Sweet Chili Chicken was fun to make! And very tasty.
For us, it was the third and final meal from our Blue Apron box for that week. (Here are the others: Empanadas, and Brown Butter Gnocchi.)
This recipe included something I’d never used before: Coconut milk powder. (I’d also never personally used tinkerbell peppers or ponzu sauce, but those were more recognizable.)
All the innards
Another cool thing: For whatever reason, the green beans that were supposed to come in this grouping were replaced by snow peas. There was a very nice, formal-looking card that explained this substitution. I like how Blue Apron strives to ensure that we get quality goods.
Plus, we like snow peas. So does our guinea pig.
I probably started this a little early, but I wanted to get the rice going, so I dumped the coconut milk powder into a saucepan:
Nothing to see here, just coconut milk powder hanging out
And started up the jasmine rice (with water) so that it eventually looked like this, though not as sticky as it also kind of looks:
Really pretty and fragrant, I thought
While in the meantime, I was furiously chopping veggies.
Results of the choppening
Meanwhile to that, on another board with another knife, the chicken was being prepared so that it soon looked like this:
The chickening
And with the addition of garlic, ginger, and the white ends of scallions, it soon looked like this:
Look at that, all nice and unstirred for the moment
But oh! We get to add the sweet chili sauce (hence the name) and the ponzu, so that the whole mass of yum then looked like this:
You can imagine how good the kitchen smelled by then
The rice having been done and patiently waiting all this time, the moment the final bubble in the chicken and vegetable mixture was done bubbling, we swept it all into bowls for the mini-feast.
Yes. Delicious. I’d make it again. Since you get to keep the in-your-face recipe (plus you can find it online at BlueApron.com), that takes the guesswork out of your next grocery shopping excursion.
We enjoyed very much our trial run of Blue Apron. In the end, it came down to us realizing that we were perfectly capable of getting our own ingredients; we just needed a bit of a nudge to stop sticking always to the easy course (which alas, includes carry-out), and to start being smarter about what we’re exchanging our money for.
This is not to say we won’t try Blue Apron again–the meals are so tempting, and the service is impeccable!
Author Becky Benishek 