Pretty Great Garlic Chicken at Golden Star Chinese Restaurant in Salinas, California by Ruth Paget
One of my favorite Chinese food-as-medicine dishes is garlic chicken. At Golden Star Restaurant in Salinas (California), garlic chicken is especially delicious with the addition of seasonal, organic vegetables.
Golden Star’s garlic chicken is similar to the one by Teresa Shields makes on Allrecipes.com, which calls for:
1-Heating peanut oil in a wok and stir-frying garlic, ginger, and green onions. These vegetables are called the aromatics for flavoring the peanut oil.
2-Chicken pieces are added and stir-fried till opaque. More garlic is added and stir-fried.
3-Sweet onions, bell peppers, and cabbage are next added in and stir-fried. The onions and bell peppers are called seasonings and flavor the chicken and other vegetables.
4-At Golden Star, the restaurant adds thinly sliced carrots and mushrooms to the mixture above and stir-fries them.
5-A small amount of chicken broth is added next, and the wok is covered.
6-While the wok contents are steaming, the cook makes a sauce of chicken broth, soy sauce, a little sugar, and cornstarch. The cornstarch thickens the sauce. The sauce is added and stirred till steaming. The garlic chicken is served immediately with rice.
The combination of garlic and vegetables in this dish is delicious, especially the mushrooms which bring out the umami flavor in the garlic chicken.
Golden Star is an unpretentious neighborhood Chinese restaurant that makes use of the choice of 200+ vegetables grown in the Salinas Valley outside Salinas, California.
I initially went to Golden Star Chinese Restaurant to support a local business and loved how good the food was. Their large menu can accommodate just about all diners.
The food at Golden Star Chinese Restaurant is reasonably priced and merits a look on the online menu for interested potential customers.
By Ruth Paget
-author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France + 6 Kindle books
-developer of the Novgorod and Bento War Games and 8 Classical Western Civilization War Games
