Chinese Five Spice Stir Fry

I love trying new flavors, so I ordered some interesting new spices I'd heard about but never tried thanks to a Penzeys gift card from some awesome relatives! One of those was a Chinese Five Spice powder. There was a recipe for sauce on the bottle that we decided to try the other day in a stir fry. Penzeys mix is Chinese cassia cinnamon, star anise, anise seed, ginger, and cloves, so if you don't have the five spice blend you can make your own.

I love making stir fry. It's such an easy way to combine whatever meat and veggies you have on hand. In this one we used some pork, orange bell peppers, broccoli, and chard stems (don't throw out the stalks! they're great!). In case you don't already know this technique, here is an easy way to julienne a bell pepper:

Cut off the top and bottom (which also happens to make really cool looking flower-like pieces).

Make one vertical cut and open the pepper. Take out the seeds. You can also scrape off the ribs if you care about looks, but I didn't so I left them on. Then cut into strips (please ignore my non-uniformity). Done!

We cut up and browned some pork and then added our veggies and sauce. 

After cooking until meat and veggies were done, we served it over brown rice. 

 The sauce recipe called for 2 TB orange juice, 3 TB soy sauce, 1/4 tsp pepper, 1 tsp honey, 2 tsp five spice blend, and hot peppers to taste. We didn't have the hot peppers, so we omitted them.

The stir fry was a fun new flavor. There was definitely a spicy element missing though, so next time I'll be sure to add the hot peppers called for in the sauce. It was still pretty good without it.

P.S. Remember how I said this blog would be mostly desserts, well I guess I was wrong. Sorry!