James Chan was up out of his seat before I got within 10 paces of his table at a dim sum place on Washington Avenue. He wanted to tell me about a favorite recipe of his, peanut vinegar chicken. A friend was making a YouTube video of it. (To see it, go to http://go.philly.com/chan.)
Chan is a business consultant, and a more than merely avid Chinese home cook. He is something of an evangelist on the subject: When he has a winner, he wants to share it with the world.
So, yes, I said, please e-mail me the peanut vinegar chicken recipe. And he did. And it is just terrific; I made it a few Sundays ago, improvising on some of the ingredients. I used the raw cashews I had instead of peanuts, and a few dashes of sriracha chile sauce to substitute for the red chile peppers.
I can guarantee I'll be making it again, the tender chicken mildly sour from the vinegar, the nuts chewy, the scallions crisp: It's hard to stop eating once you get going.
It's a joy to find a recipe like this, to add it to the repertoire of things you make again and again - cooking that is doable, understandable, affordable, flavorful, and a few degrees off the usual.
Things like spinach-mushroom lasagna or Kansas City steak soup, five-ingredient chicken paprikash or simple Provençal fish stew. Peanut Vinegar Chicken will fit nicely in the lineup, a new recruit.
I asked James Chan how he came across it. He found it, he said, in a book on regional Chinese cooking by Kenneth H.C. Lo that he picked up in a shopping mall in the 1980s. He later gave the cookbook away to a client, and it's now out of print. But he'd made the recipe so frequently by then that he'd memorized it.
He has made it more than 200 times over the last 20 years, always to great applause. It takes five minutes to cook - well, after a fair amount of prep work.
The one small downside? Guests have been known to flee the house during the sizzling of the hot red chile peppers; they give off something akin to pepper-spray fumes.
Be sure, he says, to put on the kitchen fan.
Or do what I did: Squirt in a little hot sauce instead.
