When my husband and I got married, we’d eat out about once a month. Now before you think we were well-off (because we were dead broke), let me explain what I mean by “eat out.” Once a month we’d make the 1/2 mile walk to the local Smith’s grocery store. Inside the Smith’s was a Chinese restaurant that charged $4.95 for a plate of food. So for less than $10, we had our date night. These days, knowing what I know, I doubt we’d hit up that particular restaurant, but I still remember it fondly. I always got the same thing: chicken chow mein, orange chicken and beef and broccoli. Today I was randomly craving that beef and broccoli. Side note: I didn’t have one craving when I was pregnant, but when I’m not pregnant, I crave random things all the time. The point is, I wanted to eat beef and broccoli and not feel horrible after. So I decided to come up with my own recipe. Here’s how it went down.
I started with a flank steak sliced super thin. Then I marinated this in a delicious, no-sugar, no-soy sauce for about 45 minutes (because that’s how long it took me to get my daughter, get home and start cooking).
Then I cooked my broccoli. This was simple as it was just avocado oil, broccoli, and pepper. How long you cook this is going to depend on your taste buds. I happen to like my broccoli very well cooked. I love when it has some black char on it. Cook it how you like it. How long you cook the broccoli won’t make any difference to whether or not the dish turns out.
Move the broccoli to a bowl and add the meat, marinade and all. This is another thing to cook to your liking. I like my meat rare, so I only cooked it for around 3 minutes or so. If you like it more done, cook it for around 5 minutes.
While the meat cooks, make the delicious sauce. The thickener in the sauce is arrowroot powder. It acts a lot like corn starch.
Add the broccoli back in and once it’s warm, toss the sauce. You’ll only have to cook it for a minute or so to finish the dish.
I ate this plain because I was starving and it smelled amazing, but this would also be delicious over rice.
uses BBQ sauce like most kids use ketchup, so we go through a lot of it in our house. While I’m totally okay with adding strange things to food to get kids to eat them, I’m not okay with the sugar content of most condiments. This is especially true for BBQ sauce. When we made the change to a healthier lifestyle, I knew we couldn’t give up BBQ sauce. That’s when I began the quest to make a no-sugar BBQ sauce. Not only did I succeed, but my husband says this is the best BBQ sauce I’ve ever made and my daughter gave it her stamp of approval.
One night we had some left over pork roast and needed a quick dinner. I threw the roast leftovers in a slow cooker with the BBQ sauce and we had dinner. It’s almost too easy.
