MMmmmm...Chinese

We love cashew chicken at our house, but we don't order Chines food very often. When we do, this is one of the standard dishes. I was excited to try this cashew chicken recipe - it looked easy and tasty (and was cheaper than take-out!). It was on last week's menu, but it didn't happen because someone I somehow made all of last week's menu either beans, chicken or chicken and beans and by the end of the week, we were all done with chicken and beans. Part of the reason I plan our meals for the week is to avoid boring repetition...obviously I didn't check for variety when I did that plan!

Anyway.


I was disappointed in this garlic. Garlic has not been a nice item to purchase lately. See those two large cloves back there, yeah, they were really bunches of 5-6 little tiny cloves. My plan to actually mince the garlic was tossed aside and I pulled out the garlic press. (Shhhhh, don't tell, but I plan on buying Alex a bottle of chopped garlic to start his foray into cooking. He is a huge perfectionist and if we let him chop garlic I'm afraid that will take longer than cooking the entire dish that he's making. Besides, we are going to be short on time come September, so any little short cut that isn't horrible is okay by me). Oh, and scallions vs green onions - anyone want to wade into that debate? Are they the same things and Martha is just trying to use big words or are scallions similar but larger?


Raw chicken makes me slightly sick to my stomach, so maybe I'll avoid shots like this in the future! I used my electric frying pan (because I have not yet purchased a decent sized frying pan) so I cooked everything at once - first the chicken and then added the onions and garlic.


Looking good...almost ready!


YUMMY! The one we get from our local take out place has celery in it, so I'll probably try that the next time. I actually served it on white rice because I was a bit behind and needed rice in 15 minutes, not in forever. Normally I'd use brown rice (although this was a nice special treat!). And yes, we do eat other vegetables and not just broccoli and cauliflower. But right now J is guaranteed to eat those two vegetables, so we eat a lot of them.

Definitely making this again - it's one of Martha Stewart's 30 minute meals and it really is almost that quick (probably would be that quick if there was no toddler wrangling happening concurrently!)