fried rice

Everyone loves Chinese take-out. I am no exception to this, but I don’t have the money for Chinese take-out right now. Thankfully, most recipes are rather easy, especially fried rice. All you have to do is throw some leftover rice in a pan with some oil, add whatever frozen veggies you like, soy sauce, and an egg and you’re done! If you wanna get even fancier, you can also add meat. In the past, we’ve added meats like char-siu pork and different Chinese sausages. Tonight we were going to add chicken since Luke had started defrosting chicken thighs, but I wanted to mix it up a little so I looked up a recipe for sweet and sour chicken. We also had a pineapple, so that aided in the idea.

This was the first recipe that came up on Google when I searched “sweet and sour chicken”: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/sweet-and-sour-chicken-recipe-1957986.

I can post it this time because this time, I basically followed it. The things we changed were that we had no bell peppers, we used chicken thighs instead of breasts, we used fresh pineapple, and because it was fresh pineapple, we had no pineapple juice so we subbed in limeade that we had in the fridge. We also floured the chicken before frying it because it added a bit more depth to the dish.

It came out spectacularly. The only thing that we probably could have improved upon was that I think I didn’t cook the cornstarch long enough because I left the heat up too high so it reduced too quickly. However, the pineapple was super warm and tender, the sauce was sweet and sour, and the chicken was crispy and delicious. It all went really well with the rice too, which had corn and green beans in it.

The best part of it all, we have leftovers. I love leftovers. Who has Chinese take-out and doesn’t have leftovers?