Oriental chicken – Redneck cooking

Looking for a quick chicken dish for dinner? This is recipe is a quick, filling, and tasty meal that your whole family will enjoy.

In my continuing quest to discover the ingredients for the Mandarin sauce on my favorite Chinese food restaurant’s Mandarin Chicken, I came across this rather tasty number in the back of my recipe box.

I have a vast array of recipes my Mom collected over the years of her life. It’s fun looking through these old recipes because many are very old and have been handed down from generation to generation. Some of them are handwritten and some were cut from the back of a box of some cooking ingredient. This particular recipe has no other information so I don’t know where it came from. I was somewhat surprised to find this recipe because Mom never cooked anything like this that I can remember.

How many of you out there have a card file full of these old recipes from a relative sitting in a cupboard somewhere? What condition are they in? I have a few that are only partially there now so it will be a lot of work to try and figure out what the ingredients are and the amounts to use that are missing either from something spilled on them or part of another recipe card sticking to it. I am working on creating a database to store all of my recipes to keep them from being destroyed, and I am also scanning some of the older ones to save digital images of the markings added to them. I hope that you’re also doing what you can to preserve the history of your old recipes too.

Oriental Chicken

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Ingredients:

2 pounds skinless, boneless chicken breast halves – cut into bite-size pieces
1/4 cup cornstarch
2 eggs
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup vegetable oil
4 teaspoons sesame oil
2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger root
1/2 cup chopped green onion
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup distilled white vinegar
1/2 cup white sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1/4 cup ketchup

Directions

Coat the chicken pieces with 1/4 cup of cornstarch; set aside.

Beat the eggs, salt, and pepper in a mixing bowl until smooth. Stir in the flour and baking powder until no large lumps remain. Mix in the chicken until evenly coated.

Heat the vegetable oil in a wok or large skillet over high heat. Drop in the chicken pieces; cook until golden brown and no longer pink on the inside, about 12 minutes. Set the chicken aside; keep warm.

Reduce the heat to medium-high and stir in the sesame oil, ginger, and green onion. Cook and stir until the onion is limp and the ginger begins to brown, about 1 minute. Pour in the water, vinegar, and sugar; bring to a boil. Dissolve the cornstarch in the soy sauce and add to the simmering vinegar along with the ketchup. Stir until the sauce has thickened and is no longer cloudy. Stir in the chicken and simmer until hot.

I like to serve this over pasta, but rice would work just as well. Add some fresh vegetables on the side and you have a filling meal that is fairly light.