Sunday Supper

Sundays are usually my quietest day of the week, and hence the day when I experiment with cooking new and fun suppers.  Check out more pictures on instagram under the hashtag #sundaysupper (and be sure to follow me, hiltheimpaler)!

Tonight’s Supper: Fried rice with Chicken (Not) Breasts
Tonight’s Sunday Supper Soundtrack: Old 97’s Alive and Wired

A few months ago, my mom bought me a bunch of vegan meat substitutes, including these “chicken breasts.”  Unfortunately, on the first try we discovered that they were roughly the taste and consistency of styrofoam.  However, since I still had a bag and a half of them left, I embarked on a mission to find ways to make them edible.  Through trial and error, I discovered that chopping them very small and marinating the heck out of them made them pretty palatable.  Then today I realized at 2:30 that I had no tofu for my fried rice tonight...and the grocery store closes at 2 on Sundays.  Which led to tonight’s supper adventure: trying out the chicken (not) breasts in a fried rice!  The full recipe can be found below, if you’re not interested in my photos and narration.

I started by boiling the “chicken,” per the package instructions.

While that was boiling, I made the marinade.  Yes, that is Domino brand brown sugar, which means this recipe is not fully, 100% vegan.  I’m sorry.  I live on an island.  I’m doing the best I can.

After finally getting the top off the lime juice container (seriously, never ever buy lime juice in anything besides a glass jar with a screw top) and getting lime juice all over my kitchen in the process, I managed to mix the marinade.

Once the “chicken” was done and had a little time to cool, I diced it up as small as possible.  Seriously, you have to make this stuff really really small for it to taste good.  Then I mixed it with the marinade and let it sit for about half an hour.

Next I browned it in my wok until it started to get just a bit crispy.  Then I added the rice to the wok, seasoned it with soy sauce, garlic powder, red pepper flakes, ginger, and chili powder, added some carrots, broccoli, and green pepper, fried it until it was heated through, and voila!  Supper!


Recipe
For “meat”:
Protein of choice--I used Chicken (Not) Breasts, but you could use tofu, seitan, probably even tempeh would work
Marinade:
1/8 cup soy sauce
1/8 cup brown sugar
2 tbsp. ketchup
2 tbsp. Sriracha
1/4 cup lime juice
1/4 cup cold water

For rice:
2 cups cold, pre-cooked rice (if you don’t use cold rice, it will get mushy)
1/8 cup soy sauce (I like my food really salty, you could definitely cut back depending on your taste, or omit the extra soy sauce entirely)
1 tsp. red pepper flakes
1/2 tbsp. ground ginger
1/2 tsp. chili powder
1 tsp. garlic powder

If needed, prepare meat substitute according to package directions.  Then, whisk marinade ingredients together.  Dice protein and coat with marinade. Let marinate for about 30 minutes.  Brown protein until it’s nice and crispy on the outside.  Add rice, vegetables, and rice seasonings, then fry until ingredients are combined and heated through.  Enjoy!