Chicken Lettuce Wraps

These chicken lettuce wraps are brought to you by Steve's intuition. He made me some shrimp lettuce wraps when I was studying for my qualifying exam during my first year of grad school (and even delivered them to my apartment!) Without making them again since then, he somehow knew the perfect combination of sauces to make these incredibly delectable.  Here's a little something to get you going:

peeking in the side! oh hi!

Reasons these are just dandy:

1. Very little time is required to prep and cook 'em.
2. The cool, crunchy lettuce makes them very refreshing and offsets the heat of the insides.
3. The innards can be heated up in the microwave, and the leftovers will taste as good as the first meal.
4. The roasted nuts are provide an incredible contrast in texture to the juicy, tender chicken and the crunchy lettuce.
5. The ingredients each provide a unique flavor: sweet corn, salty nuts, savory sauce, bright green onions, and omg cilantro.
6. I think they're healthy? Ish?

rotated 90 degrees, so ... mugshot?

To make these, Steve started out by heating up some olive oil and black sesame oil in a large frying pan on medium heat. A wok would have also been great, but I guess he didn't feel like getting that out. He added maybe a cup of peanuts and roasted those for a couple minutes. Then, he added diced onions and chicken that had been cut into small cubes.  (Otherwise, you can use ground meat, shrimp, or whatever you think sounds good).  He added some ginger and garlic powders to the top and let the mixture cook until the chicken was almost done.

To create the sauce, he added a tablespoon of hoisin, a tablespoon of oyster sauce, a tablespoon of chu hou paste, and two tablespoons of rice wine.  (If you want this to be gluten-free, make sure to keep an eye on the ingredients in those sauces) Next, he added shredded carrots and corn kernels (these were the only suitable vegetables we had) and salt.  Once the chicken had cooked (but not overcooked!), he turned off the heat and added chopped green onions and cilantro.

Finally, we scooped the goodness into pieces of washed and dried iceberg lettuce. Iceberg lettuce is kind of nutritionally pointless but is a great (non-carb) vehicle for slightly messy food.  By the way, don't rip your pieces of lettuce! Try to keep the pieces as large as possible so that it contains more of the sauce. Hold it horizontally to eat it, and make sure you have a plate underneath!