Orange Chicken – YUMMY!

I love orange chicken and I always thought it was really hard to make.  But lately I’ve been taking myself out of my cooking comfort zone and trying new things.  I’ve been lucky that the majority of my adventures have worked out really well and I’ve been adding some new meal ideas to my rotation of dinners. 🙂  So once again I searched recipes to find one that I could make with what I had in my kitchen but that was also rated high on the yummy scale!  I found THIS gem on the BlogChef site and figured I’d give it a try, adapting it to what I have. 🙂

For the chicken itself, I used my Copy cat Chick Fil A recipe.  I got those marinated and fried up and transferred them to my crock pot that was set to warm.  The Orange Sauce only takes about ten minutes to make…barring any tragedies, but we’ll get to that in just a min.

Orange Sauce

In a sauce pan combine:

1 1/2 cups water

1/4 cup lemon juice

2 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce

2 tablespoons orange juice concentrate

Stir well at medium heat for a few minutes.  

At this point I wanted to have some pictures of just the sauce for you, however my darling 3 year old decided to run head first into the corner of the couch and bust his head open.  Needless to say the sauce had to go on the back burner, literally, for a little bit.

Then add:

1 cup packed brown sugar

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon minced garlic

1 tablespoon orange zest

2 tablespoons green onion, chopped

Sprinkling of chili powder to taste (add more if you like spicy! :-))

While you are bringing that to a slow boil mix 1/4 cup of water with 3 tablespoons of cornstarch.

Reduce heat on sauce and slowly add cornstarch mixture while stirring to desired thickness.  I wanted it to be thick so I used the whole mixture.  Stir well and pour over chicken nuggets in the crock pot. 

Serve over rice or noodles and enjoy!

We all REALLY liked it!  Josh commented that it wasn’t as tart as Panda Express and that he would prefer a little more “hot” next time.  R liked the chicken but didn’t like the sauce on his rice.  H gobbled it up and kind of played in the rice.  C didn’t eat hardly any…but he had a head injury so he gets a pass. 🙂  Definitely one we will be making again…soon! 🙂

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