Last week I shared my Real Chinese All Purpose Stir Fry Sauce recipe, the ultimate secret weapon for fast mid week meals. It takes minutes to mix up then can be stored in the fridge for weeks, and you can use it for stir fries (including noodles) and even soups. It’s great to use as a base to add other flavours – such as herbs, chilli and of course garlic and ginger – but it has enough of a depth of flavour that you can even use it on its own. To use, you simply give the jar a good shake, add to the stir fry with water and cook it until it thickens and becomes a thick sauce that coats your stir fry ingredients. I call this sauce Charlie (as in “Charlie Brown”…because stir fry sauces are often referred to as “brown sauce” – unoriginal, I know!). Click here to read more about Charlie in the original post. In summary, the reason why Charlie is so great is because he is similar to the sauce base of so many popular Chinese dishes so instead of mixing up 10 ingredients every time you want to throw together a quick stir fry, you have Charlie on hand to use. He is not an exact replica of the sauce for any recipe, but he is very close to many. Hence his versatility. In this post I’m sharing 10 popular Chinese Stir Fry dishes made using Charlie – and all on the table in 15 minutes (thanks to Charlie). The directions will be slightly more summarised than how I usually write recipes, but that’s a small compromise for the convenience of having 10 recipes in one post. Using Charlie, the ingredients of each of these recipes closely resembles the original, authentic version, but with Charlie ready made, you can make these a lot faster than if you were making them from scratch. I hope you find this post handy! If you enjoyed this, you might find this Stir Fried Noodles – Build Your Own guide useful – read this, and you’ll never again need a recipe to make stir fried noodles!!
