Orange chicken

This isn't my photo. My orange chicken vanished in a single meal and not a scrap was left. But it looked exactly like the Panda Express kind, so I lifted the photo off their site. :-)

I was pondering dinner last night. I had some chicken thawed to make into stir fry, but I'm kind of tired of our same old stir fry recipes that I make all the time. And I'm out of soy sauce. So I asked Ryan, "Doesn't Panda Express sell those bottles of their sauce?"

He's very partial to their orange chicken, so he whisked out and bought me a bottle.

While he was gone, I diced up my chicken, soaked it in beaten egg, and dredged it in flour. It was four boneless thighs-worth, and it made a lot of floured chicken. "The kids won't eat this," I thought to myself. "Holly might, but Alex never eats anything. This will be enough."

So I poured oil in my iron skillet and got to fryin'. I don't fry much food, nor do I like it much, but I was thrilled with how the nuggets got all brown and crispy, just like the Panda kind. It made a whole big bowlful of nuggets. I tossed them onto a plate with a paper towel to drain, then from there into a skillet on another burner on Low to keep warm.

Then you just warm up about 1/2 a cup of the panda sauce in the microwave, dump it on your chicken, and toss to coat. This was easily done. I mixed mine with diced carrots, because I don't feel it's a proper stir-fry without some kind of veggie. We ate it on top of Asian noodles.

And even Alex went back for seconds and thirds. I was astonished and the orange chicken was gone in minutes.

The recipe on the Panda website just calls for frozen Popcorn Chicken, and that would probably speed this up quite a lot. Frying jillions of little chicken nuggets takes aaaaaaages and you get popped with oil a lot. Or, I did. But man, if you have four bucks lying around, go get a bottle of their Orange Chicken sauce. I can't want to try it with other kinds of stir fry.