Nothing about this dish is festive, most of it is chicken, and, surprisingly, it is a delight.
There is one non-bar restaurant in Meadville, Pennsylvania. That restaurant is one of few places in town that you can sit down to eat and not be reminded of being packed into the same room on many nights prior to drink Yuengling and listen to DJ Gatorfeet (who you know better as Jay from Bio 210) spin throwbacks to 2012. The carpet stains and their lingering smells pull imagery of college stupidity back from the dead just in time to ruin your meal. For an escape from those late night haunts and the only dining hall on campus, Allegheny College students (myself included from 2012 to 2016) head to Grace Asian Restaurant.
Grace Asian sits within what is known as Downtown Meadville, but feels like it is at the edge of the inhabited part of the town. On the streets surrounding the restaurant, there is a handful of bars, a decidedly cool brewery, and a few local storefronts. Past the restaurant, there is not much besides fast food joints, grocery stores, and the exit to the highway. As far as ethnic food goes, Grace Asian Restaurant is the only option. It is a small, family run operation that serves a multitude of Asian cuisines - well, Americanized Asian cuisines - and as John Walton on Google Reviews put it, “I think it’s the best Chinese food in town and not a buffet, which is a nice change.” I can’t believe I forgot to mention all of the wonderful Chinese buffets Meadville and the surrounding towns have to offer…
I won't go as far as some of the people on Google Reviews have gone to condem this place, in fact, all of the meals I've ever had at Grace’s were good though I never ventured into the bathroom. It is an Allegheny student staple that I will not take away from them. I’m just sayin’, as far as authentic Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese food is concerned, Grace Asian isn’t serving that - and they know it. They are simply appealing to their audience - Americans. And more specifically, the Midwest. (Don’t @ me Western Pennsylvanians)
The dish I made for today’s post, Festive Chicken Delight, seems like it was pulled directly from the minds of a Midwestern crowd that has an affinity for inauthentic Asian food. This dish happens to have an inauthentic name that I wouldn’t be surprised to see on the menu at a Grace Asian-type establishment either. The title seems to answer the question, “How do we make a dish with curry powder appeal to those who are turned off by non-English words?” while the horrifying amount of ketchup in the dish answers, “How do we make curry powder accessible to white people?”
White people love their chunks-of-deep-fried-meat-drowning-in-sugary-sauce-with-two-cups-of-white-rice meals. We prefer as much meat and sauce that can be crammed into a styrofoam takeout box with white rice ON THE SIDE to maximize the portions of both meat and rice. Don’t worry about us not having balanced diets, though. The restaurant is kind enough to include five pieces of julienned red peppers and a handful of fried onions to each order to give us the illusion of vegetables without crowding out prime chicken real estate.
Festive Chicken Delight fits all of the above descriptors making it a surprisingly delicious meal. It had chicken, a very small amount of onions and peppers, and was served with more rice than necessary. After cutting the chicken into cubes and dicing the veggies, there was little work to do. Simply, lightly flour and brown the chicken, brown the veggies, douse everything in ketchup and spices (curry powder and thyme) then bake in a dutch oven. Nothing about two cups of ketchup and a handful of spices over chicken seemed festive or delightful when I started cooking, but once I pulled the mix out of the oven and served it with a ring of rice around it (a 1960’s food staple I was unaware of) it was pretty delicious! So much so that I even ate it for lunch for three days this week. And I am happy to report that it did not taste like a whole bottle of ketchup.
While it was in the oven, I started to notice a distinct yet unnameable smell fill my apartment. It was tangy and herby, but not thick. It smelled like something from my childhood and after a first bite I knew it what it was- Worchester sauce. The immediate tang of the ketchup with the subtle, lingering depth of the curry and thyme morphed into a near-perfect replica of Worcester, in taste alone. The thickness of the sauce lent itself to be more comparable to orange chicken, though. All together, the sauce was akin to many Americanized Chinese dishes - tangy, goopy, sweet, with a very, very, very mild burn thanks to the curry powder. If I had breaded and deep fried the chicken before placing it in the sauce, it would be right at home in a spread with one of the many other chicken + tangy sauce dishes my friends and I used to order from Grace Asian.
My only complaint, er, point of tension with this dish, arose while preparing the chicken. I’ve said before that I am not very comfortable cooking meat...yet. I pray to the great chefs of Southern New Jersey that by the time I cook through this book that I am more comfortable handling raw meat. That being said, I keep finding new ways to gross myself out while handling the meat in these dishes. What I discovered during this cook is that lightly floured chicken chunks look exactly like Turkish Delight. If I put them in a perfectly symmetrical pile and hired a man to stand behind with tongs calling out to American girls that it was the “the best Turkish Delight in the world, my dear” I could have an extremely successful booth at any bazaar. I even think it could’ve easily tricked that Turkish Delight fiend from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Edwin?) into selling his whole family out to the White Witch for it, just to get a mouthful of raw chicken (something that dummy deserves for being so motivated by mediocre sweets).
Overall, there’s nothing wrong with this dish. Or any of the “Chinese food” us Americans love so dearly. I can’t say that I will make this again, but I can say with 100% certainty that I would never order something called Festive Chicken Delight at any restaurant. The lack of description in the title makes me feel as though I’m being tricked into eating something I would otherwise avoid, though I know better now. It's like how school cafeterias serve “Meatloaf Surprise!” once a month. Surprise! You’re eating those gray hot dogs no one wanted last Tuesday - repurposed as a loaf! Delightful. For the Salem County Cookbook reboot I’ll be sure to sell the editor on a new title for this recipe. I’m thinking “Ketchupy chicken… trust me its good!”
For the recipe, click here.