Easy Velveted Chicken Stir Fry

The long-distance is settling into a pattern. Not the pattern I wanted — not the easy, seamless, love-conquers-all pattern that movies promise — but a real pattern, the kind that has gaps and static and the particular loneliness of hearing someone's voice through a phone and knowing that the voice is all you get. Jason calls most nights. Some nights he doesn't. The nights he doesn't are harder than I expected — not because I need the call, but because the absence of the call is a small reminder that his life is happening without me, that he has a crew and a routine and a kitchen and a city that doesn't include me except as a voice on the other end of a line.

I'm not jealous. I'm not suspicious. I'm something worse: I'm irrelevant to the daily texture of his life, and he's becoming irrelevant to mine, and the irrelevance is not dramatic enough to fight about, not painful enough to cry about, just a slow fading, like a photograph left in sunlight, the colors washing out so gradually that you don't notice until one day you look and the image is pale and you can't remember when it was vivid.

I talked to Dr. Reeves about the fading. She said, "What do you want to do?" I said, "I want to want him the way I wanted him when he was here." She said, "You can't want someone into proximity." This is the kind of sentence that I will think about at 3 AM for the next three weeks.

I made bistek — Filipino beef steak, thin-sliced beef marinated in soy sauce and calamansi, pan-fried with onions until the onions are sweet and the beef is caramelized and the whole plate shines with the glaze of soy and citrus. Bistek is Reynaldo's dish — the thing my father made on weeknights, the easy weeknight dinner of a man who worked at a hospital all day and came home and cooked because cooking was love and love was daily, not occasional, not special-occasion, daily. I made it in the same pan Lourdes gave me, the cast iron she seasoned for twenty years, and I thought about daily love — the love that shows up on a Tuesday with a pan of bistek, the love that doesn't announce itself because it doesn't need to, the love that is the pan, the oil, the garlic, the showing up.

Jason's love is not daily anymore. Jason's love is a phone call from Fairbanks, intermittent and well-intentioned and three hundred sixty miles from the pan.

I didn’t have the calamansi for bistek that night — I’d used the last of them, and the store felt too far, and honestly I didn’t want to drive anywhere after talking to Dr. Reeves. So I did the next closest thing: I pulled out Lourdes’s cast iron, I velveted some chicken the way I’d seen done in a dozen weeknight kitchens, and I made a stir fry that had the same energy as Reynaldo’s bistek — the soy, the garlic, the heat, the smell of something real happening in a real kitchen. It wasn’t the dish I wanted. But it was the dish I made, and I made it, and that counted for something.

Prep Time: 20 min | Cook Time: 15 min | Total Time: 35 min | Servings: 4

Ingredients

1 lb boneless, skinless chicken breast, thinly sliced against the grain
1 egg white
2 tablespoons cornstarch, divided
3 tablespoons soy sauce, divided
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons vegetable oil, divided
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon fresh ginger, grated
1 cup broccoli florets
1 red bell pepper, thinly sliced
1/2 cup snap peas, trimmed
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1/4 cup low-sodium chicken broth
Salt and white pepper to taste
Cooked white rice, for serving

Instructions

Velvet the chicken. In a bowl, combine the sliced chicken with the egg white, 1 tablespoon cornstarch, 1 tablespoon soy sauce, and baking soda. Toss well to coat, then let marinate for at least 15 minutes at room temperature. The baking soda raises the pH slightly and is what gives velveted chicken its signature silky texture.
Make the sauce. In a small bowl, whisk together the remaining 2 tablespoons soy sauce, oyster sauce, chicken broth, sesame oil, and remaining 1 tablespoon cornstarch until smooth. Set aside.
Sear the chicken. Heat 1 tablespoon vegetable oil in a large wok or cast iron skillet over high heat until shimmering. Add the chicken in a single layer — resist the urge to stir immediately. Let it sear undisturbed for 60 to 90 seconds, then stir-fry for another 2 to 3 minutes until just cooked through and lightly golden. Transfer to a plate.
Stir-fry the aromatics and vegetables. Add the remaining 1 tablespoon oil to the hot pan. Add garlic and ginger and stir-fry for 30 seconds until fragrant. Add the broccoli and bell pepper and stir-fry over high heat for 3 to 4 minutes until just tender-crisp. Add snap peas and cook 1 minute more.
Finish the dish. Return the chicken to the pan. Pour the sauce over everything and toss to coat. Stir-fry for 1 to 2 minutes until the sauce thickens and coats the chicken and vegetables in a glossy glaze. Season with salt and white pepper to taste.
Serve. Spoon over steamed white rice and serve immediately, straight from the pan, while it’s hot and shining.

Nutrition (per serving)

Easy Velveted Chicken Stir Fry — The Love That Shows Up on a Tuesday