Chinese!

One of the things I miss about living in Seattle is the abundance of Asian food. There are a couple Chinese places around here. They are okay, but not really great. There was this amazing place near our last apartment in the Seattle area. I think it was The Golden Dragon or something like that. Anyway, they had the most amazing lemon chicken! And fabulous fried rice and crab rangoons! I really wish I had the recipe for thier lemon sauce. I've never had anything quite like it before or since. It's by far my favorite Chinese dish. No other lemon chicken lives up to it.

While living around such fine Asian food, I learned how to make my own at home. No, it's not that fabulous lemon chicken, it's just regular sweet and sour, but I could make basically the same stuff that every Chinese restaurant makes for a fraction of the price at home. I used to make plain old steamed rice to go with it, but have had a craving for fried rice, so last night, I made sweet and sour chicken and ham fried rice. I meant to take a picture of everyting before we ate it all, but I forgot. Sorry about that. But here's the last of the fried rice.

Ham Fried rice

2 tablespoon vegetable oil

3 cups prepared rice

1 cup cut up ham

2 tablespoons sliced green onion

1 medium carrot, chopped

2 large eggs slightly beaten

3 tablespoons soy sauce

Heat 1 tablespoon oil in 10 inch skillet over medium heat. Cook rice, ham, and vegetables for about 5 minutes, stirring and breaking up rice, until hot. Push rice to side of skillet. Add 1 tablespoon oil to other side. Cook eggs in oil over medium heat, stirring constantly, until eggs are thickened throughout but still moist. Stir eggs into rice mixture. Stir in soy sauce.

The recipe I based mine on also calls for white pepper, but I don't have any, so I always just add a little black pepper. When I have them on hand, I also use peas, peppers, and any other veggies that sound good to me at the time.

As for the sweet and sour, I've found the secret is Tempura batter.

I just followed the directions on the box and it comes out looking basically like this:

The other secret is finding a good sauce. If anyone has a really good recipe for sweet and sour sauce, I'd love to try it. The recipes I've tried never come out the way I like, so we buy it from the store. This is my favorite:

Now I need to learn how to make crab rangoons. Yummy!