Chicken Stir fry? What’s not to love? Aside from the fact that it’s is a tastier substitute for the customary tomato stew and is a healthier way to enjoy vegetables with less meat, it’s easily customizable to your budget for the days when your pocket cannot take you to Country Kitchen or your favourite restaurant😉😌🤭.
Most stir fries are made up of three main parts:
- Aromatics (A), which are ingredients that enhance flavour. We have garlic, onions, and spring onions
- “The animal,” which can be chicken or beef, in this case, chicken (C) and;
- Sliced and diced veggies (V)
Now, depending on how you want it, you can follow either of these two simple formulas I devised after a number of my attempts at stir-frying.
- The A-C-V
- The A-V-C
Note that:
- The level to which you cook your chicken is what determines which should be used.
- The seasoning should be added preferably before the last item but most times to the veggies.
Let’s see if at the end you can guess which formula I used in this recipe🤓.
Ingredients
- A piece of chicken breast (deboned). If you are using beef, you can also make use of “assorted” along with the regular beef.
- A clove of Garlic, one small onion, spring onions
- Fresh pepper (scotch bonnets or rodo)
- Green peppers
- Tomatoes (try going for the juiciest ones)
- Curry and thyme
- Carrots
- Stock cubes, salt, and seasoning to taste.
- Vegetable oil
- And lastly Ingredients for the marinade which I’ll talk about soon
Method
1. Rinse, slice all vegetables, and dice the chicken to the smallest size you can
2. Prepare a simple marinade for the chicken.
Quickly what does it mean to marinate the chicken?
To marinate is to soak something in a flavouring mixture so the mixture gets absorbed into it. It’s done to get the best possible flavour from it for cooking. While there are several methods to do this, a simple method is to mix a little vegetable oil with lemon juice and water in a bowl, add pepper, salt, minced garlic, a little seasoning to it, then put the chicken in to massage into the mixture. Leave the mixture in a refrigerator overnight or at least one hour to when you’ll be cooking.
A quicker and more common alternative to this is to massage a little seasoning, salt, pepper, garlic and cornstarch (optional) mix together and set aside for 30 minutes to an hour or leave in a refrigerator overnight. The longer it stays, the better the chicken absorbs the mixture.
3. Heat up a little vegetable oil in a wide frying pan, a wok, or preferably, a nonstick pan and add the chicken. Fry till it’s about 70-80% done
4. Add the “aromatics” i.e the onion, curry powder, and garlic and keep stirring for a minute
5. Add all the other Vegetables, diced tomatoes, pepper, and carrots (except the Green Onions).
6. Add a little Salt, ground pepper and seasoning to taste.
7. Stir-fry everything together and leave it to cook until all the juice in the tomatoes has been released. (This should take about a minute or two). If the stir fry is too thick, you can add a little water but go easy on this.
8. Finally, add the spring onion for about a minute and take off from the heat.
Serving
You can serve with rice, pasta, potatoes yam, or whatever you wish. Enjoy!
You can also combine the mix with already boiled spaghetti and leave it on the stove for 2 minutes to get a Jollof-type spaghetti chicken stir fry🤤.
So did I use the AVC method or the ACV method? Let’s see who gets it😁
ACV😏
ACV