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It's not that I always want to cook...

Confession: I love cooking, but I don't always want to cook when I get home at the end of the day.  I don't get people who claim they do.  Believe me when I say that I too come home tired, annoyed, and/or aggravated, and I am as tempted as the next person (if not more) to cry "screw it!" and hop on GrubHub.

I was having just such a day today - not that anything bad or annoying occurred, but it was hot, and it's summer, and I just wasn't feeling it.  Karen and I had gone out to do a few errands, and as we drove home, it seemed like every restaurant was taunting us. I could smell Mexican food, and something else delicious, as we made our way homeward through increasingly annoying traffic.  But I knew that there was a fridge of CSA vegetables awaiting us, and something had to be done with them before the next batch arrives on Saturday.

So, grumbling, I made my way to said fridge, staring for a bit.  We've started to have lots of "scraps" of veggies - a few stray carrots, a lonely Hakurei turnip, one squash, etc. - and I decided that we might as well try to use them up.

Enter this stir-fry, which was whipped together in about 20 minutes and appeased the part of my brain that said "just get takeout, would you?".

What you really want the recipe for here is the sauce.  Karen found it online and she whipped up the sauce - with our usual few modifications - while I was chopping up veggies.  I include all the steps anyway, though, in case you're new to stir-fry.  (It's not much of a recipe, I'm afraid!)

This one was full of tricks and cheats.  We used one of the microwaveable rice pouches that I keep around for kitchen emergencies, along with some stray bits of stuff: the egg whites leftover from Karen's latest batch of ice cream, one zucchini, a couple tiny carrots, some of the endless cabbage, a handful of shishito peppers, the single turnip, some edamame that was supposed to wind up in a chili.  So, side tip for stir-fry: save it for the end of the week and just put whatever's left in the fridge in it!  But I can say that I'd make it again in an instant - and we won this round against the ease and convenience of ordering food in.
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