Mmm… that looks great doesn’t it? Tell you what, since we like you we’re going to share something we cooked up tonight, a great recipe with fresh herbs that tastes AWESOME. Don’t forget your wok!

This recipe comes out of Cook’s Library Wok & StirFry book (ISBN 0-75259-957-7) that I snagged 2 weeks ago. I wanted to make this dish then but had trouble finding fresh red chilies. I settled for dried. It’s the sweet chili sauce that makes this dish though, so make sure you get a good one.

The full ingredient list is:

• 8 chicken drumsticks
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp sunflower oil
• 1 fresh chile, seeded and chopped
• 1 large carrot, cut into thin sticks
• 6 celery stalks, cut into sticks
• 3 tbsp sweet chili sauce
• oil, for cooking
• about 50 fresh basil leaves

We were thawing our chicken in the sink so we went ahead and prepared the chile, carrot and celery. You don’t necessarily need to prepare the veggies ahead of time as you have plenty of time to prepare them while the chicken is cooking. One advantage to doing them ahead of time is that you can use the time between turning the chicken to clean up after yourself. I cooked it, ate it, and cleaned up all under 2 hours. This recipe fed Todd, Bryce and myself and still had enough left for one hearty or two lite leftover meals.

Chef Todd helped out with most of the prep, skinning the chicken and using his kung-fu jullienne skills to make everything was tight. Then we fired up the wok.

While that was heating up we cut 3 slashes in each drumstick and threw them all in the wok once it got nice and hot with the sunflower oil.

One thing I learned while cooking this is to make it on medium heat because the medium high heat that I used caused the legs to stick to the pot. Keeping a lower heat and cooking the chicken longer makes the dish look neater, but I was hungry and probably rushed it a bit. You want to keep the heat low and the pan wet with oil or water so that you can turn the chicken every few minutes without it tearing apart when you do so. The book said to cook the chicken for 20 minutes or until done; in my case 25 minutes wasn’t enough for some of the bigger legs. You want to make sure the legs are cooked throughout because you don’t want to overcook the vegetables while you finish the legs. The bones are going to make it take a long time on some of the thicker drumsticks.

About 10 minutes after starting the chicken I decided I wanted to serve a little side with this and dug up some Thai rice noodles. I grabbed a pot out and set it up no the stove while I let the rice noodles soak in cool water. The secret to good rice noodles (and Pad Thai!!) is to let the noodles soak overnight, but I was improvising so I let them soak as long as I could.

When the chicken is done, add the celery, chile and carrot and cook for 5 minutes. At this point the noodle water was boiling so I threw them in.  Pour the chili sauce around an let simmer while you fry the basil leaves.

You want to use very little oil in a small sauce pan on med-high heat for the basil leaves. Only throw them in the pan long enough so that they start to curl a little bit. If you have too much oil in the pan they will get all wet and look like spinach. Just enough to coat the pan. Soon as they start to curl throw the whole bit onto a towel.

Drain the noodles, throw the chicken in what ever you are going to serve it in:

Bon appetit!

That’s Todd P getting down on this delish dish, definitely one of the best things I’ve made in a while. Next time I’ll probably add more carrots and chili sauce cause the meat/veggie ratio was skewed toward the chicken. Those were some big ass drumsticks!

Altogether it was a great recipe and one we will most certainly be making again. Hope you enjoy!