Cooking Experiment: Kung Pao Chicken and Green Beans

[tuftears]

Not together in the same pot, that would be crazy!

Anyway,this is the basic recipe I used. I winged it for the green beans, but how can you go wrong cooking those? Asides from taking way longer than you figured they'd take.



For the green beans, I boiled the Chinese sausage first, two of them (for 2.5 pounds of green beans) and then the green beans, taking the sausages out to cool. I should have used the biggest pot instead-- turns out that green beans take up a lot of space! Having to pour the beans into a larger pot when I realized it wasn't going to work in that pot added a lot of cooking time.

I mixed salt and garlic into the water to seep in while it boiled.

I made some modifications to the basic Kung Pao chicken recipe: I used Chinese black vinegar and a splash of apple cider vinegar in place of the wine, since I don't actually have any wine, and I used honey for the brown sugar. I think these made it a little too sour, so I should either see what the proper substitute would be, or just get some cooking wine on hand for the occasions where it's called for.

Other than that, the chicken came out very well, I poured the chicken into the pan and let it sit until it was half-cooked, then poured the sauce in, stirred vigorously, and cooked it the rest of the way. Easier than reserving a separate pan for chicken and sauce!

So there you have it, kind of a one-person Chinese restaurant meal!

Comments

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

Bookmarked! =^.^=

I'll likely appropriate parts of that recipe for stew experiments, once I have the baseline version down. It looks like the salient ingredients for that would be the chili paste and the chopped garlic.

I'm curious about what would happen if you used white grape juice as part of the wine substitute. The stuff's tasty enough that it'd get used even if it didn't work out as a stir-fry ingredient (works well when mixed with ginger ale).

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Oh hey, I do have cranberry-raspberry juice, so that could work out. I just have been reluctant to use it because I very rarely drink juice-- so rarely that the last time I drank some, when I came back later, I found mold colonies floating in the juice. Much, much later. I was not aware this could happen. D: