Chinese Craving - Sweet & Sour Chicken

It's no secret that this girl LOVES Sweet & Sour Chicken. It is most of the time the only thing I will order at a chinese restaurant, and the main portion I would put on my plate at a chinese buffet. I crave it. Regularly. Unfortunately, when I really started taking a look at how absolutely horrible restaurant-prepared Sweet & Sour Chicken is, I realized I HAD to come up with a more healthy alternative in order to continue to enjoy this delicacy.

For those of you who are thinking, "Aw, come on, Amy - stop being so health-conscious and just sit back and enjoy it and forget about the calories," I think once you see the stark, cold numbers, you'd have to agree with me. A normal size portion of Sweet & Sour Chicken (with the crispy chicken, of course) runs you between 900-1000 calories! I don't even want to THINK about how many fat grams we're talking. That's the equivalent of downing a quarter pounder with cheese and large fry from McDonald's (and, of course, downing it with a DIET Coke lol)

So I began searching my favorite recipe site - SparkRecipes.com - to find a healthy alternative, and found a fantastic one! So thanks to SparkRecipes contributor HAPPYWALKER for this incredible recipe!!

The Ingredients and Prep

It starts with a bunch of dicing: 1 each of red, yellow and green peppers, and 1 onion

And, of course, getting my brown rice going in my rice cooker.

This time I did a pretty bad job of remembering to take step-by-step pictures, but in a nutshell, you begin by dicing up 2 large chicken breasts, pan frying them in a Tbsp of olive oil until no longer pink, then removing them to a covered dish (to keep warm).

Then, you add the diced veggies into the pan and pan fry in another Tbsp of olive oil until tender. (Disregard the carrot in this picture - I technically didn't take it for THIS recipe, but you get the idea...)


Then, you add the chicken back in, along with a combination of soy sauce and cornstarch; Combine, then, add the chunk pineapple with juice, cider vinegar, brown sugar, garlic powder and ground ginger to the pan and stir in.


Let simmer for 15-20 minutes until it has simmered down a bit.

Serve over rice!

Yeah, this little puppy is only 231 calories per serving! The recipe is supposed to make 4 servings, which means that even if you ate all 4 servings yourself, you're STILL under the number of calories for ONE plate of S&S Chicken at a chinese restaurant! Of course, you have to add in a few calories for the rice, but over, a MUCH healthier alternative. And TBH, it totally quenches my longing for S&S Chicken. In fact, the in-restaurant stuff makes me kinda gag over all that fried greasiness!

So....吃个饱!! (a.k.a. "bon apetit" in Chinese)

Sweet & Sour Chicken

Ingredients:

• 1lb boneless, skinless chicken breast, cubed
• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 each green, red, yellow peppers, seeded and chopped
• 1 C onion, chopped
• 1/4 C soy sauce
• 1 Tbsp cornstarch
• 1 8-oz. can chunk pineapple
• 3 Tbsp Apple cider vinegar
• 3 Tbsp packed brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 1/2 tsp ground ginger

Directions:

• Sautee chicken in olive oil in a frying pan. Remove and keep warm.
• Add veggies to the frying pan and sautee until crisp tender.
• Return chicken to the pan.
• Mix the cornstarch and soy sauce together and add to pan.
• and add the rest of the ingredients to make a sauce.
• Simmer for 15-20 minutes, until the sauce thickens slightly and veggies are more cooked.

Serve over rice or chow mein noodles.