginger & Spring Onion. They make a nice alternative to jars of cooking sauce if you want a lighter, less liquid option so I'll be investigating the other varieties too.
star rating : 4/5
RRP : £1.95 for 75g
for more information : http://www.schwartz.co.uk/productdetail.cfm?ID=10695
Other reviews you may be interested in :
No comments:
Post a Comment