Learn how to make a chicken and cashew stir fry in basics steps! A really simple dish to get you understanding the pattern of stir frys. Why do you think restaurants can knock a hundred of these every hour! Practice this and other stir frys and you will be able to make dinner in under 10 minutes!
Recipe:
Ingredients:
- Oil
- Chicken
- Onion
- Garlic
- Carrots
- Snow Peas
- Broccoli
- Bell Peppers / Capsicum
- Soy Sauce
- Corn Starch / Corn Flour
- Salt & Pepper
- Water or Stock
Preparation:
- Cut chicken to desired size pieces, place in bowl and marinate by mixing with soy sauce, salt, pepper and corn flour
- Cut onion to desired size pieces
- Dice or mince garlic
- Peel and cut carrots and potatoes
- Cut bell peppers / capsicum and broccoli to desired pieces
- Strip snow peas of thread
- Mix a small amount of cornflour / corn starch with water in a small bowl
Method:
- Heat oil over high heat
- Fry onions until starting to caramlise
- Fry chicken until it starts to brown on the outside
- Add garlic and fry until caramalised
- Add carrots, stir and fry for about 1 minute
- Add broccoli and snow peas, mix and fry
- Add bell peppers / capsicum
- Add water or stock
- Bring to the boil and cook until desired softness of the vegetables
- Season with salt and pepper
- Mix in cornflour / corn starch mixture, enough to make a thin gravy
- Serve meal in a bowl or plate and garnish with a handful of cashews!
Additional Notes
- For vegetarian option replace chicken with a hard tofu or fried tofu
Video Transcript
Hello and welcome to good for you living, this video is part of the cooking basics series where I’m going to show you a simple 2 step method that is going to eliminate complexity in the kitchen. The goal here is for you to take total control of your cooking and your consumption. So no more ready made sauces that are full of excess salt, sugar, preservatives and other factory chemicals. So let me give you a quick explanation about the 2 step method. First it’s about oil and water, you separate your ingredients that you cook in oil and those that you are going to cook in water. And second everything is a salad, so if you’ve ever made a salad before that’s how easy these dishes are going to be to make. Today we’re making chicken cashew stir fry, and I love adding nuts to a dish like this, it just makes it that much more special. So I hope that this is going to be good for you and let’s get into the kitchen.
Let’s start with a very hot wok or pan and add some oil. And our first principle is about oil and water, we separate our ingredients into our oil ingredients they will be onion, chicken, garlic and our water ingredients are carrots, snow peas, brocolli, bell peppers or capsicum, soy sauce and corn starch or corn flour.
Now that the oil is nice and hot we will throw in our onions. and an essential part of cooking is timing it’s like a race where we want everyone to finish together so we give people a staggered start, here the ingredients that take a longer time to cook, they’ll go first, the onions will get a bit of a head start and we want the onions to fry on their own a bit so their full surface area gets fried, nothing worse then half cooked onion. Next is our marinated chicken, and you can click on the link to see how I’ve given them a quick marinade. Our second principle, everything is a salad so don’t complicate things, just toss this around give it a good mix and the chicken and onion are going to cook well.
So it’s been a couple of minutes now and we’ve just been tossing this salad around in this hot salad bowl. We’ll now add the garlic, these have been thinly sliced, you can mince or dice them, we are now ready for our water ingredients first the carrots, like the oil ingredients we put them in order. The ingredients that take the longest time to cook goes first.
We’ve cooked the carrots until they have softened a little bit and now we are adding the snow peas and we’ll throw in the broccoli, and we are not going to cook these for too long because I like to retain the crunch in the broccoli and the snow peas. Ok that chicken is looking great some crunchy bits are sticking to the pan but we want that, when we add our stock it’s going to add to the flavour of the sauce. To add some colour we are going to throw in some red bell peppers or red capsicum and cooking is as much about looks as it is about taste and the aroma and oh yeah that looks good. Ok mixing and tossing around like a salad and the next step of the salad is the dressing of course. You can use a stock or broth here which is essentially flavoured water, but a good stock would be packed full of vitamins and minerals. I’m just using plain water, just enough to form a shallow bath and to create my broth I’m adding veggie salt, you can use any other seasoned salt or plain salt as you already have the garlic flavour and give it a good mix and bring it to the boil. ok that’s been sitting their covered for about half a minute, boiling away just to soften the vegetables just that little bit and help the chicken cook all the way through. To refine our dressing or sauce I’m just going to add a bit more soy sauce give that a good mix through. And our final step is to thicken the sauce. And this is done with our corn starch or corn flour mixture. Just click on the link for further instructions there. Notice here as we pour our mixture in you will see the colour of the suace go lighter. I’ll just scrape this back so you can see that the sauce thickens and its becoming a sauce. You know when it’s right when the quick boiling bubbles become bigger. Ok I’m pretty happy with that, if it’s not thick enough add a bit more corn flour or turn the heat down a fraction and cook it a bit longer ona simmer. In this video we focussed alot on timing so we are not serving up raw undercooked food or have overcooked, soggy and lifeless ingredients. Start off with ingredients that take the longest to cook and move through those that take the least amount of time. You can adjust this depending on how raw and crunchy you want your ingredients. The finishing touch what’s chicken and cashew without the cashews. And oh yeah that looks yum!
Stir fry is the second video in the series and once you follow a few of these videos you’ll be creating delicious dishes without a worry at all. Stir fry allows for versatility so you have control of the ingredients, try different meats you can go vegetarian try different vegetable conbinations you will just have to experiment and start creating your own signature dish. So whether it’s beef and ginger and shallots, garlic chicken, mongolian lamb or all the stir frys, you follow the same 2 step principle, first it’s about oil and water and second everything is a salad, go visit my website good for you living dot com, leave a comment, like my videos, send me a recipe challenge or just drop me a line. And remember living it’s good for you.