Chinese Restaurant Brought Home

Three new recipes tonight...and all three were a huge hit. :-)

First, a mango chicken that my son had asked me to replicate from the My Thai restaurant we ate at. I couldn't quite replicate that, but I came close, and actually liked this version WAY better. I did have to altar the recipe a little. Those kaffir lime leaves are not exactly all over the place in Indiana stores, so I did as the reviews suggested and used lime zest instead. And, because my kids are not super fans of heat, I tripled the brown sugar in the recipe. I also cooked the cashews just a bit to soften them. I used peanut oil for cooking, too, to add a bit more flavor.

I had been looking and looking, and trying several different fried rice recipes before I came across this one. Truly the best one yet. Easiest, and closest to real Chinese restaurant versions. I don't use ham, and used a bag of frozen peas and carrots, plus skipped the egg (my kids won't eat it anyway). I doubled the recipe and it came out just fine. I also go a little heavier on the soy, but my family loves soy, so that worked out well here because we're fans of the soy sauce :-).

Then I made my teen daughter make this Thai Broccoli Salad. We ended up heating it more at the end, and adding a tad more soy and sesame oil, just to thin out the sauce, but it was a HUGE hit. It's definitely better warm than cold (at least in my opinion) and went off the plates so fast, we should have made more.

A lot of work involved (honestly, I have no idea how those Chinese restaurants that do those buffets do it), but it was WELL worth it. And here I thought that ambition to quit cooking was going to end.

I also made for breakfast these INCREDIBLE banana-peanut-butterscotch pancakes. You were supposed to bake the pancakes and make them from scratch. Yeah, well, it's a tad too early in the morning for all that. Instead, I made box pancakes and did the sauce from scratch. I'll see if I can find the sauce and post that tomorrow or the next day.

Shirley