Yeah, yeah, yeah...I haven't posted in awhile. That's my life. Real quickly, though, I wanted to get this post on here before I forgot. It's actually a review of a new recipe I tried out tonight. It turned out really good, but I think it needs a little more tweaking. It's one I pinned on Pinterest. Funny, it seems that most of the recipes I've tried out on Pinterest are very good, but need a bit of work. It's definitely great for getting new ideas. It's helped me out when I'm in a real cooking rut.So, this one is a homemade sweet and sour chicken. Here's the link: Sweet and Sour Chicken
Everything's great, until you get to the sauce. That's when things can get tricky. 3/4 cups of sugar seems a bit much (especially if you double the recipe, which I did, since I like to cook the chicken in the sauce and pour the sauce over the rice, veggies, etc). Doubling the sauce recipe would call for way too much sugar. Also, I felt that there was too much apple cider vinegar called for, as well as catsup. I'd decrease both of those a bit. Especially the vinegar. Here's the gist of what I did differently:
- I fried the chicken in coconut oil instead of canola. Grapeseed oil would have been nice as well.
- mixed up the sauce, decreasing the sugar called for and adding a can of chunked pineapple, juice and all to help sweeten it. I also threw in some agave nectar. Next time, I'll further decrease the sugar.
- I heated the sauce on the stovetop, dished out a small amount of sauce into a small bowl to mix up with cornstarch to make a thick paste, and poured it all back into the simmering sauce. I let it simmer a bit to reduce and thicken. Then I poured some sauce over the chicken before popping the chicken into the oven.
- While the chicken baked (which I baked for more like 30 minutes instead of an hour), I cooked up a bag of frozen TJ's stir fry veggies. Instead of using the prepackaged frozen sauce packet that came with the veggies I poured in a little of the sweet and sour sauce.
- Plated the whole thing up...brown rice, veggies on top with more sauce to soak into the rice and then the chicken placed around everything else.
All that being said, it really was a great dish. I was impressed with how good it was. Using organic chicken and brown rice made me feel so much better about eating a dish like this.
Oh, and if you're wondering...I stopped following the Weight Watchers plan officially over the summer. I really think it taught me how to eat, and I've been able to maintain the same weight now for 3 months. I'm happy with the results and I know if I ever need to start it back up again, it's always there.
