New at Spice Place is Tone’s Asian Grill & Stir Fry Seasoning. This spice blend is a complete Asian Szechwan seasoning with everything you need to make a great stirfry without having to chop garlic, ginger or peppers. It’s also has a very low amount of sodium, so if you’re careful with adding other ingredients this spice blend is well suited for making a low sodium meal. We were quite impressed with the taste of this spice blend from Tone’s and how quickly & easily we were able to create a real Asian meal at home using a frozen stir fry vegetable blend.

We have a recipe for Stir Fried Chicken and Vegetables on the product page. We sort of followed this recipe in making our meal, but as we usually do we change this and that to our tastes and what we have around. So we took a look in the refrigerator, and saw we had Shrimp left over from our Old Bay Steamed Shrimp so we adjusted the amount of chicken called for in the recipe to about 1/2 pound and added 1/2 pound of the leftover shrimp. We also do pay attention to how much salt we use, so we omitted the Tones Chicken Base and substituted a 14.25oz can of Health Valley No Salt Added Chicken Broth for the water called for in the recipe^*. There’s no need to measure the chicken broth as the can holds just about 2 cups of broth. We’re also health conscience with our choice of oils to cook with and will either use Canola Oil, or Olive Oil, and only as much as needed to keep foods from sticking to the pan.

The first thing you need to do before starting the stir fry recipe is start cooking 1 cup of dry rice. We prefer Basmati rice to the Asian rices, and in our opinion Basmati rice goes equally well with this recipe. But cook whatever rice you prefer. Making rice is quite simple, just heat twice the amount of water as rice to a boil [2 cups water to 1 cup rice], then add the rice, cover tightly and simmer until the water is absorbed. Most rices take about 20 minutes to cook, execpt we find that Basmati rice cooks in about 10 minutes, maybe a little longer. We set our timer when cooking Basmati to 10 minutes, and watch it carefully after that. It’s also best to let rice sit for 5 minutes before serving. If you’re trying to get everything done at the same time, the total cook time for most rices is about 25 minutes [20 over heat, and 5 minutes resting], and Basmati rice takes about 15 minutes [10 minutes cooking and 5 resting]. The cooking time for the Asian StirFried Chicken and Vegetables is about 15 minutes.

We found that we didn’t need to add all of the Asian Seasoning and Chicken Broth to the pan. So use care and add only enough so that you’ll season the meat, and have about 1/2 cup extra liquid in the pan to thicken into a sauce. If you end up with too much liquid in the pan, try to drain off some instead of trying to thicken the extra liquid as you may end up overcooking the vegetables. When the stir fry is done, move the stir fry to a large serving platter and serve with the cooked rice. The recipe makes 6 servings.

^* If you make the recipe exactly as described, each serving will have about 540mg sodium.