The previous iteration found me trying to make a mango chicken curry, only the second time I had attempted curry. And boy did it turn out badly (I burned it). So this time, I went with a different approach and stuck with the methods with which I was raised and semi-trained: stir fry.
I prepared the marinade for the chicken by mincing the whites of three green onion stalks, four garlic cloves, and about one cubic inch of fresh ginger. I also diced two mangoes and about 1.5 pounds of chicken thigh, de-boned, de-skinned. But I did not throw out the bones or the skins (to be used later...the subtitle of this piece indicates the use of typically unwanted ingredients after all). Dicing the chicken as well, I combined all these ingredients in a marinating bowl and got my hands dirty mixing things up.
The stir fry needed only a little bit of oil, which was further heated up by the addition of some turmeric, cayenne, and white pepper. As soon as the spiced oil started to effervesce (and that happens very soon; you will be able to tell because you will start to smell the spices), the chicken-mango mixture should have been added. Do not make the mistake of letting the spices cook too long, or the organic compounds that give them flavor will start to escape the wok and you might find yourself sneezing/coughing/choking on airborne spice. Hindsight is 20-20.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has said before that humans create art for the very simple, primordial reason of pleasing each of our senses. There are paintings and sculptures to please our eyes, music to please our ears, perfumes to please our noses, soft fluffy things to please our fingers, and the culinary arts to please our tongues. As with any art, plating and presentation is probably half the battle, if not more. So how did I do for an amateur?
I mentioned at the beginning of this piece that I did not let the chicken skins or the chicken thigh bones go to waste. The leftover thighs I used for soup, to which I added the remaining Chinese green vegetables I had bought earlier in the week (not pictured). I used the chicken skins to revitalize some rice that had been sitting in the fridge for 2-3 days. This was done by adding the diced skins to a tiny bit of oil in the wok to release the oils from the skin, and then adding the rice to the wok as if fried rice was the goal. Of course, nothing else was added to the rice. It is not exactly healthy, but as they say: waste not want not. Right?
Here is the original recipe inspiration, with thanks to Barbara Triplett: http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/mango-chicken-over-rice.
