By Louisa Burden
Editor in Chief

By this time in the semester, many students are getting sick of their Ramen Noodles and Easy Mac, and some of them probably haven’t even seen a piece of fruit or a vegetable in weeks! There’s no better way to combat this than to whip out the wok and start cooking up  some delicious stir fry.

Ingredients:
1 red potato, thinly sliced
1 Yukon gold potato, thinly sliced
3 shallots, halved
1/8 cup diced yellow or red onion
1 large carrot, sliced
1/2 head of cabbage, cut into strips
1/2 can of sliced water chesnuts
1/2 can of baby corn
1/2 of a bell pepper, sliced
Sesame seed oil
Stir fry sauce, to taste

Directions:
1. Put all the prepared vegetables in a frying pan or wok, and stir in sesame oil until everything is just barely coated. Note that if you want thicker slices of potatoes, you may want to start off by frying them for a little while (five to ten minutes, depending on how thick you’ve sliced them) before adding the other vegetables, especially the cabbage.
2. Start frying! Cook the veggies over  medium low heat.
3. Once the stir fry is about five minutes away from being fully cooked, add the stir fry sauce. You’ll know you’re at this step when the potatoes are almost a golden brown color and your shallots and onions are close to browning as well.
4. Keep frying for approximately five minutes. The stir fry sauce should be well distributed on the vegetables at this point.
5. Let the veggies cool for three or four minutes, and then get ready to eat! Rice or noodles make a great dish to serve along with stir fry.

Helpful Hints
1. It’s called “stir fry” for a reason – you actually need to stir it! Keep stirring the vegetable mixture throughout the frying process – this helps distribute heat to everything and makes sure that everything gets evenly cooked.
2. Watch out for the sesame oil. If you’re not careful with the temperature of the pan (don’t overdo it), it can splash up on you and cause painful burns.
3. The bigger the pan, the better. It’s much easier to cook the vegetables if you don’t have to continually worry about them falling out of the pan.

Preparation time: 45 minutes total
Yield: two to three servings

Photo by Louisa Burden