Kung Pao Goodness

The Penteks enjoy a little taste of China!

Last night, Mike and I were having an ever so famous conversation in our house... what do you want for dinner tomorrow night? Now, usually we would settle for making dinner on our own, but I remembered my goal and channeled my inner chef. I glanced in the fridge to see what we had to work with then marched over to our cookbook shelf (we do actually have one, and it has more than one book!) for some inspiration.

I pulled this off the shelf...

I actually got this book from our school book fair!

I paged through and found a recipe for Kung Pao Chicken and decided to go for it!  I had to laugh, though, when I looked at the ingredients. This book has the words... from scratch, in the title and I don't know about you but I do not have Asian sesame oil or sherry in my cupboard at any given time! This may give away my green-ness in the kitchen but its true, I did not have these items on hand for a from scratch meal.

All in all, I think it turned out well. I think I made a rookie mistake when I mixed the ingredients for the sauce. For future reference, and for those such as myself who have little to no idea how to blend ingredients, if a recipe calls for corn starch in a mixture of other liquids, sprinkle in the corn starch last! I put it in first and ended up with corn starch lumps, mmmmm! I did my best to mix it and once it hit the heat it simmered away quite nicely. Oh, and if you live in a super safe apartment building with hyper-sensitive smoke alarms... disconnect them before making stir fries. Tonight, Mike was lucky enough to play the role of towel fanner underneath the smoke alarm, a role we are both familiar with =).