Three factors came in to play tonight. 1) When I got home from the gym tonight, I was tired and absolutely did not want to cook 2) I'm a little tired of Eatzi's, and 3) Ming Place just opened, finally.
Ming Place is an Asian Bistro that has been threatening to open for months now. They put the sign up long before it was kind to do so. It has been taunting us. We have been dying for decent Chinese food out here, and we pass this restaurant every time we go to and from the gym. Tonight when we drove past, I saw the open sign and actually squealed with excitement. We were too smelly to go inside on the way home from the gym, so we went home and looked up the menu. Yes! Take out.
Chinese take out is absolutely not the healthiest thing one can order. Fortunately the restaurant offers brown rice as a substitution for the steamed white rice, and we ordered Edamame on the side. I ordered the Mandarin Kung Pao Chicken (fortunately they don't fry it here - ew), and Gary ordered the Hunan Chicken.
One trick that has worked for me with this kind of food is portion control. I ate enough, and left half of the rice and half of the chicken mixture alone; I set it aside for my next project.
I was feeling super lazy. At first I thought I might try to cook some Chicken Shawarma tonight to bring for lunch tomorrow at work, but that requires a little bit of actual cooking. No dice. After all, I still have to make some diet muffins for the rest of the week. I'll make Chicken Shawarma tomorrow night after my run. Instead I decided to alter my leftovers.
I am not a huge fan of bell peppers, and that seemed to make up about 50% of my leftover kung pao chicken - ew. I stuck a few in the food processor to make them more palatable, and tossed the rest.
I decided to add more healthy things that I actually do like, and fill out the dish a little bit. I cut up an onion and threw it on the stove with some garlic. Yes, Squeeze Garlic.
I also decided to add some matchstick carrots and some extra water chestnuts. Clearly these restaurant people didn't know what they were doing - they didn't add nearly enough water chestnuts.
I put the bell pepper mixture on top of the onions and let that cook for a bit. I added a couple of teaspoons of low sodium soy sauce and some low sodium, low fat chicken broth to the pan. I threw the chicken on top, added the carrots and water chestnuts, and stirred it all together to let the flavors mingle.
Because I'm one of those people who likes to mix everything together so that I can get a little bit of every flavor in each bite, I went ahead and mixed the rice in with the rest and made a kind of stir fry, minus the "fry". Suddenly I had a nice, big, healthy serving for lunch tomorrow that just barely fit into the tupperware.
Super Yum.
Update: Kind of burned my muffins because I finally watched last week's Grey's Anatomy. :(
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