Chicken Chow Mein Recipe

by Liv | May 5, 2010

Chicken Chow Mein Recipe

My friends and family are always fascinated to know what kind of food Chris and I eat at home. Most people think we eat really posh Chinese food, like we have a large feast with peking duck, dumplings and so forth, but actually most of the time we eat fairly simple food and often a lot of junk.

While we both love eating Taiwanese and Chinese food, especially Chris, usually once a week we eat an amazing 14” pizza from Asda but the rest of the time we eat things like chow mein.

Listening to people while I’ve been living in the UK, a lot of people are really fascinated about chow mein and think it’s a really complicated dish, but for me it’s a simple, tasty and quite importantly, a cheap meal.

Chow mein in my country is like chicken and mushroom pie here. It’s just normal food. So, for my loyal readers, this is what we eat on a very regular basis. If it’s not this, it will be something equally simple like fried rice or Korean fast noodle. Sadly Taiwanese fast noodles, which are simply awesome, are very difficult (if not impossible) to buy here.

Chicken Chow Mein

Course Main Dish

Prep Time 40 minutes

Cook Time 10 minutes

Total Time 50 minutes

Servings 2 people

Ingredients

1 medium Carrot
1 chicken breast
2 cloves garlic chop finely
1/2 Chili chop really finely
2 Spring Onions chop finely
1 thin slice ginger chop finely
1 pepper any colour, I used green
50 g Chinese white chive cut 2cm lengthways
150 g Chinese dried noodles available in any Chinese supermarket

Seasonings

1.5 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp Salt
1 tbsp sesame oil
Couple pinches Black Pepper

Marinade for the chicken

2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp Sugar
1/4 tsp Salt
1 pinch Black Pepper
1 tbsp Chinese rice wine

Instructions

Cut the chicken breast into fine stripes and marinade for 30 minutes at least.
Julienne the carrot and green pepper.
Cook the Chinese dried noodle in a pot of boiling water until al dente and rinse under cold running water and drain again. Drizzle with a dash of sesame oil and toss through to prevent the noodles from sticking to each other.
Heat a frying pan with some oil with full strength gas power to fry the chicken breast until the meat turned white colour and turn off the stove and leave it on a side. (At the time of writing this article I haven't found a good wok in the UK. I tried a Ken Hom wok but every time I try to stir fry of food with a bit of potato starch in it it always sticks to the wok really badly, effectively ruining the wok). These woks are completely useless.
Heat a wok with 1 tablespoon of oil and stir fry chilli, spring onion, ginger and garlic first then add all the vegetable. Stir fry all the vegetables until it’s soften.
Add noodle and chicken into wok and keep stir fry for a couple minutes then add all the seasonings for chow mein and give it a good stir fry for another couple minutes.
Place it into a plate and serve.

Char Siu Pork Recipe

by Liv | Apr 8, 2010

Char Siu Pork Recipe

A couple weeks ago, my husband’s co-workers asked for a recipe for making Char Siu Pork’s. Over the years I have collected so many different cooking methods for this dish and this is the recipe I chose but I’ve changed some of the seasonings of it. Especially as I can’t find the red food colouring so I decided to eliminate it from my recipe.

I know some people must think: “Why don’t you just use Char Siu Sauce from Chinese supermarket? Why make marinade by yourself?”. But this is part of fun for cooking food by yourself at home! What’s the point that everyone use the same brand of pre-made sauce to marinade the meat and cook the same flavour like other people do? I think that’s so lame! So, I decided to make the marinade myself and brought the flavour into the marinade based of my memories of chair siu pork in my home country.

Let’s get your hands dirty with all the seasoning and enjoy the smell of roast char siu pork.

Credit: These photos were taken by Chris at Chris Radley Photography