Wok With Me

I'm always pretty honest about where my recipe ideas come from.  I don't usually pull ideas out of thin air.  I compulsively collect/hoard recipes from a million different places and change what I need to change to make the recipe suitable for my particular dietary needs and my family's taste buds.

I've been holding onto the idea of converting this recipe for a long time.  It took forever to get hold of kelp noodles, and my early attempts using zucchini and spaghetti squash were pretty horrible.

The original recipe came from Canadian Living Magazine here.  My family loved it (pre-paleo).  It was part of our regular rotation.  We rarely repeated meals, but this recipe got some real mileage.  Once we went primal, not only were the noodles from the original recipe no longer appropriate, neither was the hoisin sauce.  And both had pretty distinctive flavours.  For a long time, I wasn't sure how I was going to remove hoisin sauce and still get that sweet flavour.  But then, I bought coconut aminos.  And had a real a-ha moment.  It's not much like the original anymore--but the same sweet taste is there still.  So here's where the recipe ended up...

Ingredients:

For the sauce:
3 Tbs coconut aminos
3 Tbs oyster sauce
1 tsp honey
2 tsp chili-garlic sauce

The rest:
1 1/2 lbs chicken thighs
1 pkg kelp noodles, rinsed under hot water
1 large head bok choy
1 red pepper
2 cloves garlic
1 Tbs sesame oil
1 tsp tapioca starch
1 tsp minced fresh ginger

Method:

Prep everything first:  Thoroughly wash your bok choy and chop it up.  De-bone and de-skin your chicken, then chop it into small bite-sized pieces.  Chop your red pepper.  If you love chicken skin like I do, make cracklings!  (And then clean up the mess you just made because they don't call them cracklings for nothing....)  Set cooked cracklings aside to drain on paper towel.  You can use them as garnish if you don't eat them before the rest of the food is ready.

Mix up your sauce.  Dilute your tapioca in a bit of cold water.

Pull out your Wok, or just a really big skillet.  Using a bit of the chicken fat from the cracklings, cook your chicken, in batches if necessary, until no longer pink.  Remove and set aside.  Add red pepper, bok choy, garlic and ginger to pan.  Stirring, cook bok choy down for a couple of minutes.  Add noodles and sauce.  Cover, if you're using a skillet, and let cook for a couple more minutes to heat everything through.  If its a Wok you're using, just stir very frequently.  Add chicken and juices back into pan and heat through.  Moving everything aside, pour your tapioca into the sauce, stirring quickly as it thickens.  Mix everything thoroughly and remove from heat immediately.


Serve with crackings!