Cuisine Fix: Pork & Squash Stir Fry

[Let me preface this post by noting that I cooked this dish before the "Eggs & Tomatoes" dish. This one is a little complicated, has more photographs, and therefore I waited until now to post.]

Most of the dishes I will be blogging about are stir fry dishes, namely because they are quick, easy, and healthy. This one is no exception: a stir fry of pork meat with squash and mushrooms. Total preparation time is about 10 minutes (twice as long as the previous stir fry).

As shown by the photograph above (see, I remembered to document this time), this dish consists of only 4 ingredients. The beauty of stir fry is that you do not need many ingredients to cook up a good dish -- and the only equipment needed is a wok and a stove. There is no messing with the oven, or with any other pots and pans. The ingredients shown are as follows: sliced onions, sliced mushrooms, diced pork meat (that I had previously marinated in soy sauce and frozen), and sliced squash. Squash isn't my ingredient of choice to be honest; my parents grow squash and insisted I take one.

And once again, the ratio of ingredients is not terribly important: there's a lot of squash and little meat simply because I wanted to cook all the squash. [Maybe it's also to compensate for the hot dogs I had been chowing down prior.] Onions are used as the saute base and mushrooms were there because I found them in the fridge. All in all, maybe I did not think things through while preparing this dish -- it's more of being forced to cook because some ingredients were going bad, rather than cooking with a passionate desire...

Instead of the usual white rice, I elected to also make pasta to go with this stir fry. Pasta-making has to be one of the easiest things to cook: all you do is boil water, put in the pasta, cook it, and then add some pasta sauce. I personally am not a huge fan of pasta but, hey, sometimes you need a little variety in the staple food.

The steps I took to prepare this dish (strictly the stir fry) are:

1. Add a few (4/5?) tablespoons of cooking oil to the wok
2. Once the oil is heated, add in the sliced onions and begin sauteing them
3. After onions start to bronze, add in the meat (to avoid any undercooking)
4. Add some salt and soy sauce and cook until the meat is ready
5. Add in the mushrooms and squash together
6. Put the lid on, lower the heat, and let it simmer for 3 minutes. The key here is to have the squash soften and become tender
7. Stir, remove from heat, and serve

If you followed the instructions, your dish should look something like this:

I am a huge fan of boiled corn, so I added half a cob to my dish as a side. As you can see, I like to keep things simple and just have the pasta with the stir fry. It was pretty good!