A Vegetarian Dish A Month – Apr 2024: Vegan Stir-Fry
For April, I continued my 2024 monthly tradition of cooking a vegetarian or vegan dish that I’ve never made before. As always, I tend to aim for simple, quick recipes and this one was no exception. I want to be able to make quick, easy, and tasty plant-based meals, and the Chinese (thanks to their long history of Buddhism) have been making vegan food for hundreds of years. Also…The idea of just throwing some things into a wok that you can then just pair with rice, minimizing cleanup without skimping on flavor? Yes, please!
April 2024: Vegan Stir-Fry
The recipe I settled on for April was a veggie stir fry! I wanted to find more recipes I could use my newly purchased vegan oyster sauce for, and combined with my desire for quick, easy, one-pan cooking made this the easy choice! It’s also super flexible in that you can put almost anything in it, assuming you pay attention to the sizes you cut the veggies in for even cooking. I actually ended up buying a stir-fry veggie mix from Costco for this, but it was definitely not as fresh as it could’ve been. For next time, I would definitely choose to go with fresh veggies over the pre-mixed.
The Recipe
For veggie stir-fry, you can pretty much use any veggies that you want. What truly makes this dish is the sauce. When I searched for “veggie stir fry” recipes, I found so many variations it was really hard to pick one. In the end I picked the following.
Choosing Veggies
Again, I just used a veggie stir-fry mix, so I didn’t follow these instructions for veggie choice, but I think for next time I will, and will post this here for your sake with the recommendation of: don’t do what I did. Use fresh veggies! Note also that these are arranged in the order you put them into the pan for maximum tasty!:
- Aromatics – Onions, garlic, ginger, chilli, leeks
- Firm veggies – Carrots, bell peppers, asparagus, eggplant, zucchini, baby corn, green beans, etc.
- Quicker cooking veggies – snow peas, kale, cabbage
- Delicate veggies – Asian greens, spinach, green onions, herbs, etc.
The Sauce
All the recipes I found more or less used the same combination of ingredients but the sauce recipe I went with for this time was:
- 1/4c Soy sauce (This seemed like a LOT of salt to me so I really cut this back, and added a few tablespoons of water)
- 2 Tbsp Vegan oyster sauce
- 3 Garlic cloves (minced)
- 3 Tbsp Brown sugar
- 1 Tsp Sesame oil
- 1 Tbsp Cornstarch or arrowroot powder
- Ginger (grated, to taste)
Cooking Instructions
- For the sauce, mix corn flour and soy sauce (and water) until dissolved, then mix remaining sauce ingredients.
- Heat oil in pan to high heat.
- Add veggies in order above.
- Add sauce to the frypan and let it thicken
- Serve with rice
Personally, I wanted to add a little more protein to my meal, so after I took the veggies out of the frying pan, I threw in some tofu with sesame oil. Threw some green onions over and the top, and the dish was done!
The Verdict
As I mentioned before, I wasn’t thrilled with the stir-fry veggie mix from Costco. The veggies came out a little mushier than I like. If I make this again, I’m definitely going to get some fresh veggies! The sauce itself came out pretty well with plenty of sweet and savory flavor, but I’ve already started to think about future changes I’d want to make. For one: less soy sauce and more oyster sauce and water! I think I’d probably add more garlic too!
That’s the fun of stir fry! There’s an endless number of veggie combinations and sauce modifications you can make until you find the perfect match for you! I definitely plan on making this more in future and will post any updates to the recipe if I find one I love.
Once again, I’ve had a chance to see that really flavorful, delicious food doesn’t need to have meat!
Do you guys have a stir-fry sauce recipe you love? If so, I’m open to more ideas! Drop them in a comment below!
Thanks for reading everyone!
