I had a big time jones for some Chinese takeout. General Tso's chicken, in particular. Which starts with tempura chicken. And tempura chicken is also what the girls like from the Chinese takeout.
I got curious, consulted my stained and well thumbed Joy of Cooking and discovered it's about as easy as food gets.
Whisk together:
1 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
Whisk in a separate bowl:
1 cup cold water
1 egg
until the egg is thorougly dissolved, then add to the dry ingredients and stir until just incorporated.
Dip stuff in it and drop into hot oil and that's all there is to it. Well, you have to fish the stuff out of the oil at some point, put it on paper towels to drain.
The girls ate this stuff with gusto, too. Em declared that tempura fried chicken should be the only kind of fried chicken (I can't go that far, it's good, but regular fried chicken rocks pretty hard).
I had batter leftover, so I made onion rings, which turn out to use the exact same batter recipe. I found the batter didn't want to adhere to the onions, though. Browsing the cookbook and experimenting I found the trick: dip the onion in buttermilk, dredge in flour and then dip in the batter.
It's important to serve it with lots of leafy green stuff to assuage your guilt.
No I have to learn to make the sauce for General Tso's. The chicken was too good as-is and I was too hungry to get very far down that road.
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