Vegetable & Chicken Stir Fry

Hey! That's not soup.

The Ministry of Soup is on the road this week as I'm in Florida visiting family. Bulls Head Friends will do without soup this week, but my family will benefit from my cooking. It's odd to cook in my mom's kitchen because I don't have my usual ingredients at hand and that's means even more improvisation than usual. I'm also cooking for a different audience this time, so I'm not under the usual dietary restrictions.

I started this dish by cutting up some boneless skinless chicken breast and putting the pieces into a bowl along with some soy sauce, chopped garlic, sesame oil and a bit of cornstarch. I set this aside and let the flavors mingle while I prepared the veggies.

I chopped up a couple of inches of fresh ginger and some more garlic. I cut a bunch of green onions into 1 inch pieces, a red bell pepper into strips, a bunch of mushrooms into chunks, and trimmed the ends off a couple of baby bok choy. I rinsed and drained some snow peas and mung bean sprouts.

Because my mom's kitchen is so much bigger than mine, I went a little crazy and cooked in 2 pans at the same time. In the first pan, I heated a bit of oil and then stir fried the garlic and ginger for about 1 minute, then the chicken went in. When the chicken was nearly cooked, I added the mushrooms.

In the second pan, I also heated a bit of oil, then added the veggies in this order, stir-frying each for a minute or so before adding the next: green onions, bell pepper, bok choy, snow peas, and mung bean sprouts. At this point Mom (Carole Seibert) came in and took over stirring this pan while I finished off the other pan.

While the chicken was finishing, I mixed some more soy sauce with a bit of white wine, some sesame oil and corn starch. All the liquids were cool to make it easier to mix the corn starch without it lumping. I stirred this liquid into the chicken & mushrooms and it quickly thickened too much, so I added a little water until the chicken was coated in a nice gravy-like sauce.

To finished, I dumped everything in the veggie pan into the chicken pan and made a big mess as I mixed it all together. We ate it over brown rice.

This dish is very simple and mild. At home I would have added fermented black beans, hot red peppers, and probably some other strange condiments from my fridge - but for Dot Cesky, my 97 year grandmother this was adventurous enough.