***Chinese 5 Spice Chicken Stir Fry***

Chinese food is generally thought of as… Complicated. This dish is very simple and healthy. Besides The Bean & The Leaf's Chinese Five Spice seasoning blend the rest of this dish would require exactly 0 visits to any sort of specialty stores.

Let’s start with why the Chinese Five Spice is so important in the first place to this dish. Sometimes Chinese Five Spices actually contains just FIVE spices (like ours), but others might contain a couple more because the key to really great five spice is hitting all five FLAVORS- Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter, and Spicy. When using five spice, the blend does most of the work for you in the sense that’s already balanced and harmonized. Where adding just sea salt would call for you to draw a thin line and taste carefully to make sure you don’t overwhelm your other flavors with saltiness, Five Spice is a seasoning blend that was developed from ground star anise, cloves, fennel, cinnamon, and Sichuan Peppercorns that are proportioned with a consistent ratio so no one flavor can over-dominate (it’s also remarkably salt-free!).

You can use a frozen stir fry mix or we used peppers, carrots, zucchini, broccoli, asparagus, and garlic for ours, but there’s nothing stopping you from using just peppers and onions if that’s all you have on hand!

The only thing that’s important about stir frying is just the timing and prep that you’ll want to figure out before-hand: have everything chopped before you start your cooking and you’ll get much better results and have an easier time enjoying your dish without having to figure out how to use chopsticks with bandaged fingers because you were quickly trying to cut up your asparagus before your carrots get too cooked.

In addition to our The Bean & The Leaf Five Spice Blend, you can also add some Arrowroot Powder or Corn or Potato starch in order to thicken your sauce up a bit. Remember to mix your thickener up with a bit of water in a small dish to make sure you don't have lumps.

This recipe only takes about 15 minutes to put together and your ingredients are going to be introduced based on how long it takes them to cook, so your finished product will result in all of your vegetables still maintaining the bite that keeps this meal fresh and interesting and not a sad mound of mush.

Ingredients:

2 Tbsp Vegetable oil
2 tsp The Bean & The Leaf Chinese Five Spice
1 Lb. Boneless skinless chicken breast, cut into ½ inch pieces
½ Red bell pepper, sliced into matchsticks
1 Cup carrots, cut into matchsticks
1 Cup zucchini, cut into matchsticks
1 Cup broccoli
5-6 Asparagus stalks, cut into 1 ½ inch pieces
2 Cloves garlic, minced fine or 1/2 tsp The Bean & The Leaf Organic Granulated Garlic
¾ Cup water
2 Tbsp Low sodium soy sauce, or Braggs Liquid Aminos
2 Tbsp Arrowroot Powder another type of starch
½ to 1 tsp The Bean & The Leaf Crushed Red Pepper Flakes depending on how spicy you want it.
¼ Cup unsalted peanuts
Scallions, sliced (optional)
Rice to serve with - ½ Cup per person (optional)

Directions:

Add 2 Tbsp Arrowroot Powder or other starch to ¾ Cup water. Set aside.
In a wok or a skillet, heat 2 Tbsp vegetable oil to medium-high.
Add The Bean & The Leaf Chinese Five Spice powder to the chicken cubes and mix well.
Add seasoned chicken to the wok or skillet.
When the chicken is almost browned on the out side (after cooking about 2 minutes), add carrots and asparagus and cook for 2-3 minutes. Then add the zucchini and bell pepper, and garlic. Cook for 3-4 minutes.
Add peanuts, soy sauce, and Arrowroot/Starch slurry and mix well. Cook another 5 minutes.

Serve with rice and garnish with scallions and Enjoy!!!