Simple Chicken Stir Fry

Artist's rendition: me scavenging for food after refusing to
leave the house for a week

The dreaded Holiday Season has almost passed us by. You can see the signs of it everywhere. In the songs being played on the radio. In the fact that strangers on the street are giving up their smiles and kind words for the more traditional scowls and refusal to make eye contact. And of course in the increasingly unhinged advertisements bombarding us, begging us to take advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime deals from Target-mart & Beyond-Buy. Deals so insane that they're seriously considering slapping whoever printed them. With savings so unbelievable they'll make you completely forget about last week's unbeatable once-in-a-lifetime deals. It's truly a magical season. It's a perfect time to take stock of the year and assess the ways in which your various loved ones and major appliances have let you down. And to not leave the house because the stores are clogged with shoppers who have been lured in by advertisers' promises of savings and the return of their loved ones. So you'll have to make the most of what you've got around the house when it comes to sustenance. And nothing makes the most of random kitchen leavings like a stir-fry.


Ingredients:

3 Boneless Chicken Breasts
10 oz. Mushrooms (I used cremini, as that's what I had lying around. Whatever mushrooms you have will be fine, provided that you bought them, and didn't inadvertently grow them yourself.)
2 Carrots
2 Bell Peppers
1 standard-issue Onion
1 bunch Green Onions
1 can Baby Corn (It's funny how those animal rights activists who complain about veal never take issue with baby corn. I guess they're just hypocrites)
2 tsp grated Ginger
2 cloves Garlic
2 tsp Soy Sauce
2 tsp Rice Wine Vinegar
juice from 1/2 a Lime (As always, if you don't have half a lime lying around, find a whole lime, cut it in half, and maybe start wearing a helmet)
2 tsp Sriracha
2 cups Brown Rice
3 cups Water
Salt
Oil for sauteing 

Yes, I know, this recipe has somewhat of a longer ingredient list that what you may be used to cooking. Even more so once you realize that bread isn't really an ingredient of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich per se. But trust me, it's much easier to make than it looks. And what else are you gonna do? Go outside? I thought so. Now that you've come to grips with your fate, it's time to get started. Your rice is going to take a bit to cook, so get that started first. That way you can do everything else while you're waiting for rice to happen. Throw it in a pot along with your water and a pinch of salt, and bring it to a boil. Cover the pot and bring it down to medium heat for 20 minutes, or until all of the water is absorbed, and the rice is fluffy and delicious instead of sad and crunchy. Got it? Good. Now go choppity chop chop your  mushrooms, carrots, bell peppers, baby corn, regular onion, green onions, and chicken. You want each of these to be about bite size, and to be the same size as each other, like Tom Cruise's stunt doubles. Take a pan (I used a wok, because I'm apparently that cool. If you have one and know how to use it effectively, go nuts. Otherwise, any large saute pan should work fine), heat up some oil over medium-high heat, and then toss in your carrots and regular onion along with a gentleman's pinch of salt. Cook that down for about 3 minutes, stirring occasionally, before adding in your green peppers, mushrooms, and another pinch of salt. Let that mess cook down for another 2 minutes before adding in your garlic, ginger, and baby corn.

Not pictured: me comatose on the couch 20
minutes after eating this

Now it's time to test your skill and mettle. After about a minute of cooking, it's time to cook your chicken. If you have the will of the warrior, you can push your cooked vegetables up against the side of your pan, leaving exposed metal at the bottom to cook your chicken. Otherwise, you can take your vegetables out before adding your chicken in. You know, like a failure. No matter what horrible truths you discover about yourself, cook your pieces of chicken for about 3-5 minutes (depending on how large your cut your chicken pieces because I'm not legally recognized as psychic in the 48 contiguous United States), stirring occasionally, before adding your cooked vegetables back in to the mix along with your green onions, soy sauce, vinegar, and sriracha. Let the whole thing cook down for another couple of minutes while the flavors all blend together into deliciousness. Turn off the heat, and then stir in your lime juice. Then it's time to load up your plate with rice, smother it in your chicken and vegetable goodness, and enjoy a flavor so good that you might entirely forget the grim truth that you'll have to leave your house some day. You know, when you run out of peanut butter.

Vegetable Fried Rice

Exports of the Riceland include rice, brown rice, and meth

There comes a time in every man's life when he must eschew the brightly colored fried blobs of inauthentic deliciousness sold to him by American Chinese restaurants, and seek out something more legit. Something more culturally relevant. Surprisingly enough, that turns out to be fried rice (the existential journey's over and you didn't even have to leave the restaurant. You're welcome) Apparently, despite the fact that it seems custom-made for US restaurants, fried rice goes back pretty much forever in China. Like any respectable cultural dish, it developed as a way to force a family to eat the leftovers that are just lying around. They say that necessity is the mother of invention. That seems about right. When you've got a whiny family breathing down your neck for food, for the third time this week, and all you've got in the fridge (or...root cellar, or whatever they had back in ancient China. Probably not fridge.) are some scraps of random vegetables, and leftover rice, you'll get to inventing pretty quickly. That's how fried rice, and probably also the wheel, justified homicide, and divorce attorneys, were created.

Ingredients:

3 cup Water
1.5 cups uncooked Rice (You're gonna want something in a long-grain rice for this. Short grain rices are good for things like risotto, where you need a lot of starches released into the dish to hold everything together. That's not what we're doing, so keep that mess away from fried rice.)
2 Eggs
12 oz. frozen Peas and Carrots 
1 standard-issue Onion
1 Red Bell Pepper
1 bunch Green Onions (The part of "scallions" will be played by "green onions" today. The two terms are completely interchangeable, but when I say "scallions" I get angry hand-written letters from my mom telling me I'm a disappointment.)
1 TBSP Canola Oil
3 tsp Soy Sauce
1 tsp ground Ginger
1 tsp Toasted Sesame Oil
Salt


The first thing you're gonna need to do is make your rice. Unless you like sad and crunchy fried rice that gets stuck between your teeth, which makes you a laughing stock at the winter formal. Again. So take your rice, shove it into a pot along with water your water, ginger, an average-sized human's pinch o' salt, and 1 tsp of your soy sauce. Let those guys swim together and really get to know each other. An awesome icebreaker is fire, so bring that pot to a boil, cover it with a lid so that nobody escapes, and simmer it for 15 minutes. Turn off the fire, uncover the pot, and stir that nonsense around with a fork to help keep it from forming a massive, dense clump of rice and sadness. That's the rice part down. Now we just need to work on the fried part.

Slice your onion, and toss it in a large sauté pan (or a wok, if you've got the disposable income to buy things like woks) over medium-high heat, along with your canola oil and an average pinch of salt. Cook that mess for about 5 minutes before adding in your peas and carrots (pro-tip: defrost the peas and carrots first to have your dish turn out more "delicious," with even fewer "needless expensive dental bills"). Cook those together for another couple minutes, when the peas and carrots are heated through, and the smell coming off of your pan starts getting aggressive with your nose.

Chopsticks added because I'm apparently fancy.

Use this time to thinly slice your red pepper into little strips. Add your dainty red pepper strips into the business end of your pan along with another pinch of salt, and cook them for another minute. Then form an empty well in the middle of the pan, beat your eggs so they won't try to escape, and throw them in to the well (I had a joke about throwing a sack of adorable kittens down a well but I decided it was in bad taste. And now I'm struggling to not make a joke about cats being "in bad taste" in traditional Chinese cooking. You're welcome, political correctness enthusiasts). Stir the bejeezus out of the eggs so that you end up with small, evenly cooked egg bits, instead of a big dumb egg-patty that's burnt on the bottom. Chop and stir in your green onions, and then unceremoniously plop your rice down on top of your vegetables and eggs. Add in your sesame oil and the rest of your soy sauce, and stir that sucker up. Let it cook for a couple minutes, stirring regularly, to let all the flavors really get in each other's business, and that's it! A big steaming pile of vaguely-authentic deliciousness! Get some friends together and gobble it down on it's own, or pair it with some of the other authentic Chinese dishes you prepared, like your famous "Number 87 with extra sauce."

Scallion Pancakes

Note: Actual recipe may included no blueberries or cardboard

If you're anything like me, you hate paying too much for restaurant food that you can make better yourself. Also, you once carved "I messed with Texas" into a table at a rest stop...in Texas. The point is, sometimes, restaurant disappointment can be kind of like inspiration. You may have been served cardboard with a ketchup and sadness emulsion, but you ordered that crap because it was supposed to be awesome. Which brings me back to scallion pancakes, because they can be great. But more often than not, when I have them in restaurants, I end up more disappointed than 1990s Nicolas Cage having a vision of his future. So I'm taking what I wanted them to be, figuring it out, and making them myself. And that my friend, is the true meaning of Christmas.

Ingredients:

1 Cup All Purpose Flour
1/2 Cup of Hot Water
8 Green Onions/Scallions/Spring Onions/etc. (Apparently, green onions have a stupid number of regional names, and no region wants to give theirs up so we can all call them the same damn thing. Probably because of Onion Politics,  with it's lobbying efforts, corruption, and stubborn stupidity. You know, like regular politics, just more delicious)
1 TBSP Vegetable Oil
1 tsp Toasted Sesame Oil
1 tsp Salt
More flour
More Salt

More Ingredients! For a dipping Sauce, which is kind of superfluous, and therefore optional!

2 TBSP Rice Wine Vinegar
2 TBSP Soy Sauce
1 TBSP Sriracha (The concept of a dipping sauce with these is really an American development, so using an American hot sauce that's designed to taste eastern-ish felt...appropriate)
1 TBSP Sugar
2 Green Onions
2 tsp Crushed Ginger
1 tsp Toasted Sesame Oil
1 Clove of Garlic, crushed

Woo! Sooooo many ingredients. But most of them are for the sauce, which takes like 25 seconds to make, so we'll ignore them for now. Take your flour and sift it in a bowl along with your Salt, using a sifter, a fork, knives, a whisk, or fear itself. You just want to break up the clumps, and aerate it a little bit. Then slowly add in your water, stirring as you go. You may not end up using all of your flour. You want the dough to just barely come together, but there shouldn't be any leftover flour sitting around, looking for a dance partner, striking out, and bringing the whole party down. Cover the whole thing with a moist towel, and let it sit for about 45 minutes. You can use this time to chop your Green Onions into itty bits! You're on your own for the other 44 minutes. Once the time has passed, cover a cutting board, counter, or other flat surface with flour, knowing deep in your heart that you'll never truly be able to get it clean again. Plop half of your dough onto your floured surface, sprinkle the top of it with flour, and knead the crap out of it for 5-10 minutes. If it still feels sticky, knead in more flour. Once you've done all the kneading that your dough needed (Puns!), roll it out as thinly as you can. Take half of your Toasted Sesame Oil, and smear it on the dough, and then evenly throw on half of your chopped Scallions.

Now comes the complicated bit. Take an edge of your flattened onion dough, and start rolling it up on top of itself, until your have a tube of dough. It should look kind of like everything you ever made out of Play-Doh as a kid. Then take that dough tube, and wrap it in a spiral around itself. Then roll it out again, this time about 1/4 of an inch thick. Got that? Because I'm not sure I do. Seriously though, roll up your dough into a dough snake, then make a dough spiral our of your snake, and then roll it flat again. It's not as bad as it sounds. If you can't figure it out, just fold your dough in half a couple times and then roll it out again. It's won't be as layered and flaky, but at least you won't be standing terrified in your kitchen, afraid to move for fear that I'll jump out of your computer and mock you (Which has only happened once, that I know of). Throw your Vegetable Oil into a pan on medium heat, lay in your fledgling pancake, and fry it for about 3 minutes on each side, until it's brown, crispy, and awesome. Put it on a plate lined with paper towels to drain, and immediately sprinkle it with an average human sized pinch of Salt. Then repeat this entire stupid process again with the rest of your flour, Oil, Scallions, and whatnot, while trying not to weep.

Like all fried foods, it's best eaten as soon as possible,
in one sitting, while stubbornly refusing to share

Once you're done weeping, it's time to think about the sauce. This type of food is served as a street food in places like China, and doesn't have a sauce. And it tastes awesome on its own. But in American restaurants, a dipping sauce usually comes with. So, for thoroughness and awesomeness, we're making one too. And it's pretty complicated too. Are you ready? Chop your Green Onions. Crush your Ginger and Garlic. Add them into a bowl with the rest of the ingredients. Stir. Feel free to read this paragraph as many times as you need to to get that down. And there you have it! Delicious, flaky, crispy, delicious bits of reverse-engineered awesomeness that you can take back to that original restaurant that wronged you and rub their dumb faces in it. Not literally. Probably.