cantonese lemon chicken

So, it’s not all tasty adventures for our week in Food and Drink-land. We had a recipe fail on our hands this past week as well. The current Spring 2013 issue features a recipe for Cantonese Lemon Chicken which sounded great. I really enjoy making my own Chinese take-out classics at home. I understand they aren’t always what you can expect from the restaurant (which is usually a good thing b/c I like to leave out deep fried food and MSG when possible). Healthier, lighter, fresh and homemade are the way to go in my home.
The recipe takes chunks of marinated pieces of chicken breast coated in panko and scallions and then oven baked. That wasn’t the fail part (but a little more salt would have certainly helped), the odd sauce was the kicker. The sauce looks and tastes a lot like lemon meringue pie filling. It might be me, but I could not get the balance between sweet/tart/savoury to work not matter what I did. Scallions seemed to take the sauce from dessert to dinner so it was edible. But Owen shuttered at the taste of the sauce and ate mostly chicken and rice (and hardly any at that).

This past week has shown me there is loads of potential with this magazine, and just like any other cookbook, magazine or website there are great recipes and some which just don’t work based on technique or maybe they just aren’t to your tastes. Food and Drink features a collection of recipes from multiple sources, some which just don’t seem reliable. And that’s the reason I love Everyday Food - they work in a test kitchen which simplifies cooking techniques and gives you a little bit of ‘food insurance’ making each new recipe a likely success. You know they’ve been tested and refined to succeed.