Jeff's been hankering for orange chicken lately, so we got the Top Secret Recipes cookbook out of the library, which had a recipe for Panda Express orange chicken. I'm too lazy to type up the whole thing right now, and they don't have the whole recipe on their website. It turned out well, and satisfied the craving pretty well. The sauce was a touch too sweet for me. I need to buy a kitchen thermometer, since I have no idea how hot the oil was. Also, I discovered that not being able to see the chicken as it's cooking is unnerving for someone who's paranoid about cooking chicken. Really, the whole deep-frying thing, while tasty, is a pain in the ass, hot and messy. Next time around, I'll bread and bake the chicken. It won't be quite the same dish, but it'll be 10 times easier. However, it is nice to know how to make properly breaded chicken. So, overall, a lot of work, but yum.
Top Secret Recipes is pretty hit-or-miss for me. They tend to add "improvements" that totally defeat the purpose of recreating restaurant food at home, and a lot of their reverse-engineered recipes are way off the mark. Sometimes they're great though. At any rate, be glad you didn't pay for the book. I bought both volumes and returned them the next day after copying down the 4 or 5 recipes I really wanted. :)
:) That's precisely why I'm a library fiend, especially when it comes to cookbooks.
I'm sure I'll end up tweaking the recipe, but I was having problems finding a recipe for good old American Chinese breaded chicken, so that part, at least, was a huge help.
Yeah, I'm extrordinarily pleased to have easy access to a good library again. In Cambridge, all the local library branches were really lame. There was the Boston Public Library, which is the standard against which all other libraries are to be judged (well excluding the LoC of course ;)), but it wasn't terribly convenient to get to. Now I've got the kickass Berkeley Library a short walking distance away.
I'm sure I'll end up tweaking the recipe, but I was having problems finding a recipe for good old American Chinese breaded chicken, so that part, at least, was a huge help.