Pork Stir Fry

This probably wouldn’t be your first guess for a popular Thanksgiving food, would it? Yet, this is one of my family’s favorites out of the recipes I know, and I always bring it to that holiday reunion.

This recipe is written accordingly, and results in a very large amount of food. For a smaller amount, use only one bell pepper, a small onion, and 8oz of ground pork instead.

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Ingredients

• 2 red bell peppers
• 1 large sweet onion
• 2 limes
• 16oz ground pork
• Jasmine rice
• Irish butter
• Teriyaki sauce (*can be gluten free)
• Sweet chili sauce (*can be gluten free)

Items needed

• 1 large pan
• 1 large mixing bowl
• 1 small mixing bowl
• 1 freezer bag
• Rice cooker
• Cutting board
• A zester (alternative: cheese grater)
• A regular fork
• A hard spatula
• A chef knife

Setup

1. Put ground pork in a freezer bag with enough teriyaki sauce to cover, and then squeeze the air out of the bag and close it. Put this in the fridge for now. Try to give it at least 30 minutes. You can give it a full day or more if you want, it’ll be even better.

2. Clean and dice the bell peppers and onion. Set aside on the cutting board for now.

3. Zest the lime (be careful to only get the outer green part of the lime zest, the inner white part will be extremely bitter). Set aside in a small bowl.

Rice

1. Cook the rice in a rice cooker. I don’t know exactly how much I usually make, but it’s better to make more than have too little of it.

2. You may complete other steps of the recipe while it is cooking/warming. Leave it in warming mode in the rice cooker after it’s done.

3. When the rice is done, add 2tbsp of butter and the lime zest to rice and mix with a fork.

Stir Fry

1. Heat a large pan and put the marinated ground pork in it. Flatten it out on the pan and leave it for a little while so it gets a nice crust on the bottom.

2. Use the spatula to chop the ground pork into smaller pieces while it continues to cook, until fully cooked and to the consistency you like. Then remove it from the pan and set aside in the large mixing bowl for now.

3. Add the diced vegetables to the same pan and cook until lightly browned on some pieces, then remove and set aside in the mixing bowl with the pork and stir to combine them.

Sauce

1. Start with a lot of sweet chili and teriyaki sauce in the small mixing bowl that was used for the lime zest. Adjust to taste. You may add other ingredients to change the sauce as desired. I recommend making more than you think you need; you can freeze any extra.

2. Add the stir fry mix back into the pan. You may need to do multiple batches at this point. Add sauce incrementally until you’re happy with it.

Completion

1. Serve the stir fry in a bowl on top of the lime rice. Here, you can add additional ingredients on top such as chopped green onions or peanuts. It goes really well with some ice water with lime juice in it.
2. You can reduce the sauce in a small pot for a while before adding the stir fry to make the final consistency less liquid and have it stick better to the stir fry if you like.
3. You can also add a small amount of MSG (a type of salt from glutamic acid that has been a staple of much East Asian cooking for a long period of history) to the sauce to increase flavor. Its name is a misnomer; this addition is gluten free.