Well, we went back to our experiment and this time C cooked dinner as we had to run and pick up J.  He made Apricot Beef Stir Fry.  We doubled the recipe, of course!  I spent about $19.00 on ingredients or about $2.38 per serving. Still not bad, though more on that later.

C LOVES to cook, but is new to working with some of the appliances, or is unfamiliar with the one we have as he has only used the one he has in class.  Our rice cooker can be temperemental and the rice didn’t quite get cooked, so crunchy rice was not a favorite here.  The beef was pretty..well, sucky too.  Too fatty, some cartilage still on it, etc.  I usually get it at Costco, but was not going out that way this week, so I bought it at our local store….will not be doing that again, at least not the sirloin stew pieces!

CL-(that’s me!)it was ok!  The Apricot preserves didn’t make it overly sweet, and I don’t usually use an asparagus stir fry blend, so that was nice and different.  (will definetely do that again!) but I couldn’t get past the crunchy rice.

R-didn’t like it.  He didn’t like the veggies used this time, the meat was yuck and he couldn’t get past the rice either.

C-I was glad he was able to laugh off the rice…we all make mistakes, and he took this one in stride even joking with us about it.  I think he liked the sauce, but that was all.

J-This rice is crunchy, enough said.

A-see J’s remark.

H-“I don’t like this, mommy! My rice is hard!” he gave up, ate a few pieces of veggies and ran off.

D-he picked at his a bit, but overall he wasn’t impressed.

Using a better cut of beef would have helped, as would properly cooked rice, but I think I will stick with my own recipe for beef stir fry.