Orange Chicken

Number Five requested Orange Chicken for Sunday dinner.

I don’t know why – the man’s got eclectic taste in food, which I try to encourage, because I worry about all the young people who won’t eat anything but chicken strips and hamburgers.

I think the ability to eat anything, or at least try anything, at least once, is a vastly underrated sign of adulthood.

The only problem is, I’d never made Orange Chicken.

Actually, there were a couple other problems. I’ve never been a huge fan of preparing Asian food for guests, because by and large it needs to be fresh, straight from the stove to the table. I like food I can make ahead of time, like soup or a hot dish. That way if I screw it up I can start over, or if it looks like it’s going to be edible I have time to freshen up my makeup, do my hair, put on a clean apron – all stuff I learned from watching Mrs. Cleaver in my youth.

Another issue was we were a little short of ingredients. For one thing, orange juice, without which the orange chicken would lack a certain something. I checked carefully and all I found were a couple bottles of frozen grape juice, left over from our grape harvest last fall.

Even for me, that would be a bridge too far in the substitution world. And that’s saying something. When I was growing up, my mom, who was busy either finishing college or teaching school, was not a slave to recipes. And living eight miles from the closest grocery store made things just a bit more complicated. During the dinner conversation, I mentioned an ingredient substitution I had considered. My daughter looked at me thoughtfully and said, “So, it IS genetic.”

Who can tell? Nature vs. Nurture; it’s often a close call. One of our family’s favorite stories involves my mom bringing us a hot dish to help out after my wife had been in a car accident. It was some sort of Mexican thing, and the recipe called for a topping of tortilla chips, which my mother did not have on hand. What she did have was an out-of-date package of dill pickle potato chips that weren’t moving, so she used them. That took the dish from Mexico to an entirely different ethnic tradition, based on the island called, “Eat it or starve.”

I went to town and got some orange juice and a few other items, then Sunday I set up my assembly line. I could have used a regular pan, but we do have a wok which sits on the back of the top shelf in a cupboard. We drag it out about once a decade, and Sunday was the day. Of course, our stove wasn’t made to balance a wok, but that’s a different story, possibly involving a home insurance deductible.

Anyway, I set up my bowl of chicken chunks, a pie tin of beaten eggs, another one with flour and cornstarch, the wok, a baking sheet lined with paper towels to drain off the grease, and the orange stuff you pour over the chicken for the finished product.

We did eat on time, and it was pretty good, but I dreaded going back out to the kitchen. Even by my standards, I’d made a mess, and that’s a pretty high bar. But everyone pitched in to help clean up, and the kitchen is more or less back to where it was, with the wok on the back of the top shelf.

Number Five does have other menu suggestions. Give me a few days to recover, and I’ll be back in the game.

Copyright 2026 Brent Olson