Stir-Fried Chicken

We keep hearing that it's easy to prepare stir-fry dishes. You just keeping stirring the ingredients until they're cooked,... supposedly.

The thing is, what do we use to flavor the dishes ?

My mom sent me a Chinese cookbook - it's more of a pamphlet, really - and this gave us a starting point in terms of the sauce.

For this chicken-stir fry dish, we used the following:

Skinless & boneless chicken thighs, cut into strips
1 head of broccoli florets (did not know that the stem is edible so I threw it away, argh!)
1 carrot, sliced
quail eggs
2 cloves garlic
1 tsp grated ginger

sauce:
2 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tbsp lite soy sauce
1 tsp cornstarch, dissolved in 2 tbsp water
1 tsp sugar

1. Blanch the vegetables - broccoli and carrots.
2. In a wok, saute the garlic and the ginger in hot oil.
3. Add the chicken and stir around until chicken in cooked.
4. Pour in the sauce and then add the vegetables and the quail eggs.
5. Let the sauce boil and thicken.
6. Serve

Sweet and Sour Chicken

Hubby and I, avid meat-eaters, have been making an effort to try to eat healthier. We are now trying to incorporate more chicken into our meals to replace beef and pork. We're still a long way off from being totally healthy and I won't even dare suggest that we become vegetarians, but this is a start.

So we've been buying chicken during our weekly grocery trips and we are fast running out of options for preparing chicken. So I turned to the net and my favorite cooking site, Pinoycook.net, and
I found a recipe for Sweet and Sour Chicken Fillets.

We tried the recipe and the dish turned out good on our first try except that it was too sweet for our taste. We have since revised the recipe to suit our tastes and to make use of the ingredients that we have in our kitchen and this is the result.

1.5 lbs Boneless & skinless chicken thighs, cut into strips
seasoned salt
flour (for dredging the chicken)
cooking oil (for deep frying the chicken)
1 tsp minced garlic
1 tsp minced ginger (we grated this instead)
1 small bell pepper, sliced
1 small onion, sliced
1 small carrot, sliced
1 cup water
1/8 cup vinegar
1/4 cup - 2 tbsp sugar (subtracted 2 tbsp sugar from the original recipe)
salt & pepper to taste
2 tbsp tmato paste
1 tsp cornstarch
1/2 tsp sesame oil
pineapple chunks (new addition)
toasted sesame seeds (new addition)

1. Season chicken strips with seasoned salt and then dredge in flour.
2. Deep fry the chicken till golden brown, drain on paper towels and set aside.
3. Saute garlic & ginger. Add the vegetables and stir fry over high heat for around 45 seconds.
4. Stir together water, tomato paste, vinegar, salt, pepper, sugar and cornstarch.
5. Return chicken to the skillet or wok and pour in the sauce. Stir till sauce thickens and clears.
6. Add the pineapple chunks and stir around to coat the pineapple with sauce. (Note that by adding the pineapple chunks at this stage, it probably didn't lend a lot of flavor to the dish. We like it this way).
7. Turn off the heat and drizzle with sesame oil just before serving.
8. Top with toasted sesame seeds.

This is good for 4 to 5 servings.

Carrot Cake

I got this recipe from my Aunt in California when I visited last June. She was on a carrot cake cooking binge and would cook different batches (she'd be giving most of the cakes away) while she experimented and looked for the best recipe & combination.


Dad isn't too fond of eating sweets but he liked the frosting on this one.

When I got home, I decided to try this out and see if I got the recipe right. This turned out good but yielded a lot of cakes! I will halve the recipe next time I do this so we don't get stuck with carrot cake for several weeks.


I have to give a word of warning to first timers though, shredding carrots is a hard job! My arms were so sore afterwards.


CAKE:
3 cups all purpose flour
2 cups sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
2 cups shredded carrots
1 cup crushed pineapple
1 tbsp vanilla extract
4 eggs
1/2 cup cooking oil


ICING:
1/3 cup cream cheese
2 cups powdered sugar
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp milk
1/2 cup chopped cashews

1. Sift the flour, sugar, salt, baking soda and baking powder.
2. Add eggs, cooking oil and beat for 5 minutes.
3. Grease 13x9 in pan and bake at 350 degrees for 30 to 35 minutes. Stick a toothpick and pull it out, if nothing sticks to the toothpick, your cake is done.