Kung Po Chicken is a favourite of mine at local Chinese Restaurants, So I thought I would give cooking it a go.

This recipe tastes fantastic, and depending on your prefereneces you could make more sauce to make it more like the restaurant version than it's Chinese counterpart.

Prep time: 30mins
Cooking Time: 15mins

You Will Need:
4 Chicken Breasts (500g)
4 Tbsp Cornflour
2 spring onions
1 red pepper
1 Tomato
2 red chillies
4 garlic cloves
3 slices of ginger
Handful of Cashew nuts

For Marinade:
2 Tbsp Rice Wine Vinegar
2 Tbsp Light Soy Sauce
½ Tbsp Sesame oil
Pinch of black pepper

For Kung Po Sauce:
4 Tbsp Soy Sauce
4 Tbsp Rice vinegar
2 Tbsp Brown sugar
1 Tbsp Plum Sauce
1 tbsp Hoisin sauce

1. Prepare the marinade for the Chicken; Mix the soy sauce, rice vinegar and sesame oil with a pinch of black pepper. It does not look like much but will cover the chicken. Cut the chicken into large bite-sized pieces and place in the marinade.

2. Leave the chicken in the fridge to marinate for 25 minutes whilst preparing vegetables, garlic, ginger and chillies.


3. Now is a good time to wash off the excess starch from the rice. This will prevent it from making a sticky mess. Put the rice in a deep bowl, and in your sink, run cold tap water over it. Once the bowl is full of water, use your fingers to swish the rice around. The water will start getting murky. Now gently pour this water out. Repeat this process till the water is mostly clear. This will take at least 4-5 washes. Now fill it up one last time. Don't wash the rice again. Just leave it in there, covered with water, for about 20 minutes or so, so you can put the rice in to start cooking as you start to fry the chicken.



4. Combine chicken and cornstarch in the marinade bowl and toss to coat. Heat sesame oil in wok over medium heat.

5. Add the rice now to a pan (for steamed rice, make sure it is a flat based pan and you have a tight lid) of boiling water, one and a half times the quantity of the dry rice. (1 cup rice, 1 and a half water.) Resist the urge to lift the lid and peek at the rice. Let it cook for 15 minutes on a low setting, and when ready leave to stand for 5 minutes with the lid on before serving. This should be enough time to complete the rest of the meal.

6. Add chicken to the wok and stir-fry 5-7 minutes or until no longer pink inside. Remove chicken from wok and leave in a bowl ready for later.



7. Add green onions, garlic, tomato, red pepper, garlic and sliced ginger to the wok and stir fry for 45 seconds.


8. Combine vinegar, soy sauce, hoisin sauce, plum sauce and brown sugar in a small bowl. Mix well and add your Kung Po sauce to the wok.

9. Return chicken to the wok and coat with sauce. Stir in roasted peanuts. Heat thoroughly. Serve.




Serving suggestion:

Serve with Steamed Rice in a bowl, or let everyone share from the middle of the table.

Serve with additional spring onions on top.



Enjoy your Kung Po Chicken and Rice.

Recipe Adapted from: BlogChef

Having had to experiment and explore Chinese grammar today, with the help of a couple of my friends on twitter, I learnt the way to incorperate colours into sentences. First of all though lets go through a couple of the basic colours. Each colour ends with 色 sè

白色 (báisè) White
黑色 (hēisè) Black

红色 (hóngsè) Red
黄色 (huángsè) Yellow
蓝色 (lánsè) Blue

绿色 (lǜsè) Green
紫色 (zǐsè) Purple
橙色 (chéngsè) Orange


Colours are descriptive of an object and when used as a description you put the suffix 的 de following the colour. This makes it clear that you are talking about the preceeding object being that colour. If you are just saying that something generic is a colour you need not place 的 (de) at the end of the colour. But if it is in reference to something specific then 的 de is required.








Hopefully this gives you a starting grasp of colours and how they are used within Mandarin sentences. I have only just learnt this today, and am glad to share it with you.


Charlie



* 中华人民共和国 (Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó) actually means The People's Republic of China.

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