Beef Broccoli Lo Mein with Eggrolls & Spicy-sweet dipping sauce

I have served this delicious (and REALLY easy) Beef-Broccoli Lo Mein recipe from Cooking Light magazine before and we have really enjoyed it. The beef takes on the ginger-garlic flavor nicely (even though it’s not marinated) and the sauce has the perfect balance of sweet and spicy. I substitute wide Udon noodles for the spaghetti for a little more authenticity. The only drawback to this recipe is that it calls for a lot of ingredients that most people do not routinely have on hand (oyster sauce, fresh ginger, Thai chile paste, etc.). Of course, around here, we ALWAYS have sriracha on hand. Hubby loves that stuff and put it on his breakfast casserole this morning.

I don’t “Mise en place” for everything that I cook, but I do think that it is especially helpful for anything stir-fried.

When the recipe was originally published (in 2002 or 2003?), it featured a whole “menu” complete with Egg rolls and “spicy-sweet dipping sauce”, but that feature is REALLY hard to find on their website now, even with a link (it’s buried in a long article on weekday menus and it’s hard to find that specific one), so I’ll just give you the instructions for that here:

While you are cooking the pasta, bake 6 frozen white-meat chicken egg rolls (we actually prefer vegetable, but it’s up to you) according to package directions. While egg rolls bake, combine 1 tablespoon minced green onions, 2 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce, 1 tablespoon rice vinegar, 2 tablespoons duck sauce, and 1 teaspoon sriracha. Serve sauce with egg rolls. This sauce is DELICIOUS and is also great on potstickers. (Hubby and I learned how to make potstickers at our Chinese New Year cooking class last week – check back later for more info.)

This sauce is DELICIOUS and is also great on potstickers. (Hubby and I learned how to make potstickers at our Chinese New Year cooking class last week – check back later for more info.)
Hubby and I LOVE this sauce, but it’s a little too spicy for Boy and Girl; they usually use the “sweet and sour”-type dipping sauce that comes in the package of eggrolls.

We also ate some in-the-shell edamame with this dinner.

Cooking Light suggests that you serve fortune cookies (natch) for dessert. When I was a kid, my mother and I made fortune cookies from scratch once (I cannot, for the life of me, remember WHY), but I do remember that it tough to get the cookies stuffed with a fortune, folded in half and rolled around a wooden spoon in time before the cookies hardened into unflexibility. This has been a running joke with Hubby and me. I told him once MANY years ago, when we were finishing dinner and having fortune cookies at a Chinese restaurant, “My mom and I made fortune cookies from scratch once when I was little”, thinking that he would be terribly impressed. In typical understated Hubby fashion, he said “cool” and went about eating his cookie. When I told him of my disappointment, he corrected his reaction so appropriately “Wow – fortune cookies – really? That’s great!” that I now remind him of my childhood Chinese baking pursuits EVERY time that we eat fortune cookies – so much so that he will now sometimes say, “Wow – fortune cookies – really?” when he sees the server coming with the check and cookies at the end of the meal.