General Frank's Chicken

You ever think to yourself, you know, Reddit has continually told me, over and over, that General Tso's Chicken is in fact an American dish, despite being invented by recent Chinese immigrants who noticed that Americans love nothing more than fried things and chicken nuggets? Well, I don't particularly care whether YOU thought that to yourself, but I did, and I realized there was an easy way to make this thing even more American than ever before.

Introducing General Frank's Chicken, the abomination between 1940s Chinese American fast food and good old American bar food. This is the best thing I've eaten this month, and I'm not even dead so far.

Ingredients:

1 pound of boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut into sizable cubes (try to cut them a little bigger than you would eat since they will shrink when cooking).

Marinade:

• Egg white

• 2 tbsp soy sauce

• 2 tbsp shaoxing wine

• 1/4 tsp baking powder

Sauce:

• 1/2 cup Frank's hot sauce

• 2 tbsp soy sauce

• 2 tbsp shaoxing wine

• 2 tbsp water

• 1 tbsp cornstarch

• sugar to taste (probably about 2 tsp)

Coating:

• 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup cornstarch, like 1/2 tsp salt, it's not an exact science

Frying:

• A copious amount of peanut or vegetable oil

Marinate the chicken in the crap I said before. Make sure you beat the egg white with a fork before adding the chicken or you will make a big mess. No, it's not ruined, stop trying to throw it in the garbage because the entire egg white stuck to one piece of chicken, it's going to be ok. Just be smarter next time. Because the chicken pieces are so small, marinating for more than 30 minutes won't do much, so 30 minutes, and it's ready to go.

Mix the sauce. There are no special instructions, just dump it all together and call it a day.

You don't need to rinse the marinade off the chicken for this recipe because you want the egg white to remain in the final cooking step. So just grab the pieces out of the marinade and dredge them in the flour mixture. Shake off the excess. This isn't the colonel's secret recipe and you're not going to get craggy KFC chicken out of it so don't be too precious about this step.

Heat your fryer oil to 375 degrees, then throw about 8 or 10 nuggets in at a time and cook for 4 minutes, flipping the nugs halfway through. A pound of chicken will go in about 3 batches this way.

While you are frying the nugs, heat the sauce in a saucepan on the stove. When all the chicken is ready, dump it all into the sauce and use a spoon to stir so every piece is coated with the ridiculous heart clogging sauce you've made. Eat the whole thing while standing right next to the stove thinking "I invented something that everyone is going to want to try" then either collapse from a massive heart attack or repeatedly vomit from the worst acid reflux anyone could have ever imagined, your choice.

If you live, empty your whiskey glass in one long pull and say out loud how much you love America.