Easy chicken, veggies and rice asian style

…a stir-fry wanna be

Chicken is the most versatile ingredient that you can buy. You can find it in a lot of supermarkets and at the same time it tends to be very cheap. Now I know that a lot of you do not want to deal with cooking or baking a whole chicken, so today we will focus only on one of the key protein providers on the planet: the chicken breast.

Starting from scratch in a kitchenette tends to be a little tedious. I am not a big fan of pan-fried chicken breast with just salt and pepper so you can easily understand my pickle. The idea of this post came after I ordered some sushi for dinner. It came with a bunch of soy sauce packets and I actually wanted to use them instead of just throwing them away. So I bought a chicken breast and some veggies and used the soy sauce as an additional element to introduce a fun Asian element.

The general rules for this to work are fairly straightforward. First and foremost, cut everything in small pieces. Make sure that the chicken is cut in even stripes so it cooks evenly. Take care that some veggies need less cooking time than the others and also make sure to marinate everything abundantly. The best thing to do after you have cooked this dish is to make some simple rice and combine it with it. 

ingredients

• 1 chicken breast cut in thin strips
• 1/2 of an onion cut in strips
• Some broccoli (boil it for 5 minutes and its done)
• carrot strips (now carrots are hard to cut with a knife. If would highly advise against it. Use them only if you have some sort of vegetable peeler)
• Baby squash cut in thin strips.
• Salt and pepper
• Soy sauce packets because we are cheap

steps to happiness

1. Marinate the chicken. Salt, pepper, some olive oil, and a little soy sauce. Miks them all together and let them be for a couple of minutes.
2. Heat up a pan. throw the chicken in and fry them 2 minutes on each side. Please make sure not to overcrowd the pan and at the same time if your strips are a little thick, leave them for 3 minutes.
3. Once the chicken is done, remove them and leave them aside. Now it is time to fry up the veggies. Make sure to marinate them first with salt and pepper. Frying veggies without salt and pepper is horrible – you end up with tasteless cardboard…
4. We do them one by one as their cooking time is not equal. Start with the squash. Give it a quick fry in high heat with olive oil. Remove it, add the onions and let the sweat, add the carrots, the cooked broccoli, then re-add the squash. the chicken and give a quick fry.
5. At this point, it would be great to add some more taste – but we do this by following the golden rule of cooking: YOU TASTE IT FIRST. After the test, if you see that it needs some more soy, add some…maybe you want it a little spicy…add something to get it done.
6. Remove it from the pan and make sure to eat it immediately.

Depending on how this plate comes out for you, you can integrate some sort of additions to the dish. Eating it as is, works – but adding some very easy rice on the side works as well. To answer your question though on “Depending on how this plate comes out for you” – I do not believe in strict cooking and my recipes are very very simple so you can adjust them as you go along. Easy breezy lemon squeezy!