The tandem post will be up later this week!

A few weeks ago, Paula submitted this Kung Pao Chicken recipe (original recipe can be found at All Recipes; printable recipe can be found at the bottom of this post) as a possible future tandem post. Since I think we ALL know that Nance is pretty much over Asian recipes at this point (she’s a hater), I snatched it up for myself, and told Nance she was excused.

I think y’all have come to know that I am ALL ABOUT the Asian food.

I have no picture of all the ingredients for this post, because I kind of tossed it together in a half-assed manner, as I am wont to do. So here’s a picture of the marinade.

And here’s a picture of the marinade being poured over a pound of cut up boneless skinless chicken breast pieces.

See that bottle or Sriracha sitting over there to the right? Well, see, the recipe calls for “hot chile paste.” The problem is that although we have a pretty decent “ethnic foods” section at our grocery store, I could not find one single bottle that was labeled “hot chile paste.” Paula told me that she ended up using Sriracha instead, and since the bottle of Sriracha is labeled “hot chile sauce”, I figured it was good enough.

HOWEVER.

After we had the Kung Pao Chicken (spoiler: we both liked it), Fred did some looking around online and found that the Kikkoman Sriracha is like 100 times hotter than the Huy Fong Foods version. The next time we were in the grocery store, we bought the Huy Fong Sriracha, and that’s the kind I’ll use next time we have Kung Pao Chicken, because the Kikkoman Sriracha – even though I used half of the amount called for in the recipe – was WAY too hot for my delicate self and in fact was a bit too hot for Fred, who is a lover of hot foods.

While my chicken was marinating, I mixed up the sauce and chopped the green onions.

Once the marinades and sauces are made and the chicken is done marinading, it all comes together pretty quickly. In one pan you cook your chicken, in the other you heat your sauce slowly until it’s aromatic. This is what the sauce looks like as it’s heating:

Once the chicken is cooked through, you add it to the sauce (assuming the sauce is “aromatic” by the time the chicken is cooked through, and I will be honest, I’m not exactly sure my sauce was all that “aromatic”, all I can tell you is that it was well heated, and I wasn’t up for sticking my face in the pan and taking a big sniff, so I called it good enough). Then you let it simmer until the sauce thickens.

And then you spoon it over rice and eat it.

Like I said up there, we liked this a LOT and will absolutely be eating it again. Next time I make it, I’ll cut my chicken pieces smaller (that’s just a personal preference on my part), and I’ll likely double the amount of sauce because I like it saucy.

A++, will eat again, thanks for the submission, Paula!

PS: The original recipe calls for chopped peanuts, which I left out because when I mentioned it to Fred, he made the “That sounds gross” face.