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Cooking @ Home: Stir Fry Style Tortellini
Use up the ‘odds and ends’ in your fridge and pantry with this stir fry-inspired dish
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You’ll probably look at this and say that this isn’t a very traditional stir fry, and you’re correct. That’s why I was sure to title this “Stir fry style.” Think of it as an inspiration, rather than an authentic dish.
In fact, this is a dish I made up on the fly while on vacation with some friends, but we ended up liking it enough that we retraced our steps and wrote it down. We were nearing the end of a trip where we’d all stayed together in one house and shared the cooking duties among all of us. We’d bought some tortellini and tomatoes from a store, intending to make them into a light pasta dish one night, and never got around to it.
Everyone agreed that we wanted something light with a lot of vegetables since we’d all been eating heavy food all week during the trip. We didn’t want a lot of leftovers since we were leaving the next day. To that end, almost everything is either something you hopefully have on hand, like onion powder, soy sauce or crushed red peppers, or something that you can use the entire thing of. An entire pound of ground beef, the whole zucchini, the whole pint of cherry tomatoes and even the whole bottle of teriyaki sauce. Stir fry is great in general for that kind of cooking, by the by. If you have some odds and ends leftover in your pantry and fridge and need to just use them up, it might be a good time to warm up the wok.
Recipe
Stir Fry Style Tortellini
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 30 minutes
Serves 4
Ingredients
1 pound ground beef
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon onion powder
3 cloves minced garlic
2 cups julienne carrots
1 pint cherry tomatoes
4 tablespoons soy sauce
1 large zucchini or twice as many small ones, quartered and cut in half-inch pieces
1 (12-ounce) bottle teriyaki sauce
10 rings pickled banana peppers roughly chopped
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1 (20-ounce) package cheese tortellini
1 (8-ounce) package spinach
Directions
Bring a pot of water to boil and salt generously. Prepare vegetables – mince garlic, chop zucchini, carrots, and banana peppers, and wash and prep tomatoes and spinach.
In a large skillet or wok, sear beef on high heat on both sides. Crumble and cook through, then add salt, pepper, onion powder and garlic.
When garlic is fragrant, add carrots and tomatoes. Cook until tomatoes begin to wrinkle, at which point they can easily be burst with a wooden spoon.
Add soy sauce and deglaze pan.
Reduce heat and add zucchini. When zucchini is partly cooked but still toothsome, add teriyaki sauce, banana peppers and crushed red pepper flakes.
Put the tortellini in the boiling water, then wilt the spinach into the hot meat and sauce mixture.
When the tortellini is ready, transfer in with the sauce and vegetables and stir to combine. Optionally top with sesame seeds if desired.
Source: Alex Gallegos
Cook the tomatoes longer than you think you might need to. The goal is to get them to burst like nature’s little sauce packet. When they’ve started to shrivel up like a raisin, it’ll be easy to do that with gentle pressure — and you won’t spray tomato juice all over your kitchen. They’ll all but disappear for the start of a lovely sauce that you’ll finish with the soy sauce and a bottle of teriyaki sauce — or a different sauce of your choice.
We’re fortunate enough to live in a time where a lot of delectable sauces are available to us pre-packaged in the grocery store, so if you like your food spicy or think that teriyaki is just too sweet, feel free to substitute in a bottle of Gochujang sauce or General Tso sauce.
Alex Gallegos is an enthusiastic home cook who enjoys trying new recipes and learning new techniques. Find this recipe and others like it at PlatefulsOfFlavors.com
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