Kung Pao Chicken

Several people have been asking me about the Kung Pao Chicken we made with my friend David the other day. It's his recipe, really, I'll try to write it down for you as precisely as I can recall. With his permission and comments, here you go:

Obviously it's the one on the left. :-) The right pic is my favorite cold dish - cucumber with garlic and vinegar. 

You will need:
4 chicken breasts
Corn or potato starch - 5 tbsp
Soy sauce - half a cup (? Start with less, you can always add more to make it more saucy), a good one - for my czech friends, Maggi does not equal a good soy sauce. Go for Kikkoman or sth of a better kind.
Black "mature" Vinegar - 3 tablespoons (add more, soy sauce and vinegar are a base for the saucy part of this dish). It's a chinese black/ brown vinegar 陈醋 chéncù, try in your local chinese/vietnamese asian grocery store. It's not the one we usually use in Czech Republic (wine or apple). Mostly it is made from sorghum, peas, barley, bran and chaff and has a much stronger smoky flavor than rice-based black vinegar. It is popular in the north of China as a dipping sauce, particularly for dumplings.
Sugar - 2 tbsp
Salt - few pinches
Dried chillies - half handful
Sichuan pepper - 1 tbsp
Ginger - 4cm piece
Garlic - 4 cloves
Carrot - handful, diced
Cucumber - handful, diced
Leek
Handful of Peanuts
Oil (for frying, so just your regular oil you use for frying)

First, wash and dry the chicken breasts, dice them. Little cubes, that's the shape we are looking for, not slices or any other shape. The chinese name says it cleary 宫保鸡丁 (gōngbǎojīdīng) means Kungpao chicken cubes. Mix with starch and let rest aside.

Make the magic potion: in a bowl, mix soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, salt and finely chopped garlic and ginger. Taste it, add  more of anything that feels like it's necessary to be added.

Put generous amount of oil (it does not need to drown in the oil, so just maybe about 8 tbsps, add later if necessary) in a wok(or other big) frying pan and roast the peanuts till they start to smell really nice, simply roasted peanuts smell, it takes maybe like 2 minutes. Put the peanuts on a side in a bowl, you will need them later. Keep the oil in the pan. This step is ESSENTIAL, you have to roast the peanuts, not just toss raw ones over already done meal. The oil absorbes the  nice peanuty smell and taste.

Crush the Sichuan pepper so it is more powder-like than ground-like. Put in the same pan where the peanuts were before and roast for like 30 seconds. Add the chillies. Add the meat. Roast for few minutes on medium high heat, so that the cubes turn white. Remove the chicken, put in a bowl, leave the oil and spices. Add diced carrot, few minutes later cucumber and leek. Roast till soft (not too soft, we still want to need our teeth to eat it, so we are not looking for it to become saucy), add the magic potion. Let it absorb the magic. Add meat again, mix well, let simmer for a bit, so that the meat is well done and all the tastes combine together.

Turn off the heat, put on a plate, toss the peanuts all over (I love them, so for me the more the better). Serve with rice or just like that, for me usually meat and the veggies are just fine.