Mom's Chinese Homestyle Chicken Stir Fry

Hey everyone, I'm Flo, Judith's behind the camera, and we're all about simple food, simple faith. We are making my mom's homestyle chicken with zucchini today. The recipe for my mom's homestyle chicken with mushrooms is in my cookbook, Daily Special, and all we're doing is stepping out the mushrooms for zucchini today. Simple recipes are where it's at. I don't have time to make complicated recipes, so often we can change things up just by changing out some of the ingredients, and today we're just simply taking those mushrooms out and putting in zucchini. So we're going to start with the marinade. One tablespoon of soy sauce, and this is just regular soy sauce, and one tablespoon of rice wine, and I'm just using just a plain rice wine today. If you have Shaoxing wine, you can use that. One tablespoon of cornstarch, and one teaspoon of sugar. Sugar is there to balance out the flavors. If you don't want to use sugar, you can just omit it, but know that it may be a little bit more salty. Just give this a quick stir. It doesn't matter if it's lumpy. When we add the chicken, it will just mix everything up. I have just over a pound of chicken thighs. You can use chicken breasts if you like, and these are boneless, skinless, and I'm just going to cut them down into bite-sized pieces. You have to see this last part. Dude doesn't like this vein that you can find in chicken thighs. So being the good wife that I am, I remove it. Thanks, Flo. Okay, adding it to my marinade, and I'm also going to add about half an ounce of sliced ginger. Now my mom says that the ginger will take away the chicken smell, which I don't really know what she's talking about, but the wine also does that. The rice wine that we add to the marinade. So either one or both, I guess it's worthwhile to take away that chicken smell. While the chicken is marinating, we're going to chop up our veggies. I've got one onion. I'm cutting the onion into chunks because the zucchini will also be in chunks, and that will make a more consistent mouthfeel. I'm also using zucchini and garlic that my mom grew. I'm not very good at growing things, so I'm thankful that I have a mom who is. You know what's interesting also is that my kids have, like, they're so excited when I'm like, oh, these came from Pawpaw's garden. They're like, wow, really? Meanwhile, I grew up with my grandmother with a huge garden, and everything we ate came from the garden. It was no big deal, but they're very excited when we get garden-grown vegetables. I'm going to mince up my garlic. See, look at how juicy this garlic is, and it's fresh from the garden as opposed to garlic that you get in the stores. I think the funny thing is that my mom doesn't really like garlic, but she grows it. I'm happy to take it off her hands. I like to mince up my garlic quite finely. You can keep it as chunky as you like. I just don't like biting into big chunks of garlic. All right, that's good for me. And before I start cooking, I'm going to get my sauce ready to go. I have half a cup of chicken broth. I'm adding a tablespoon of dark soy sauce. Dark soy sauce will add some color and also some depth of flavor, and one tablespoon of oyster sauce. Oyster sauce also gives it that extra umami. Give that a stir. If you like this video, please click the like button and subscribe because it really does help the channel. Okay, let's get our wok heated up. Medium-high. Once you see that wisp of smoke, you can add your oil. I'm using avocado oil today, so about a tablespoon. And I'm going to add half my chicken so I can get a good sear on them. If you don't have a wok, you can use a large frying pan. We're going to let it sear for about a minute and then flip them over. Once your chicken is cooked through, we're just going to remove this into a clean bowl. I'm going to turn off the heat because I don't move fast enough. Okay, turning my gas back on, adding another tablespoon of avocado oil, then adding the rest of my chicken. Turning off my heat again. Remove the rest of the chicken. Okay, adding one more tablespoon of oil. Adding my onions. Stir fry this for about a minute. Then adding my zucchini. You can cook your zucchini for as long as you like to the texture that you like to eat them. I cook them for about three to five minutes and I leave them until it's just before it's the right texture because I'm going to add some liquid. But first we're going to add our garlic. When we add our liquid, we're adding more time so the zucchini will cook a little bit more. I'm going to add my chicken back in along with any of the juices, along with the sauce that we made. I'm going to let that simmer for a little bit and putting the lid on for about maybe two minutes. I'm also going to make a cornstarch slurry to thicken the sauce. About a tablespoon of cornstarch and adding about a tablespoon of water. It has to be room temperature water or cool water otherwise it won't dissolve. All right, I want to make sure our chicken is cooked through and scraping up all the bits at the bottom of the wok. Okay, just pushing the ingredients off to the side as much as I can so that I can expose some of that sauce. I'm going to add our cornstarch slurry right into the middle and stir that in. All right, and that's it. This is going over rice. When cooking Chinese dishes, it is best to get your rice going first before you start cooking your main dish because it doesn't take much time for it all to come together and then dinner will be ready all at the same time. Okay, getting this into a serving bowl and one last addition, just a bit of sesame oil. Are you all ready for it? I am dude. This is the taste and this is a whole lot of food. You know guys, you know when you make it at home it just tastes better and when you can make it at home and it tastes better and you get a lot more food, that's like double whammy. I'm going to take in some of that aroma. Oh, that smells really good. Oh, gotta make room with the rice and the veg. Like you're not gonna get this much food at the restaurant. No way. Oh, look at all that sauce. Yeah, a little bit more sauce. Yep, here we go. Drizzle. You may be wondering about the shirt. Yes, there are bicycles all over the shirt and if you didn't know, I love cycling. Actually, I'm addicted to cycling, road cycling specifically and if you don't follow me on social, I'm going to shamelessly plug myself. YouTube and Instagram. Back to the show. You gotta have it with rice and when you have it with rice with a lot of sauce, gravy, whatever you want to call it. Sauce. You just gotta. It's so good. It's such the perfect combination. That perfect crunch. Just enough of the zucchini and 100%. Home garden grown produce including this zucchini is so much better. 1000% better. Start of the show, chicken. Oh, look at that glistening. It looks really nice. It has a nice sheen to it. Oh, tender. It's so good, guys. Make it at home. Awesome. Thanks, dude. When ingredients are homegrown, it's even less expensive. You gotta check it out. You can find this recipe on my website, slowbum.com.