Sesame Chicken with Cashews and Dates - a weeknight #recipe from @LeslieBudewitz

LESLIE BUDEWITZ: Mr. Right loves dates, so when I see them at Costco, I buy them. A windfall last fall led to several delicious recipes that I’ll share with you at the holiday season. And like Lucy, we’ve come to trust recipes by Melissa Clark in the New York Times. This recipe combined both! It took a little revision to smooth out the cooking process, but it all comes together quickly enough for a weeknight dinner. It’s absolutely delicious and we highly recommend it.

The Washington Post recently ran a piece on mise en place, the French method of laying out and measuring all your ingredients before you start cooking. If you’ve ever watched "America’s Test Kitchen," you’ve seen it in action – all those tiny prep bowls with a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of sugar, two crushed cloves of garlic. Makes sense on TV and in the professional kitchen. At home, not always. I call my method “mise sort of in place.” For a blog post, of course, we start with a shot of the ingredients. But often, you can prep one thing while something else is cooking. You don’t need to have everything chopped or grated before you turn on a burner.

But the principle came into play here. A stir-fry happens quickly, so you want everything ready. The original called for measuring out two kinds of liquid while stir-frying; that got a bit crazy, so we rewrote the order of ingredients and instructions to combine those before starting to cook, and made a few other similar changes. 

The original recipe called for boneless chicken thighs, skin on or off. I don’t care for them, so we used skinless chicken breasts and the flavor was great. We served it with roasted vegetables mixed with leftover vinaigrette from this Roasted Carrot and Lentil Salad, but any vegetable would do, especially one given an Asian flair. My copy of the recipe printed badly and I didn’t see that it was to be served over rice; we’ll do that next time, though we love sauces, so we might increase the amount of rice wine and soy sauce. 

And there will be a next time, sooner rather than later!

By the way, I finally figured out how to upload an easy to print PDF of the recipe -- link at the end of the recipe.

Sesame Chicken with Cashews and Dates

(adapted from Melissa Clark, for the NY Times) 

½ cup cashews, toasted (see below)

2 pounds skinless chicken breasts

1/3 cup rice wine or dry sherry

3 tablespoons soy sauce or tamari

4 tablespoons toasted sesame oil

a 2" piece of ginger, sliced thinly, or a tablespoon of grated ginger

6-8 cloves of garlic, peeled and smashed or minced

5-6 scallions or green onions, cut into 1" pieces, whites and greens

½ teaspoon red chile pepper flakes

4-5 pitted dates, thinly sliced or chopped

3 cups fresh basil or cilantro leaves, or a mix, cut in ribbons

additional rice wine vinegar or lemon juice, for serving (optional)

cooked rice, for serving (optional)

Heat oven to 300 degrees. Toast the cashews in a pie plate or other pan for about 5 minutes, or until they begin to turn golden. Remove from oven. Remember that they will continue to cook and darken as they cool. 

Slice or cut the chicken into 2-3" pieces. Season with salt and pepper. 

In a glass measuring cup or small bowl, mix the rice wine and soy sauce. Set aside. 

Heat a wok or large skillet over medium-high heat. Add 2 tablespoons of sesame oil and swirl to coat bottom of pan. Add the ginger, garlic, green onions, and chile pepper flakes. If the mixture splatters, lift it off the heat to cool the pan and reduce the heat. Use a spatula to stir-fry until the garlic is golden at the edges, 2-3 minutes. 

Add the remaining 2 tablespoons of oil, the cut chicken, and toasted cashews. Stir-fry until it begins to turn golden, 4-5 minutes. Pour in the rice wine and soy sauce mixture and add the dates. Simmer until the sauce reduces to a syrupy consistency and the chicken is cooked through, 5-7 minutes.

Stir in the herbs. Sprinkle with rice wine vinegar or lime juice and serve. Serve over cooked rice, if you’d like. 

Makes 4 servings.

Enjoy!

💕Click here for the 

free recipe PDF.

TO ERR IS CUMIN: A Spice Shop Mystery (Seventh St. Books, coming July 16, 2024 in paper, ebook, and audio)

From the cover: 

One person’s treasure is another’s trash. . .

Pepper Reece, owner of the Spice Shop in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, wants nothing more than to live a quiet life for a change, running her shop and working with customers eager to spice up their cooking. But when she finds an envelope stuffed with cash in a ratty old wingback left on the curb, she sets out to track down the owner.

Pepper soon concludes that the chair and its stash may belong to young Talia Cook, new in town and nowhere to be seen. Boz Bosworth, an unemployed chef Pepper’s tangled with in the past, shows up looking for the young woman, but Pepper refuses to help him search. When Boz is found floating in the Ship Canal, only a few blocks from Talia’s apartment, free furniture no longer seems like such a bargain.

On the hunt for Talia, Pepper discovers a web of connections threatening to ensnare her best customer. The more she probes, the harder it gets to tell who’s part of an unsavory scheme of corruption—and who might be the next victim.

Between her quest for an elusive herb, helping her parents remodel their new house, and setting up the Spice Shop’s first cooking class, Pepper’s got a full plate. Dogged by a sense of obligation to find the rightful owner of the hidden treasure, she keeps on showing up and asking questions.

One mistake, and she could find herself cashing out. . .

Available at Amazon  * Barnes & Noble  * Books-A-Million * Bookshop.org * And your local booksellers!

Leslie Budewitz is the author of the Spice Shop Mysteries set in Seattle's Pike Place Market, and the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries, set in NW Montana. As Alicia Beckman, she writes moody, standalone suspense, most recently Blind Faith. She is the winner of Agatha Awards in three categories: Best Nonfiction (2011), Best First Novel (2013), and Best Short Story (2018). Her latest book is Between a Wok and a Dead Place, the 7th Spice Shop mystery.  

A past president of Sisters in Crime and national board member of Mystery Writers of America, Leslie lives in northwest Montana with her husband, a musician and doctor of natural medicine, and their cat, an avid bird-watcher.

Swing by Leslie's website and join the mailing list for her seasonal newsletter. And join her on Facebook where she shares book news and giveaways from her writer friends, and talks about food, mysteries, and the things that inspire her.