Monday, August 1, 2011

Homemade P.F. Chang's night!!

As you now know I like cooking when I have the time and energy to do so. I recently got a Costco membership, pretty much because we eat that much peanut butter, and impulse bought a big bag of green beans (they might have been string beans, I'm not sure). Well my friend Adrienne and I would order the crispy green beans whenever we went to PF Chang's with an order of extra sauce because that stuff is amazing. The second or third time we did this I asked the waiter if he would get the recipe for me. He said he would go ask the chef. The sweet guy came back with a list of ingredients and explained that that was all he could get for me. That little scrap of paper has been sitting in my recipe book for about a year. I finally decided to make some. But you can't just have crispy green beans for dinner so I made General Tso's chicken too.

Everything turned out perfectly too! I was so excited. I used these recipes I found online for the tempura and the General Tso's and really enjoyed them both. I did change the General Tso's a little. I added a bunch of garlic and ginger to the raw chicken and let it marinate for a little while before frying. The sauce wasn't quite spicy enough for me so I also added some crushed chili flakes and some extra chilies. I bought the dried chilies in the Mexican aisle of the grocery store for a buck and they made it very tasty. Warning about this recipe it makes A TON! It could easily feed 5-6 hungry adults.

Here is my recipe for the dipping sauce that I made up all my myself. It's not quite perfect but I can't remember what it tastes like exactly so feel free to change it up.

Crispy Green Bean Dipping Sauce

1/4 cup mayonnaise
2 teaspoons Sriracha sauce ( aka rooster sauce here's a funny comic)
1 1/2 teaspoons rice vinegar 
1 teaspoon soy sauce
1/4 teaspoon celery salt 


We definitely enjoyed it. I think that I might make the sauce again but just used grilled chicken instead of fried, my body wasn't very happy with me after all of that. If you try my dipping sauce recipe let me know what you think of it and how you changed it.

3 comments:

Geevz said...

Mmm! I think we may be having general tso's tonight!

Alicia W said...

Please include recipe and how to for the rest of the dinner. Thank you, your adoring fan and sister.

Elena said...

Sister, I linked to the recipes and I just followed their directions. I made the tempura and just hand dipped the green beans then put them in some hot oil (about 1/2 inch in a sauce pan over medium heat) and put them on paper towels. They were great. We just had those two things for dinner, though I intended to fry up some other veggies but didn't have time. For the General Tso's I recommend making the sauce first (I made it a few hours before) and just leaving it in the fridge then you can just whip it out and cook it up. It starts off really pale but darkens as it cooks. Definitely add extra garlic and ginger to the chicken before you fry it, makes yummy on it's own :)