The Costco Kirkland Freezer Find That Makes Stir-Fry Night 10 Times Easier

"Cooking" can mean a lot of different things, depending on how busy you are. Heck, there are some days when even an easy frozen pizza upgrade can feel like a culinary triumph. Other times benefit from smaller shortcuts that still keep the "home" in semi-homemade. Costco's Kirkland Signature Stir-Fry Vegetable Blend cuts your prep time down to a fraction of what it could be when you're breaking out the wok and racing against the clock.

A large chunk of a completely scratch-made stir-fry night typically involves basic vegetable washing and chopping. The Kirkland Signature stir-fry blend, a whopping nine-item medley of broccoli, sugar snap peas, green beans, orange and yellow carrots, mushrooms, red bell peppers, water chestnuts, and onions, is already sliced down to size. That number of botanicals would have otherwise taken as long to prep as they would to cook.

The veggies are more or less ready to use as soon as you open the 5 ½-pound bag, though you should still pat them dry after they're thawed, and before they hit the pan, to keep them from steaming. A little cooking oil, plus the protein and sauce of your preference, brings your own signature to the stir-fry blend.

Reddit's Costco sub seems to have a post for everything. The warehouse store's Kirkland Signature stir-fry blend is no exception. Commenters on a Reddit post calling the product a "game changer" for consuming vegetables detailed their delight: "I've had a lot of frozen veg in my life, and these are easily the best," one user wrote. "They don't cook out to be watery and gross," another noted. 

Sapping as much liquid as you can is one way to make a more restaurant-quality stir-fry, and while the latter netizen didn't mention how they avoided a mushy fate, paper towels do the trick: arrange a few layers, scatter the veggies across, roll into a tube, and gently press out even more moisture. Salad spinners are some of the only single-use tools we think are worth making space for, and one also helps here for getting the thawed produce dry. 

Add a nice sauce, plus meat or tofu, to tie it all together. Diced chicken cooks in just a few minutes; add it to the pan before you add the veggies, which finish even faster. As for the sauce, there are many that take minimal time and minimal ingredients when starting from a soy sauce base – for added convenience, soy sauce is even one of the condiments you should always buy at Costco.