Among Friends Thursday--Kent's Chicken Sweet and Sour Stir Fry

Busy times. I mean BIZ ee! Every night I come home covered in paint and smelling like bleach. We are cleaning up and doing the build out for the new educational program we are starting. With little in the way of start up funding, we are doing most everything ourselves. This week's project was to clean, sand and repaint metal kitchen cabinets from, we think, the 1940s era. The old house was built in '39. Can you imagine the amount of "character" it has? Personally, I love it, but it does have its share of old house problems. Cleaning up a place that once held 24 females released from prison is a chore. You would think someone in that group would have been a clean freak. Umm. No. It takes some elbow grease to go from halfway house to an educational institution. Yeah, that sounds stuck up. Let's call it a learning place for a bunch of teens.

But you didn't visit my blog today to hear about that! We do still eat around here. Fortunately for us, I do have a lot of chicken in my freezer stash. This was made with chicken strips, similar to my cubes, so I saved the step of cutting and stir frying the chicken. We love Chinese food. Well, all but my youngest boy. Since he is off on his honeymoon, we can eat it more now! Though I miss him a lot, I decided to try Kent's sweet and sour. That is middle son, Pearson's favorite. If you like sour, you will like it. If you generally go for cashew chicken, this may have too much of a vinegar bite for you. You could easily replace half the vinegar with water. We liked it though. I did add just a little extra soy sauce, well Tamari to be exact. I did that because I added the whole bag of frozen broccoli since I did not have cauliflower tonight. In addition, I also added 4 ribs of celery rather than 2 since I was finishing up a rather limp bunch.  Knowing I had a few more veggies than Kent called for,  I added a bit of extra to the sauce. Don't know why I have such a hard time sticking to recipes.

Stir Fry meals are so great. They are fast and delicious. Who really needs the rice anyway? The flavor is there. The recipe is in Low Carbing Among Friends, page 301. There. Another unabashed promotion of my cookbook. This is a project I am very honored to be included in. There really are great recipes from some very talented and creative people in there. Better by far than any single author book. Last night, someone left a mean spirited comment about my promotion of the book. How called for was that? I give away tons of recipes for free. I try new things to share whenever I have the time. Tonight, it would have been much easier not to photograph our dinner and not to write a blog post. I do it because I love helping others who are in the same situation we are in. None of us are getting rich from the books by any means. The recipes that were good enough to be included in the cookbooks are pulled from the blogs. That just makes sense. We leave our favorites or our most popular, and refer you to the cookbook for the others. It just personally hurts when some people think they are entitled to all my work for free without giving a thought to the labor that goes in. Gee. On the other hand, I know there are lots of you who are wonderful and appreciative, and let me know it with the sweetest email. You make all the difference!