Chicken Stir Fry

This recipe is about stir frying chicken. I'm going to list out the specific things that appear in the picture and explain what you should do with each one, but you can substitute the vegetables for anything you want. You can even change out the sauce quite a bit, although you might want to pay attention to the proportions of salty/sweet/sour/water.

Stir-frying: the basics
Stir frying is the best way to cook dinner because it all happens in one pan (except the rice). However, when starting out, your stir fries will be lame because you'll be like “one pan? I have that ready to go”, and you'll throw everything in at the same time and it will suck, and you won't understand why. The other thing you'll do is you'll try to cook everything on medium heat. That's ok, now you have a healthy pan of meat and vegetables to eat. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's missing something you didn't know you needed.

Once you master the art of cooking shit right at the edge of where it's burning (and even burning it a little on purpose) you will never be able to go back to how you cooked before.

Dividing the components
Here's a list of the ingredients in this recipe

•	Two boneless skinless chicken thighs. If you just have regular chicken thighs, just rip the skin off like an animal and then cut the bone out with a knife or some kitchen shears. You can try to tear the bone out like an animal too but it probably won't leave you with a very nice piece of chicken. Cut the chicken into small pieces.
•	A carrot (cut into small squares so it will cook quickly)
•	A celery stalk
•	4 cloves of garlic (chopped small)
•	A serrano pepper (seeds and pith removed, chopped into tiny pieces)
•	A red jalapeno (same)
•	½ a red bell pepper (sliced)

Sauce:

•	¼ cup low sodium soy sauce
•	1 tbsp black vinegar (use Worcestershire sauce if you don't have it)
•	2 tsp rice vinegar
•	1 tbsp white sugar
•	2 tbsp oyster sauce
•	2 tbsp water
•	2 tbsp Chinese cooking wine (difficult to substitute, I'd just leave it out if you don't have it)
•	Ginger powder
•	Black pepper
•	A spoonful of sambal oelek or whatever other spicy shit you have laying around
•	A slurry of 1 tbsp cornstarch mixed with 1 tbsp water

If you are making this for two, consider using THREE chicken thighs.
Let the chicken warm up to room temperature for about an hour before cooking.
I marinated the chicken in soy sauce, sugar, and cooking wine while I was preparing everything else. This step is optional.

When stir frying, you typically have a bunch of shit that cooks for different amounts of time. You need to divide your workflow so that you're cooking everything only as much as it needs it. You generally have 4 categories of shit you need to cook in batches:

• Aromatics: in this case your garlic and hot peppers
• Vegetables: the carrot, celery, and bell pepper
• Meat
• Sauce

Why the different treatment of the bell pepper vs the hot peppers, you might ask? It's because the bell pepper is for flavor and should be cut into big chunks that you want to take a bite out of, and the hot peppers are diced and you should only generally notice their heat. The bell pepper should be crunchy when you're done, the hot peppers should be mush that blends into the sauce.

At the high heat we're cooking this at, the aromatics shouldn't cook more than 30 seconds. The vegetables need a couple minutes. The meat also needs a couple minutes. The sauce needs about 1 minute. You want to be prepared before you start, this all happens really fast.

Instructions
Heat up your wok or other type of pan (don't use non-stick, don't even think about it). My stove dial goes from 1-9 and I put it on 8. This is as hot as I will ever turn it up unless I'm boiling water. So you want your heat pretty high. You can tell it's ready if it's so hot that it's uncomfortable for you to put your hand within a couple inches of it.

Add some high temperature cooking oil (vegetable or grapeseed are good choices). If your pan is screaming hot, the oil will immediately begin smoking. You need to add something to it right away if it smokes.

Throw some chicken in the pan. If you have a large amount of meat, you usually want to do this in batches. But if you're only cooking 2 thighs, you can probably just chuck all of it in there. Try to spread it out into a single layer. Don't disturb the chicken for 45 – 60 seconds so it browns really good on one side, then start turning all of it to brown the other side. After about 2 minutes, remove the chicken from the pan.

Add some more oil, and dump the vegetables in the pan. The vegetables should generate a nice amount of steam. You may be able to scrape a lot of shit from the previous step off the pan (but don't worry if you can't, it will all come off during the sauce step). Keep stirring the vegetables for a couple minutes so the carrot softens. The bell pepper will probably start to char a bit. That will taste good, don't worry about it.

Move the vegetables to the sides of the pan, add some oil in the middle, then dump the aromatics in the pan. Stir them constantly for about 30 seconds, then dump the sauce right on top of them. Dump the meat back in the pan and stir everything together. Reduce the heat to medium and keep stirring so the sauce doesn't burn. Give it 30 – 60 seconds. If the sauce starts to stick to the bottom at all, take it off the heat, it's done.

Fair warning, I took the battery out of my smoke detector before I made this. The amount of smoke in my house was completely insane. My furniture probably smells like a barbecue, I know I do.