Spicy Orange Chicken

We accidentally woke Alex up a few nights ago, shortly after he went to sleep, and he started babbling about Orange Chicken. He longs for the Orange Chicken of Panda Express. I've never been there, but clearly I needed to make something so he'd stop asking to go.

I suspect that the Panda Express variety involves battering and deep frying some frozen chicken pieces, which sounds messy and unhealthy, so let's not go there. Instead, we'll get some high quality fresh chicken thighs from Fulton Valley Farms and some sugar snap peas from Iacopi Farm.

Special thanks to my uncle Ken in Houston for the hot peppers from his garden!

I bought the ingredients today down at the Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market market for a recipe on Epicurious for orange chicken,  only to later find the reviewer comments reporting the outcome as terrible. Unacceptable!

So, I juiced it up with some garlic, ginger, Shaoxing rice wine, chicken stock, sesame oil, black beans, and garlic. Hard to go wrong with all that flavor.

The recipe for Spicy Orange Chicken is on Freebase.

The Epicurious recipe cooks the snap peas with the chicken, which we don't do here, because that will either leave your snap peas tough or your chicken overcooked. Instead, you want to blanch the snap peas separately, so that they cook perfectly, and then add them back to your chicken and sauce.

The snap peas work well for the summer-fall version. If good snap peas aren't easy to find, just use some good organic broccoli. Blanch that in boiling water as well, after chopping into 1.5 inch florets.

Here's a short video on zesting an orange, a technique that Chef Suzette Gresham at Acquerello taught me a few years ago. It's much more effective to zest with a vegetable peeler and paring knife than to use a zester tool.