Stir Fry Chicken with Bok Choy

I love stir fries….I could eat them all the time. Trouble with them is that they often don’t photograph well, coming out resembling something other than their true nature and not often wholly appetizing. Yet I persevere. This photo turned out pretty good.

This simple recipe from the current Food and Wine magazine was twisted up with my own fingerprint as is my norm with any recipe I come across. What recipe out there couldn’t benefit from some personal fingerprint twisting? Delicious as it likely was all on its own, I look at it and think “Oooh, bok choy…how about some napa too? What? No carrot? Where’s the beta carotene? Would a pepper be good in here? No, not really. The sauce is not enough….must double the sauce and let’s serve it on noodles, yeah! Noodles!” And so on an’ so forth, etc. etc. until I become kind of a kitchen Dr. Frahnkenshteen (”It’s not Frankenstein….it’s Frahnkenshteen!!”) kinda bug eyed, waving my hands around, hooking up electrodes to limp bits of raw chicken and generally making a really big mess, which my loving, well-fed hubby dutifully cleans up with a resigned sigh and a quietly uttered “That’s all right, it’s the price we pay for good eating.”

God, do I love him.

But…I digress. And I am kidding about the electrodes. Nowhere in this recipe did it call for channeling major amounts of electricity into dead flesh a la ‘Young Frankenstein’. I swear. Don’t run to the hardware store, OK? I have yet to meet a stir fry that needs an undergroung lab, a hump backed assistant and Fraubleuchen. (queue the horse whinnying)

I digress….again. Sorry. It must be the wine. Which was delicious, by the way.

This is the recipe as taken from the F&W website.

Stir Fry Chicken with Bok Choy

• 3/4 cup chicken stock or low-sodium broth
• 2 tablespoons Chinese black bean sauce
• 1 tablespoon dry sherry
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon Chinese chile-garlic sauce
• 2 teaspoons cornstarch
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 1/2 pounds skinless, boneless chicken thighs, cut into 1/2-inch strips, or skinless, boneless breasts, cut into 1 1/2-inch chunks
• Salt and freshly ground pepper
• 2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger
• 1 pound bok choy, cut into 3/4-inch pieces
• 1 cup snow peas
• Steamed white rice, for serving

1. In a small bowl, whisk the chicken stock with the black bean sauce, sherry, sugar, chile-garlic sauce and cornstarch.
2. Heat a large wok or skillet until very hot. Add 2 tablespoons of the vegetable oil and heat until just smoking. Season the chicken with salt and pepper and add it to the wok in a single layer. Cook over high heat, turning once, until the chicken is browned but not cooked through, 4 to 5 minutes. Transfer the chicken to a plate and pour off the fat in the wok.
3. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons of oil to the wok. Add the ginger and stir-fry until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the bok choy and snow peas and stir-fry until bright green and crisp-tender, 2 to 3 minutes. Return the chicken and any accumulated juices to the wok. Stir the sauce, then add it to the wok and simmer, stirring, until thickened, about 5 minutes. Transfer to a bowl and serve with rice

Yeah, it looks delicious all in it’s own right, I know. But here’s what I did to make it Frahnkenshteen perfect. In addition to the bok choy, I added a small head of napa cabbage, and about a cup of shredded carrot. I omitted the pea pods as I did not have any, and they have been crazy expensive lately, causing me thoughts of taking out a second mortgage just to enjoy their crunchy, snappy goodness in my food. (Not gonna happen, y’all. I like ‘em but I a girl only will go so far for good food) I doubled the sauce ingredients as we love a good saucy stir fry, and instead of rice, I used mung bean threads- thinner than rice noodles and oh so yummy. (and they had been in my cupboard for a while so they had to go) Also, I imagine they are lower on the ol’ glycemic scale too. I also added a package of tofu for some added nutritional ooomph. I sauteed everything separately and then tossed it all together at the end to blend, meld and marry each other nicely to live happily ever. The sauce was stellar; I love black bean sauce and I have had a jar in my cupboard forEVER waiting for me to pop it open with inspirational joy. It thickened nicely and tasted fine despite my lack of sherry that was called for in the recipe. Who needs it?? Would I have noticed it?? Maybe, or possibly not. The only thing I would do differently would be to cut back the ginger, as it seemed a bit much, and I would cook the napa separate from the bok choy as it was just a tad crisper than I like, but otherwise, this dish was a winner. It was good Thursday night food; y’know, the kind that Mike and I love but that Griffin would have looked at with a look of sheer contempt. “Tofu?? What is that? And cabbage? Two kinds? Do you really hate me that much?? Can I pick out the chicken and just eat that??”

Thank goodness he was out, as usual.

Oh, and the wine I mentioned? This recipe said it would be perfect with a Torrontes, which, ironically I had a bottle of stashed in my basement. It. Was. Lovely.