Mishaps nearly turn sesame chicken into stir-fry surprise

A co-worker and I have argued in the past over who gets to order the sesame chicken when we head to lunch at a local Chinese restaurant. We both love the tasty Asian dish, but for some reason he feels a little weird when we both order the exact same meal. A few weeks ago, he decided to try something new -- it wasn't as good and he's ordered sesame chicken ever since.

Jennifer's sesame chicken smelled better than it tasted. (Diane L. Wilson)

This week, I decided to whip up a batch of my own sesame chicken, and I asked my fellow sesame chicken-loving co-worker to sample it when I was finished. Surprisingly, he agreed -- even after hearing about my cooking experiences.

I figured the Chinese restaurants wouldn't give out their recipe for sesame chicken, so I searched the Internet and found a recipe that involved the use of a wok. I had watched my mother cook delicious stir-fried chicken in her wok many times growing up. It never looked too difficult, so I thought I'd give this recipe a try.

Here are the ingredients:

2 teaspoons cornstarch

2 tablespoons rice wine

1 tablespoon lemon juice

Chopped ingredients needed to be stir-fried to make the recipe, although some would have chopped the green peppers smaller than the main ingredient of chicken.

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1 dash hot pepper sauce

1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger

1 clove crushed garlic

1 pound skinless, boneless chicken breast cut into bite-size pieces

2 tablespoons sesame seeds

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

4 ounces fresh mushrooms, quartered

1 green bell pepper, sliced

4 green onions, sliced diagonally into 1/2-inch pieces

Before I begin to describe how I cooked this meal, I want to apologize to every Schnucks employee I bothered last week. You know who you are. I spent an hour wandering the aisles of the grocery store looking for most of the ingredients. Thank you to all the friendly employees who helped me find the following items: lemon juice, hot pepper sauce, sesame seeds and the green onions.

Jennifer had to shop for ingredients she had never used before and may never use again. Instead of getting rice wine, she bought rice vinegar, which gave the sesame chicken a different taste.

I would also like to point out that while I was shopping for the ingredients, I could not find rice wine ... but I did find rice vinegar, which I thought would work as a substitute. I was wrong. And I didn't know ginger was actually some sort of root ... I thought it was a spice in a jar. If you use the ginger from a jar -- like I did -- don't use a whole tablespoon, maybe only half of a tablespoon.

After I returned home from my trip to the grocery store, I prepared my chicken for a four-hour-long marinade.

Before I made the marinade, I cut the chicken into bite-size pieces. I really don't like working with raw meat, especially chicken. I'm definitely no vegetarian, but there's something about raw meat that makes me a little queasy.

To prepare the marinade, I blended the cornstarch with the rice vinegar (should have been rice wine). Then I stirred in the lemon juice, soy sauce, hot pepper sauce, too much ginger and the garlic. I poured this mixture over the chicken, covered the dish and placed it into the refrigerator to sit.

Four hours later, I returned to my marinating chicken, which smelled pretty good -- even if it contained too much ginger and rice vinegar instead of rice wine.

I threw in a step at this point that wasn't part of the instructions but was a suggestion from a reviewer on the recipe's Web site. To give the chicken a little breading, I dipped each piece in a beaten egg and dropped them into a zip-lock bag filled with 1/4 cup of cornstarch. After the chicken was in the bag, I shook it until each piece was coated.

Now came the fun part -- using a wok. The first step called for placing the sesame seeds in the wok to dry-fry over medium heat, shaking until the seeds turned gold brown. After the seeds popped in the wok for a couple of minutes, I scooped them into a bowl.

Jennifer found, while standing and watching the wok, that to stir-fry meant to continually stir the food while it's frying.

Next, I added sesame oil and vegetable oil into the wok and heated it slowly. Once the oils seemed hot enough, I dropped pieces of chicken into the wok.

At this point, I stood there and watched my chicken for about a minute or so. That's when my trusty photographer had to inform me what it meant to "stir-fry" chicken. See, I thought stir-fry meant you just threw ingredients into a wok, stirring occasionally. Nope, to "stir-fry" means you have to continually stir the food while it's frying.

Once all the chicken was done cooking, I added the mushrooms and green peppers to the wok and stir-fried those for about three minutes. Into this mixture went the green onions for another minute. Then I put the chicken back into the wok and added the remaining marinade. After about three minutes of stirring the chicken and vegetables, I poured it onto a plate and covered it with sesame seeds.

Well, my sesame chicken sure didn't look like my favorite dish at the local Chinese restaurant, but it smelled good.

Once I had finished in the kitchen, my family sampled the chicken. Immediately, my mother could tell something was wrong.

"It's probably the ginger, you used too much," she told me. "And the rice vinegar -- you can't substitute that for rice wine."

At least the sesame chicken was edible. I brought a sample into work for my fellow sesame chicken-loving co-worker and even though it tasted nothing like our favorite Chinese dish, he told me it was "pretty good."

~Want to read about an inexperienced chef attempting to cook your favorite meal? Every fourth week, Jennifer Freeze will whip up something new in the kitchen and write about the experience. E-mail your recipes to jfreeze@semissourian.com or mail them to Jennifer Freeze, Southeast Missourian, 301 Broadway, Cape Girardeau, Mo. 63701.