Quick Asian Chicken Stir fry

One of the nice things about being at my parent's house is that there's always food in the fridge, and it's always a surprise - so it can be fun to open it up and on the spot decide what to make. After rummaging around for a bit I decided that I would just do a quick stir fry/fried rice... I guess it was kind of a hybrid... I don't like labels. 

To start, I grabbed some Uncle Ben's white rice and used 1/2 cup of rice, 1 1/3 cups of water, brought it to a boil, and then let it simmer for roughly 20 minutes. As the rice was cooking I started on the chicken.

I am a very inpatient cooker, so when cooking anything in the pan I usually dice it up first so it cooks faster. I know that if I were to cook it whole and then slice it the meat would be juicier, but honestly as long as you don't overcook the meat I think it still turns out fine. 

After I diced up the chicken I added soy sauce, garlic salt, pepper, cayenne pepper, red pepper flakes, and ginger. I mixed everything up together, and then I put the chicken into a nonstick pan with just a little bit of EVOO and started cooking it on medium heat.

Also, whenever cooking chicken I always cover the pan. This helps the meat to cook faster - which I love. 

While my chicken started to cook, I quickly diced up some red onion, and washed off some snap peas. Fried rice is great because you can pretty much add whatever veggies or meat you want to it. Sometimes when I make fried rice/stir fry I add diced squash and zucchini, pretty much whatever I have in the fridge. 

I waited for the chicken to appear cooked (I don't want to add veggies to the pan while I can still see raw chicken, so I just waited until both sides were white... the chicken was still a little pink in the center) and then added the veggies to the pan.

I re-covered the pan and let everything continue to cook. By this time my rice was done cooking, so I scooped out the rice and added it to my chicken and veg. 

After I added the rice I also added a little bit more soy sauce, and some more of the seasoning I had used on the chicken. This helps to add more flavor and tie everything together. 

After adding more seasoning, mix everything together and just let it cook for another minute or so. 

Dump everything into a bowl and poof! - lunch is served! This is a very healthy and still filling lunch. If I had more time I would have used brown rice instead of white, and I would have preferred to use low sodium soy sauce, but I had to work with what I had. 

Whenever I am super hungry and low on time I love to make a quick fried rice with chicken or beef. One thing I recommend everyone to keep in their kitchen is the bags of Uncle Ben's rice. Uncle Ben's makes these little packages of rice, sold individually, that take 90 seconds in the microwave to cook. Whenever I don't have 20 - 30 minutes to make rice, I will just use a package of the vegetable rice and then add the meat to it. It cuts back a lot on the time and tastes just as good!