Mongolian Chicken.

I “pinned” a recipe a while back on Pinterest that I thought looked pretty scrumptious. Saturday, having a 3 day weekend, I was feeling ambitious and decided to try out a new recipe. The original recipe {found here}, from “Favorite Family Recipes” blog, is for Mongolian Beef similar to P. F. Chang’s, but I’m not a big beef lover, plus we didn’t have any of this type of beef on hand, so I decided to try it with chicken instead. I also realized that it was for a large amount of food. I only wanted to use 2 large chicken breasts, so I decided to try cutting the recipe in half. This worked pretty well. We had enough sauce for probably 4 chicken breasts, but we ended up saving the sauce and making more rice the next day as our lunch.

Here’s my halved version of the recipe:

Mongolian Chicken

2 tsp. vegetable oil
1 tsp. ginger, minced {I used powdered because that’s what I had on hand
1 Tbsp. garlic, minced
1/2 c. soy sauce
1/2 c. water
1/2 c. brown sugar {packed}
1 c. vegetable oil
2-4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1/4 c. cornstarch {I used flour b/c, again, that’s what I had}
3 large green onions {I didn’t use any}

I basically followed the original recipe’s instructions to the “t.” {See the original source here” http://www.favfamilyrecipes.com/2008/01/mongolian-beef.html}

Make the sauce by heating vegetable oil in a medium saucepan over medium/low heat. Don’t get the oil too hot. Add ginger and garlic to the pan and quickly add the soy sauce and water before the garlic scorches.

Dissolve the brown sugar in the sauce, then raise the heat to medium and boil the sauce 2-3 minutes or until sauce thickens a little bit. Remove sauce from heat.

Slice the chicken into small cubes or slivers. Add your flour or cornstarch so the slivers are fully covered & let them sit for about 10 minutes so the cornstarch/flour sticks.

As the chicken sits, heat up 1/2 c. oil in a wok (or skillet). Heat the oil over medium heat until its hot, but not smoking. Add the meat to the oil and sauté, and stir the meat around a little bit so that it cooks evenly.

Once the chicken’s fully cooked, use a large slotted spoon to take the meat out and onto paper towels, then pour most of the oil out of the skillet. Put the pan back over the heat, dump the meat back into it and stir-fry for 1 minute. Add the sauce, cook for 1 minute while stirring and add green onions {I didn’t do this part}. Cook for 1 more minute.

Now at this point you can either remove the beef with a slotted spoon or tongs and discard the sauce OR thicken the sauce with a cornstarch-water mixture to desired thickness and serve it over rice with the beef. I just added some flour and simmered it until it thickend up more like a gravy consistency. YUM!

It was so good. I was afraid that the garlic would be too much, but it really wasn’t overpowering. So delish. It would be good with pineapple and cashews, maybe even some carrots too. I think I’ll try out some variety for next time! Seriously, so good.