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!