Product Description

The most complete book on stir-fries.

Stir-fries are an ideal way to prepare delicious, nutritious and internationally inspired meals quickly and easily. Novices and experienced cooks can create fantastic meals with just one wok, skillet or frying pan.

In 300 Best Stir-Fry Recipes, Nancie McDermott creates outstanding stir fries based on her extensive food and travel experiences. Here's just a sampling of recipes:

• Chicken with honey-ginger sauce
• Spicy beef in lettuce cups, Szechuan-style
• Pork with fresh ginger and mushrooms
• Ham with eggs, onions and peas
• Shrimp with pineapple and peas
• Catfish with turmeric and fresh dill
• Shiitake mushrooms with Napa cabbage and peas
• Sugar snap peas with garlic
• Everyday fried rice, Thai-style
• Egg noodles with barbecued pork and bokchoy
• Lemongrass beef, Vietnamese-style
• Sweet Chinese sausage with eggs, onions and peas.

In addition to thorough information on stir-frying traditions and techniques, there are recommendations for the best equipment. A comprehensive easy-to-follow pantry list and glossary enhance this quintessential stir-fry cookbook.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #74038 in Books
• Brand: Nancie McDermott
• Published on: 2007-04-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Features

• Stir-fries are an ideal way to prepare delicious, nutritious and internationally inspired meals...
• 320 pages, softcover
• Dimensions: 10"H × 7"W

Review
Simple in concept, essentially healthy, and intrinsically quick. Nancie's stir-fry recipes help you cook delicious dishes using easy-to-find ingredients. (Plus Magazine (San Luis Obispo CA) 200709)

The recipes are easy enough for beginners ... but so flavorful they will be appreciated by the most experienced cooks. (Denise Landis The Exeter News-Letter (Exeter, NH) 200709)

The recipes are inspired by [McDermott's] work and travels abroad and incorporate easy-to-find ingredients. (Giftware News )

One pan is all it takes for quick, delicious meals. (Fancy Food and Culinary Products )

About the Author

Nancie McDermott is an expert on the food and culture of Thailand. She has written seven cookbooks and contributes recipes and features on food and travel to Food & Wine, Bon Appetit and national newspapers. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and teaches cooking classes nationwide.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

This book is a recipe box, designed to introduce you to an ancient way of cooking, one that translates beautifully into the language and demands of the 21st-century kitchen. Simple in concept, essentially healthy and intrinsically quick, stir-frying makes sense for Western cooks, whether they are experts or novice cooks. With stir-frying in your kitchen repertoire, you have almost endless options for making delicious, healthful home-cooked meals, even on a busy day.

Wonderful as it is, stir-fry cooking is presented here not to replace the cooking methods you use now, but rather to offer you another technique to use in cooking wonderful, satisfying and delightful food in your kitchen. If you don't cook, it's an excellent place to get started. If you do cook, stir-fry cooking fits right in to what you already do, while expanding your options to create wonderful food.

I consider stir-fry cooking to be an essential part of my repertoire as a cook and I use it often to bring freshly cooked, beautiful and delicious food to our dinner table. I still stew, sauté, fry, steam and grill. I still make curries and soup and slow-cooker feasts, and I love having breakfast for dinner, meaning pancakes with maple syrup and sausage, or eggs and bacon and grits on a dark, wintry night. But stir-fry cooking is a cornerstone of my kitchen routine -- a simple, endlessly varied kitchen technique that helps me cook weeknight dinners for my family and celebration meals for our extended family and friends.

The main course dishes in this book presume that you will enjoy them Asian-style, as a flavorful and substantial accompaniment to rice. Quantities of meat and vegetables in a given dish in most cases serve four people who are eating them along with a generous portion of rice or noodles or couscous or another satisfying accompaniment.

Unlike a European-style stew or a bowl of chili con came, which can be a meal in a bowl along with an optional serving of bread, stir-fried dishes exist in tandem with rice or another grain or noodle. They are seasoned to this end, with generous amounts of salt, herbs, and other intense ingredients, so that the flavors of the stir-fry balance and brighten the "comfort food" portion of the meal, which traditionally consists of unseasoned rice.

One reason for this is that rice is what Asia has been eating for thousands of years, even before the wok appeared on the culinary scene as a tool for cooking. In Thailand, the very word for stir-fries and other substantial dishes, such as curries, steamed fish and soups, is "with-rice." It is a phrase, used as a noun, to encompass all that will be provided as a meal. It acknowledges that the traditional role of such dishes is to season, accompany and make more delightful the rice, which on any given evening was all that was available along with chiles, fish from the stream and greens from the garden.

I hope you enjoy learning how to stir-fry or that you find a few new recipes to add to your repertoire if you already know how. I hope that your cooking brings you pride and pleasure. I hope that it makes your table a place where you can set aside your cares and enjoy being here, now, eating good food, whether you are alone, with family, or with friends.

Nancie McDermott

Customer Reviews

A World of Asian Flavors and Beyond...
I am a big fan of Nancie Mcdermott's recipes and her vivid writing. I love her book Southern Cakes and I'm an avid baker myself. I'm not as familiar with Asian cooking, so I was thrilled to learn she goes beyond traditional Asian flavors in her new book 300 Best Stir Fry Recipes to include delicious dishes like her Pork with Escarole, Cherry Tomatoes and Pine Nuts--a delicious, colorful and healthy weeknight meal. Being a true lemon lover, I adored the Stir Fried "Piccata" with Pork and Peas and my family sopped up the savory sauce with warm slices of sourdough bread. It was an easy one-pot wonder. After a trip to New Orleans, I couldn't wait to try the Cajun Spiced Shrimp, and was delighted by this quick and very flavorful dish. The recipes in this book are colorful and vibrant and I can't wait to try more of them, especially this summer when I get tired of grilling but don't want to heat up the oven. My 15 year old daughter is just starting to cook, and together we will turn to this book time and time again to search out easy and delicious meals she can whip up with ease. Thanks Nancie, for a great book that introduces us to the world of Asian flavors and beyond!

300 Best Stir Fry Recipes
300 Best Stir-Fry Recipes

I love this book. I purchased it during the summer because I wanted to try new recipes while I had time. I have prepared roughly 25 of the recipes and each one has been superb. The documentation and pictures are outstanding. Not having a lot of experience with Asian cooking I found the ingredients easy to locate in the local super market and the dishes easy to prepare. My husband was delighted with the new additions to my Greek cooking. I would recommend this book to anyone trying to eat a healthier diet. I am now online to purchase another copy of the book for our winter home.

Salt Of The Earth
I have been a fan of Ms.McDermott's for a long time, and I often give her books as presents. With the arrival of 300 Best Stir-Fry Dishes I did what I always do when a new cook book comes:I make one recipe by following the instructions exactly. This method tells me a lot about the author and her/his way with and thoughts about food.I found a dish and its georgeous picture for which all ingredients were in the house:Sweet-And-Salty -Shrimp with Pineapple and Carrots, pg 128. When finished, it was as prety as its picture, but we could not eat it. The word SALTY is in the title, but my first bite made me feel sure that I had made a mistake - that would be the only way something this salty could come out of my kitchen. The next evening I made Lime-Splashed Salmon with Chiles and Cilantro, pg.173, and I produced the same sorry result. The ingredients included 2 T Soy Sauce, 2 T Fish Sauce, and "1/2 t salt or to taste".I started writing notes next to my recipes and made Cantonese-Style Shrimp with Black Bean Sauce, pg.125 my last try. This was too salty even over unsalted Couscous - 1 T fermented black beans instead of the listed 2 T would most likely have been enough. I am still convinced that there are delicious dishes that you can make from this book if you cut down on the salty ingredients, especially the frequently used extra salt. As it is, the book should carry a warning from the American Heart Association. An inexperienced cook might be accused of wanting to kill his/her spouse!
So you should enjoy this book while remembering that salt and Soy sauce can be added at the table when things taste flat - just like the way you can do it in a Chinese Restaurant. Inge