Savory Adventures: Sometimes I Also Cook Dinners!

In my previous post, I mentioned I've been toiling away in the kitchen making fancier-than-usual dinners. The first was a recipe from Ree Drummond's The Pioneer Woman Cooks website: her at-home rendition of orange chicken. We just happened to have some chicken thighs in the freezer, and also happened to have OJ in the fridge, so it was kismet.

The recipe was easy and came together quickly. The only thing I did differently was that I didn't deep fry the chicken. I still coated them in cornstarch and egg whites as prescribed, but I then simply pan fried them in a thin layer of oil rather that dropping them into a few inches of very hot oil. I'm still too nervous to deal with a pot of hot hot hot oil. Someday, but not this day. I did, however, double-fry the chicken pieces just as the recipe requests. The only difference was a slightly less crunchy finish to the chicken, but that was all. It was absolutely delicious!

Things start out by soaking cut-up chicken thighs in whipped egg whites and some corn starch. While that's sitting, you make the very easy and very delicious sauce in a non-stick pan. Ree wisely points out that since the sauce is sticky, you want to use a nonstick pan so the only thing it glues itself to is the chicken!

The sauce is made of OJ, corn starch, water, and spices. You just cook it down for a few minutes, then add corn starch whipped with a little water to thicken it. While that was working, I was cooking the chicken on another burner. I heated some oil and dropped in about half of the chicken pieces (I didn't want them to stick together and make a big old clump). Once everything had been fried up once, I dropped them in again (again, in two batches), to get a slightly crispier finish on the battering. From there, I simply dropped them into the sauces and mixed it around to coat.

Ree's recipe makes enough for 4 servings--using 4 thighs--but since we only had two thighs, I simply halved the recipe (which was really simple to do--halving it didn't leave me with any bizarro measurements like 1/16 tsp or anything like that!).

John picked up ginger beer because he thought the spice (while Mexican/Jamaican and not Asian) would play nicely with the spices and flavors happening in the meal. He was right, but it had too big a bite for me to drink more than half.

This was fun and simple, and I will definitely incorporate this into our usual dinner rotation. Chicken thighs are typically cheaper cuts of meat, so it'll be an excuse to buy them and actually enjoy eating what is decidedly not my favorite part of the chicken.