What I eat, apparently

My original plan was to make orange chicken. I had the orange juice rather strategically located in my fridge, and everything else just a cabinet’s length away. I even had a pre-existing recipe, and by ‘recipe’ I mean ’scrawled-up piece of paper’. The recipe called for oranges, and I had juice, so I figured I’d just dump things in at random. This was my first mistake.

Apparently there’s a big difference between ‘1 tbsp of sherry’ and me just casually adding a vaguely largish dollop. No matter how much sugar I added, the sauce kept tasting like a screwdriver gone horridly and vomitously wrong. The soy sauce didn’t help either. Albeit, the recipe I was vaguely following didn’t actually call for soy sauce, which right there might have been part of the problem. So I gave up and strained it all out.

Luckily, I’d only added carrots, which strained out quite well. I dumped them back in the pan, and added the green pepper and gluten. I then proceeded with the ‘teriyaki sauce, garlic, and sesame oil’ approach, which worked much better. I stuck to safer addons like sesame seeds and pepper. Look, it’s pretty! There’s even steam rising! It’s like a train got buried in a tragic avalance of vegetables!

These gluten balls are awesome, btw. So squishy and just the right amount of absorbent! Like, I wish I had a giant magical bed of gluten I could curl up on and go to sleep on. Then if I got hungry in the middle of the night I could just start gnawing. I suppose I’d need to douse myself in teriyaki or sweet and sour sauce before going to bed though, otherwise the gluten wouldn’t have too much flavor. I could just shower in the morning, I suppose. These things are so complicated!

Oh yeah, it all got gloriously dumped on rice for the final consumption. I had a serious case of consumption…of teriyaki! Woo!

P.S. I’m putting the ‘vegan’ tag for this, so kindly ignore if you are Buddhist, as apparently garlic is non-vegan for Buddhists. I always knew garlic came from those cloven beasts that haunt the hills and meadows of the lands no vampires dare enter!

There seems to be a secret to making sesame chicken that is good and right and delicious in every possible way. I have yet to discover that secret. Even greater then that secret is the hidden knowledge of how to make gluten (a form of imitation meat) soft and springy and delightfully chewy, combining perfectly with said sesame chicken sauce to surpass in deliciousness any sesame chicken dish made with real meat. Let’s just say that I’m still searching.

So many combinations of sugar and spy sauce and sesame seeds have I mixed. So many packets of dried gluten, squishy gluten, and puffy gluten have I boiled and/or fried. Some attempts have been close - almost but just not quite there. Other attempts have been a mere mockery, like chewing sugary earlobes.

This is my dream, the delicious dream I hope to someday capture. I can only hope that the China Panda Chinese Restaurant will spring a leak of knowledge, and then I will feel true enlightment.

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As an aside, the extra sauce that Carolyn passed on to me from China Panda the other day was quite good with dehydrated gluten balls that were boiled until soft. The gluten is pretty much there; the chewy fried texture, while it would certainly be delightful to achieve, is not really a necessity. The secret is the sauce though. Oh man, so good. So good, in fact, that I just plain forgot to take a picture of my own attempt at this today. D’oh!