Magazine Recipe: Healthy Vegan Tangy & Spicy Chickenless Chicken

Here is a link to the original recipe in Real Simple magazine.
2 c brown rice dry, with 5 c water in rice cooker
1 box quorn chickenless chicken nuggets (frozen)
½ c apricot preserves
2 T cider vinegar
2 T bragg (amino acids, healthier than soy sauce)
2 t grated fresh ginger (but how can you measure fresh ginger? Just eye it)
olive oil
6 stalks celery, thinly sliced
25 snow peas, ends removed
2 jalapenos
4 cloves garlic, sliced
6 green onions, thinly sliced

Cook the rice however you usually cook rice. The notes above work for my rice cooker, but I assume, like all kitchen appliances, that they all have their own quirks, so you can use the notes above if you are cooking the rice at my house.
Meanwhile, bake the chickenless nuggets, 10 minutes on each side. If you are using Quorn, there will be 14 nuggets. There always are. You don’t have to be a vegetarian to eat chickenless nuggets. They just seem a bit healthier, or maybe just less cruel than supporting the companies that inhumanely raise the chickens whose chicken parts end up in other brands of frozen chicken nuggets. And yes, this section of the meal does call for some processed food, but that’s what makes this meal easy and achievable on a weeknight, rather than spending a bunch of time cutting up the meat from a local free-range organic chicken, making homemade bread crumbs, and creating your own chicken nuggets. I have done that, by the way, and believe me, when you go to that much work you end up creating something very delicious that you don’t want to taint with rice and cider vinegar and soy sauce. But I digress…..
In a bowl, whisk together the apricot preserves, bragg, vinegar and ginger. This is fun when you have a cool colorful whisk with curly cue ends on it, like I’ve got. Also, I have been cooking a lot lately with apricot preserves. The Quorn chickenless chicken nuggets, for example, have a recipe for a dipping sauce on the back, which is ½ apricot preserves, ½ bbq sauce (I’ve been using Sweet Baby Ray’s Sweet & Spicy lately) and some fresh ginger. I’ll use ginger powder if I’m out of fresh ginger. It makes a great sauce.
Anyway, Heat the oil in a large skillet over med-hi heat. Add the celery & carrots and stir it up. After a couple of minutes, add the snow peas, jalapeno, green onions and garlic.
Note- I got some snow peas from the farmer’s market and rinsed them and tossed them in the dish, and then I learned that you’re supposed to remove the ends. So, I learned something, and if you didn’t know you were supposed to do that either, than you just learned something too!
Another note- I always put a non-latex glove on my left hand when I cut up jalapenos. Because I hold the peppers with my left hand while holding the knife with my right hand. Because the first time I cut jalapenos I didn’t wear a glove and I felt a constant flame coming out of my palm for the rest of the evening, no matter how many times I washed my hand. It was an invisible flame, and I couldn’t light a candle with it, but it was there, I’m telling you.
When the garlic starts to brown (you might need to turn the heat up), add the cooked chickenless nugs, the sauce, and toss it all together well. You don’t want to add the nugs too soon or the breading layer will come off of them.
Now, your choice- you can serve it scooped on top of the rice, or you can dump the rice into the skillet and mix it all up.

Eat it, like it, and then comment on by blog how much you liked it.