For Sunday’s dinner we made Beef Stir Fry and Pie! Read on for details about dinner.   cooking, see the next post. Happy Cooking!

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This was a yummy meal! Max was in charge of dinner and Alex was in charge of dessert.  We are going to talk about dessert first because it was actually made before dinner.  (Max had soccer practice so decided to make a quick stir fry (see below for dinner)

Today Max was in charge of dinner so I (Alex) made a lemon meringue pie for dessert.  Neither my mom or I had ever made it so we had to just choose a recipe and follow it.   It turned out really well but I would make a few tweaks (see below).

First I pre-baked a pie shell.  Then I separated 3 eggs and mixed the yolks with lemon juice, corn starch, sugar and a little butter.  I let that cook on the stove top till it was thick and then poured it into the pie shells. Then I whipped 3 egg whites (the ones I had used the yolks from before) with salt and sugar.  The only problem was that the recipe called for 1/4 teaspoon salt, which turned out to be way too much so I separated another egg, whipped that egg white, and folded it into the other 3 egg whites.  It helped a lot but next time I am just going to use a pinch of salt.  Also, I am glad I whipped 4 egg whites because I barely had enough meringue to cover the pie. If I had only had a 3-egg white meringue it wouldn’t have turned out nearly as well.  Anyway, after I whipped the eggwhites to stiff glossy peaks, I spread them on top of the lemon mix in the pie shell.  Then I baked it for 5 minutes.  (The recipe called for 10 minutes but the meringues were already golden brown, so that’s another place I would tweak the recipe.)

Because I knew I only had a short amount of time to cook dinner, I decided to make a beef, broccoli, red onion and kale stir fry.  The key ingredients to a stir fry in my opinion are chopped garlic, chopped ginger and a little sesame seed oil.  You start off cooking that to season the oil in the wok, then remove the garlic and the ginger so they don’t get burnt.  I also use a little soy sauce but soy often overpowers the taste of everything else, so I don’t use too much.  Also the key thing about stir fry is to chop everything up ahead of time.

Here’s the kale, garlic, ginger and red onion.

I also steamed the broccoli a little before I stir-fried it, because sometimes it takes too long to cook

Here’s the rest of the ingredients and the final product, served with rice.  I had to cook some of the ingredients separately because I ran out of the room in the wok.