Chinese food just doesn’t taste as good if you cook it at home. Plus it makes your house smell like sesame oil for awhile. Those are the two facts that I had stuck in my head when I attempted to make a healthier version of sesame chicken that I found in Food Network Magazine. So going into this I knew this wasn’t going to be the fried, breaded, so yummy sesame chicken that I order from New Fong Kitchen (our local Chinese takeout).
The first bit of confusion came into play when I noticed that the recipe asked for the snow peas to be trimmed. I had to Google trimming snow peas, having never done that before. What I learned was there is some sort of string like bit that is holding the pea together and people said you should remove them on both sides. There is debate about whether both sides are necessary. I did my best but it was hard to get that little stringy bit off. Sometimes it would break and I would just leave it half there half not there. My thought was as long as these peas are cooked well you can probably just eat the whole thing. Peeling both sides off seems silly because the whole thing will fall apart. This is still a mystery to me; if anyone knows anything about trimming snow peas please give me some pointers!
Now that the snow pea trimming hurdle had been tackled (albeit not very gracefully) lets move on to the rest of the recipe. First step (this happens before the snow pea trimming, but is not nearly as interesting) is marinating the chicken for about 20 minutes in a mixture of sesame oil, soy sauce and honey.
Once your chicken is marinated you sauté it (do it in two batches so there is enough room in the pain for the chicken to cook properly) until it’s cooked. The recipe says until it’s browned but you can’t see the color on the chicken underneath all that brown sauce, so just cut a few pieces open to see if it’s done. Another thing about this recipe that I didn’t like was once the chicken is cooked you transfer it to a plate and then you are supposed to wipe out the pan. The pan was covered in sauce and super hot so I got Anthony to help me. This part is ridiculous though. If I were you I would just use a new pan, you shouldn’t have to wipe pans out while you are cooking.
The next step is heating up the scallions, ginger, and garlic and then while you are doing that you are supposed to whisk up a sauce containing chicken broth, cornstarch, sugar, rice vinegar, chili paste, and soy sauce. I read ahead in the recipe and decided to make this sauce while the chicken was cooking. I don’t like to leave garlic unattended over heat because it tends to burn. You add the sauce to the pan and stir until it’s thickened. Meanwhile you can steam the snow peas as you stir the sauce for a few minutes. Once the sauce has thickened stir in the chicken until heated.
I made basmati rice to go with this because it’s the only rice besides instant that I had. Cooking rice is the pits. I just can’t get it right at all. It was mushy and not very appealing. When will I ever understand how to cook rice correctly?!
Final Product:
This was a flavorful (I might use a little less sesame oil next time) dish. The rice was a disaster and the snow pea trimming was a pain in the butt, but other than those things this dish was easy to make. Make this if you have a craving for Chinese, but don’t want all the calories.
There has been a ton of life going on over here. I haven’t had any time to cook, which means no material to blog about. But…there is a challenge ahead of me. My husband has gone off to Peru (for 20 days) and left me to fend for myself and I can’t afford to eat take-out every night. So can I come up with meals for one person or will I just give up and eat frozen meals? The challenge is on!
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