the review: chicken lo-mein

Chicken Lo-Mein is the perfect vehicle for refrigerator clean out. I bought absolutely nothing for this recipe. That said, I didn’t follow the recipe to the letter. Interestingly, I didn’t click over to the original recipe (the recipe that I followed was a modified version) until after I made the lo-mein for dinner. Mine was a lot more like the original recipe than the one that I followed. These things happen.

I’m of the opinion that most stir-fry type dishes can benefit from as many vegetables as possible, especially if it means your kids will eat vegetables. I therefore only used a large handful of snap peas but added broccoli, two carrots, half of a zucchini, and some edamame to my dish. I also used previously cooked chicken. Like I said, refrigerator clean out.

I started by heating my oil until smoking, then cooking my broccoli and carrots first. After these had softened a bit, I added the onions and zucchini. The recipe calls for a whole onion. I’m not much of an onion fan. It definitely has its place as a seasoning, but I don’t want to eat it by the forkful. I cut the onion down to about a quarter of an onion rather than a whole onion but used all three green onions. I also used two large cloves of garlic instead of three cloves and a bit more ginger than the recipe called for. The ginger and garlic I added to the middle of the sauté pan à la Cook’s Illustrated with a little bit of sesame oil. I don’t think this made any difference.

I added my chicken, snap peas, and edamame, let those cook for a couple of minutes, then added my sauce. Once the sauce thickens (pretty quickly), the whole she-bang can be tossed into the noodles. I didn’t have lo-mein noodles on hand so used brown rice pasta that looked a bit like fettucini. This worked just fine.

One problem with my approach was that I had extra veggies and extra noodles but failed to make extra sauce. Oops. This did not bother my kids. They went crazy on this dish veggies and all proving once again my theory that kids will eat just about anything if it is served with noodles. Rob and I thought that the dish was ok overall. Not excellent but not bad either. We have a lot of leftovers. I will be eating this all week for lunch. And that's ok because it isn't bad. I may try to freeze some. Anyone ever freeze noodles? I'll let you know if it works.