I’m using the ubiquitous copycat recipe for Mongolian Beef that presumes to replicate a recipe from the P. F. Chang restaurant (to which I have never been), but with pheasant breasts.
This is not a low sugar version, but I tried one of those a couple of weeks ago and it was bland and disappointing, so I’m making it today as it is meant to be made, with more sugar than I should be eating for dinner. There is a paleo version of Mongolian Beef that uses raw honey instead of brown sugar, but, take it from a diabetic, sugar is sugar. Read this article about “healthy” sugar and view the funny graphic that pokes fun at famous people who know nothing about sugar, but still give advice about it. If it’s too much sugar for you, make something else. If you are going to eat it, but shouldn’t, just skip dessert and be good tomorrow. I ate a normal-small portion with two vegetable egg rolls (next post).
Mongolian Pheasant
Sauce:
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon ginger, grated
1 tablespoon garlic, grated
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/2 cup water
3/4 cup brown sugar
- Heat the 2 teaspoons of oil over medium heat in small saucepan.
- Add ginger and garlic, stirring briefly until fragrant.
- Add soy sauce, water, and brown sugar, stirring until sugar dissolves and the mixture comes to a boil. Boil for a few minutes until thickened. Thickened must be a relative term here, because I boiled the sauce for more than five minutes and saw no evidence of thickening. In the end, it didn’t matter, but if you want more of a sticky sauce, I would leave out the 1/2 cup of water, gradually adding it to the boiling sauce until it reaches the desired thickness. Maybe 1/4 cup of water would work more quickly. Eventually, you could boil out the water, but it took much longer than recipes for this copycat dish suggest. Perhaps some people have no sense of time.
- Set saucepan aside.
Pheasant:
1 cup vegetable oil, for frying
1 lb pheasant breasts, sliced in 1/4″ strips
1/4 cup cornstarch
2 -3 green onions, sliced diagonally into one-inch lengths
- Coat pheasant strips with cornstarch and set aside while making sauce.
- In large frying pan, like a chicken fryer, or wok, heat the 1 cup of oil until hot over medium-high heat.
- Add strips of pheasant so that pieces do not touch. Working in batches, fry until lightly browned—this will happen quickly—then remove to platter until all the meat is browned.
- Pour off oil and return meat to pan. Stir in sauce and green onions and cook, stirring, for 2-3 minutes, until all the meat is coated.
- Serve with rice or noodles or neither if those extra carbs don’t suit you.
My husband loved it from the first bite, but then sugar and salt are tied for his top favorite food group. I think meat is a close second.
Kitchen Portfolio 