My wife asked me if it had been worth it. If all the time and effort were worth it.

Of course it was, I said. A good meal is always worth it.

The saga of the Big Meal That Was Totally Worth It, Maybe, began with a single bunch of broccoli in the refrigerator. It was just beginning to turn a little bit yellow at the very tips, meaning it did not have long left in this world.

We had broccoli, so we decided to make a stir fry. That can’t take a lot of time and effort, can it?

It happened to be a weekday, and generally I am a lazy (for me) cook on weekdays. But it was also a day I did not exercise, and when I don’t exercise on weekdays it always feels like I have found some unexpected time.

Hence, stir fry.

I began by trimming the fat off of chuck roast and cutting the meat into thin slices. Chuck is a tough meat, so I tenderized the slices by coating them with baking soda and water and letting them sit in the fridge for an hour (or up to two).

While I waited, I started making the rice and chopping vegetables for the stir fry.

When the meat was ready, I marinated it in small amounts of soy sauce, oyster sauce, Shaoxing wine, cornstarch and oil. Then, I washed off everything I had just added because I forgot the vital step of rinsing off the baking soda before adding the marinade.

Always rinse off the baking soda before adding the marinade. Otherwise, your stir fry will taste like baking soda.

With the meat now baking soda-free, I added the marinade ingredients again. Sometimes the time and effort are my own fault.

While the meat marinated, I continued to slice and chop the vegetables and aromatics for the stir fry. I chopped onions, garlic, ginger, mushrooms, small sweet peppers and, of course, the broccoli. I also cut up some small tomatoes, which I ordinarily wouldn’t use in a stir fry but they, like the broccoli, needed to be cooked soon. It looked like I had a massive amount of vegetables.

I did not have a massive amount of vegetables. Vegetables are mostly water, and when I stir-fried them they shrank down from a massive amount to an almost tiny amount.

Even though I had the heat cranked all the way up under my wok, the meat took an surprisingly long time to sear. Because I was working in batches, it took more than a half-hour to cook a pound of thin-sliced meat.

I removed the meat from the wok, added more oil, and cooked first the aromatics (onion, garlic, ginger) and then the vegetables (everything else). The broccoli florets took forever, which is why the other vegetables shrank so much.

Finally, I added the meat back to the wok to reheat it, and used a cornstarch-and-water slurry to thicken the chicken stock I had added along with the vegetables but had not mentioned until now.

Dinner was finished, a mere 2½ hours after I had started it.

But it was worth the time and effort. A good meal, as noted, is always worth the time and effort.

Unfortunately, when I have cooked a meal, I tend to eat it too quickly. I eat at the same pace that I have been cooking, and I end up shoveling food into my mouth like an uncouth gorilla. I have to remind myself to take a deep breath and slow down.

With this particular meal, I had to do that several times. I suspect there is a correlation between the length of time spent actively cooking and the speed with which I try to eat it.

There was another problem, too. The food was so good that I kept eating it. And eating it. And eating it.

I thought I had cooked enough so there would be plenty of leftovers for the next day, but by the time I was through there was not enough left over for even a small snack.

Reader, I stuffed myself. And yeah, it was worth it.

©2025 STLtoday.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.