EATING STELLA STYLE - by George Stella

Tell us which recipes you've tried from this book and what you thought of them, whether they were great or duds. Don't post the actual recipes here because of copyright issues. If you've tweaked one of the recipes to come up with your own version, feel free to post it in the recipes section at the top of this forum.

NOTE: Let's use a separate thread for each cookbook that we review.

General Tso's Chicken

I wasn't sure how many oranges I'd need to get 2 tablespoons of orange zest. It turned out that 1 medium orange yields about 1 tablespoon. Since I only bought 1 orange, I used just 1 tablespoon of zest. I think it was plenty. Any more would have made the dish too bitter. I also think this could use more sweetener. The General Tso's chicken I've had in restaurants is much sweeter than this. I think I'd use 2 tablespoons of Splenda instead of just one. Although this tastes pretty good, it doesn't taste all that much like what I've had in restaurants. Perhaps extra sweetener would help.

There was a slight problem with the recipe as George wrote it. He said to drain the chicken and reserve the marinade. There isn't enough marinade to drain. It all clings to the chicken so I dumped it into the wok, marinade and all. It worked just fine that way. I also added a tiny bit of xanthan gum to make the little bit of sauce glaze the chicken better. It really wasn't terribly necessary though. I've adjusted George's cooking time a little too. The chicken really doesn't need all of the 4 minutes of cooking in the last step.