Chicken With Cashew Nuts

Submitted by McCarthy

"From 'Chinese Cooking' - Serves 4"

 

• Ready In: 25mins
• Ingredients: 10
• Serves: 4

ingredients

• 3 tablespoons dry sherry
• 1 egg white
• 1 teaspoon cornflour
• 2 boneless chicken breasts, cut into small pieces
• 2 tablespoons oil
• 2 spring onions, chopped
• 1 green pepper, cored, seeded and diced
• 125 g bamboo shoots (canned, drained and shredded)
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 125 g unsalted cashews

directions

1. Mix 2 tablespoons of the sherry, the egg white and cornflour together.
2. Add the chicken and toss well until evenly coated.
3. Heat the oil in a wok or frying pan, add the spring onions and stir-fry for 30 seconds. Add the chicken and cook for 3 minutes. Add the remaining ingredients and cook for 2 minutes.
4. Pile into a warmed serving dish and serve immediately.

Reviews

[sunoffabeach]

This recipe for chicken with cashew nuts is OK, but it's a little bit too vague for my liking, and one or two things about it haven't worked too well on the two occasions that I have tried it so far. I don't think that it works particularly well with the soggy, waterlogged chicken breasts that they sell in UK supermarkets, although the vegetable/noodle part of the recipe was delicious.<br/><br/>Firstly, the amount of sherry/egg white/cornflour is far more than what is actually needed to coat the chicken, so when you have fried the spring onions for thirty seconds and you pour the meat and coating liquid into the frying pan you have this big puddle of liquid which quickly congeals, a little reminiscent of when you fry the beaten egg when you are making egg fried rice, and you end up with a grey sludge on the bottom of the pan which promptly ends up all over everything when you stir fry. This looks quite unappetising.<br/><br/>Secondly, it takes longer to cook than what the recipe implies, but if I had only cooked it for five and a half minutes (as specified in the recipe) the chicken definitely wouldn't have been properly cooked. Because the recipe doesn't specify which oil to use I used sunflower oil, and it doesn't really give a temperature so I had it as hot as I could without the oil spitting at me. I cooked it for about ten minutes in total and the chicken was only just cooked, and the chicken was white and bland although everything else was very tasy. I did it the next day using strips of ribeye steak but again it took significantly longer than five and a half minutes to cook.<br/><br/>I have light soy sauce and dark soy sauce, but the recipe doesn't specify which one to use. I tried light soy sauce the first time and dark soy sauce the second, and we felt that the dark soy sauce worked better. I don't really understand why the other reviewer said that the dry sherry added a richness, because dry sherry isn't rich? <br/><br/>Portion sizes seem to be about right. I used three chicken breasts instead of two and it was certainly enough for three, possibly enough for four. I served it with egg noodles. I don't like the fact that it says ?Add the remaining ingredients? and I would prefer it to actually list all the things that you are adding at that point. At this point I was stir-frying the ingredients of this recipe in one pan and stirring the noodles in another, you have to keep stirring or they will burn/stick and it would be quite easy to forget something, such as the one tablespoon of sherry that you haven't yet used, while you are rushing around trying to stiry-fry whilst adding in all the ingredients.<br/><br/>I also added a couple of additional ingredients: a clove of garlic, a few chopped mange tout, some fine carrot sticks one night and a few strips of parsnip the next night. This is a recipe with various different colours, textures and flavours in it, the vegetable/noodle part of it worked really well but I wasn't too keen on they grey sludge from the egg/cornflour/sherry mixture and I found the chicken very white and bland. In my kitchen a safe cooking time for this recipe is about ten minutes.

 

[Tea Jenny]

Mmmm this was yummy, I used chicken thighs rather than breast meat as it was what I had. I didn't use bamboo shoots as the tin I thought was bamboo shoots was actually water chestnuts and I had everything ready to make it before I noticed but it was still very good, The cornflower makes the chicken silky smooth and very tender, and the sherry gives it that nice richness. I served it with w/w egg noodles and the two went very well together. I will be making this again as it's very quick to put together. Thank you for posting. made for PAC Spring 2011