Kung Pao Chicken

What's the opposite of traditional American Thanksgiving food? Without a doubt, the furthest you can get is halfway around the world in Asia. That's why, after a long weekend spent gorging ourselves on turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes, we decided to whip up some more Chinese food. Reaching into our pile of torn-out pages from Cooking Light, we found a recipe for Kung Pao Chicken (Cooking Light, Dec 2010).

Cooking Light claims that this recipe only requires 40 minutes prep and cook time. We're happy to say, since we chose this recipe for a work night, that they were right! The chopping of the vegetables is probably the most labor intensive part of the prep, so if you want to speed things up even more, we recommend taking care of that the night before you plan to cook.

A note on ingredients: This recipe calls for 1 pound of boneless, skinless chicken thighs. Normally, we don't mind a well-cooked piece of dark meat chicken, but for some reason, the taste in this dish was just off, in a slimy way. We'd recommend using cubed chicken breast instead, for a fresher, lighter taste.

Back to the recipe...

This one was a cinch to put together. The first step is to saute the onion in sesame oil for several minutes, then the garlic for 30 seconds, and then the chicken is added and cooked until it begins to brown. The recipe states that the chicken will take approximately 3 minutes to brown, but in our experience it took a touch longer. (We're also somewhat paranoid about undercooked chicken, so your mileage may vary.)

Next, we made the sauce, combining water, cornstarch, soy sauce, brown sugar, minced ginger, and crushed red pepper. The sauce was then added to the chicken and brought to a boil.

Finally the veggies were added in. Here's where, as with most stir fried dishes, improvisation can occur. This recipe called for bell peppers and snow peas, but other sturdy vegetables could be swapped in or added. These are cooked along with the chicken until crisp-tender (about 2 minutes) and then the entire mixture is removed from the heat and sprinkled with chopped peanuts.

There wasn't anything wrong with this dish, but it was far from outstanding, as some comments on CookingLight.com might have you believe. To quote one commenter, "With so many other good Cooking Light recipes to try, I doubt I'll come back to this one." Indeed, litgourmet - we concur.