Gutsy Cooks Club #25 Sweet & Sour Chicken

This week's Gutsy Cooks Club Asian inspired menu was one I'd been looking forward to making. We love to eat & make a wide variety of Asian dishes. One thing we have never made is Sweet & Sour Chicken. I had been thinking that I really wanted to make this recipe minus the batter and deep frying of the chicken to be slightly more on the healthy side but in the end I went with the recipe.

We decided to round out the meal with some Chinese BBQ fresh from Costco & some homemade spring rolls made by one of my parents who made to sell as a fundraiser for our school. We decided to bake them as opposed to frying them.

G ran to the store to pick up some canned pineapple, scallions and a red bell pepper the only ingredients we were lacking to make the chicken. I gathered the long list of items needed and got started.

First I started by making the beer batter for the chicken following Monica's suggestion to sub baking soda for the baking powder.

I then put together the sweet & sour sauce.

I heated the vegetable oil to 350 degrees using my candy thermometer. We then dipped and fried our chicken pieces after the batter sat for 30 minutes.

I was pretty excited when the chicken came out looking pretty yummy looking.

Next, I sauteed the pineapple, scallions and red pepper. Added the sauce and then the chicken.

We used a dark mushroom soy sauce that we bought at one of our local Asian markets that is very yummy but also made the sauce a little darker than I wanted.

We have our Chinese inspired meal with a bottle of  Oregon O'Reilly's pinot gris that G picked up on his trip to pick up the last few ingredients. O'Reilly's is made by another one of favorite Oregon wineries Owen Roe.

The chicken was good, the sauce was tasty but I forgot to put on the blanched almonds at the end I even had them measured out ready to go just got distracted I suppose.

Next time I'm going to go with my gut and skip the deep fried step and I predict it will be pretty good that way too!