‘The Pioneer Woman’: Ree Drummond’s Easy Summer Chicken Stir Fry Is a Healthy Weeknight Dinner
Ree Drummond makes an easy summer stir fry recipe that’s light, healthy, and served in lettuce wraps. The recipe is a spin on her original stir fry recipe, which is made with shrimp.
Ree Drummond gave her stir fry recipe an update
Drummond made the recipe on an episode of The Pioneer Woman when she revisited recipes from her cookbooks. “I’m putting a new spin on speedy summer stir fry,” she explained.
“I’m having so much fun taking this walk down cookbook memory lane,” she noted. “So I’m going to go all the way back to my second cookbook, Food From My Frontier, and I’m making a stir fry that I have loved for years and years.”
Drummond added, “I’m changing it up a little bit and adding chicken and I’m going to turn it into lettuce wraps instead of serving it over rice … This is a spin on my recipe summer stir fry, which originally had shrimp and lots of delicious summer veggies. So I thought chicken would just give it a little spin.”
The recipe introduction offers up a tip. “The key to a successful stir-fry is to have all of your ingredients prepped before you start cooking. The high heat under the pan makes things go quickly — if you stop to prep in between, your food will overcook.”
How to make Ree Drummond’s summer stir fry recipe
Drummond cut chicken breasts into bite-sized pieces and cooked them in a skillet. Then she removed the chicken from the pan, added olive oil, and sauteed zucchini for a minute. “The point here is to cook each vegetable just a little bit and then I’ll move it out to the perimeter of the pan every time I add a new one,” the Food Network host explained.
She added fresh corn kernels next. “The idea here is that you start with the veggies that take the most time and then you kind of move it out and add the veggies that take less time to cook.”
Drummond added halved grape tomatoes, salt, pepper, and lemon juice. “There’s some butter and oil that’s in the pan and the lemon is gonna mix with the butter and the oil and just kind of create a really light sauce,” she said. “If you have some white wine, you can pour in a little white wine, which gives it great flavor too.”
She returned the chicken to the pan. “I love, love, love this dish. It’s simple, it’s light, it’s pretty, it’s colorful, it’s fresh,” Drummond said.
‘The Pioneer Woman’ star serves the stir fry on lettuce leaves instead of rice
To serve the stir fry, Drummond opted for mini romaine lettuce leaves rather than rice. She added torn basil, parmesan shavings, and a squeeze of lemon juice to her “great summery dish.”
The Food Network host added, “So fresh and lovely. Great for summer entertaining. Summer chicken stir fry lettuce wraps — wonderful update to the old classic.”
The full recipe is available on the Food Network website.
