Kung Pao Chicken

Chinese is another type of food that has a few tricks you need to learn, but once you have you can cook most dishes better than the Chinese restaurants. Getting them to be very authentic is another matter and takes some time and a few strange ingredients. This recipe, originally by Fuschia Dunlop on her travels to China, is a good one, and my version is slightly Americanized due to several ingredient substitutions. But it's delicious, and I did have the Sichuan peppercorn in the pantry which gives it a distinctive flavor.