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Video Summary
In this video, I show you how to use canned ingredients to make dinner incredibly fast and easy! I’m making honey garlic sesame chicken, which is normally a crock pot meal that takes hours, but because I’m using my home-canned chicken, I can just throw everything in a pan and simmer it for about 10 minutes to get it up to temperature. I also use my canned onions, which saves me from having to dice and sauté them, and I add some frozen green beans from last year’s garden. I make jasmine rice in my Instant Pot using the chicken broth from the canned chicken jars, so nothing goes to waste. The sauce is a delicious combination of honey, soy sauce, ketchup, rice vinegar, sriracha, garlic, and ginger. This meal comes together so quickly and is perfect for those busy days when you don’t have much time but still want a homemade, flavorful dinner!
Video Transcript
Hey everyone, welcome back. I’m Kari and this is Keep It Simple DIY. Today I am going to be showing you how to use your canned ingredients to make your life so much easier. I am going to be cooking a honey garlic sesame chicken. This is a crock pot meal, but because I am using canned ingredients, I don’t need to use the crock pot for many hours. I can just throw it in a pan, let it simmer for about 10 minutes just so it gets fully up to temperature, and that’s all we’ll need to do. I’m also going to be making some rice in my Instant Pot, so let’s get to it.
So this is a great meal for those days where you really just don’t have much time to get dinner together, so that’s what I’m going to do today. I have some sesame oil. I’m just going to put a little bit in the bottom of my pan, and then I am going to add in these two cans of chicken. Now these are the two that did not seal when I canned my chicken, so they were in my fridge and I need to find somewhere to drain that.
I’m going to be needing two cups of liquid for my rice, so I’m just going to use any broth that I have for the rice. I’m going to need, there’s a layer of fat on here because it’s been in the fridge that I need to get through. Let’s put the chicken in here. When you’re taking your jars out of the pantry, you don’t have to worry about doing this. It doesn’t gel up like it does in the fridge, but because mine were in the fridge, they’re a little jelly and that’s fine. Typically you just strain it and dump everything in. I just don’t want a whole ton of liquid in there. All right, let’s see. I’m going to call that good. And then you know, I’m actually not even going to use this, save something that we don’t have to wash. This will end up being quite a bit more liquidy than I want it to, but that’s okay.
It doesn’t call for salt and pepper, but I feel like that’s a must, so I’m going to put some salt in and I’m going to use white pepper because I know it just has a white pepper vibe. We’re going to add quite a bit of honey. We’re also going to add quite a bit of soy sauce. I did get out two bottles of soy sauce because I thought I might need a little bit more. Hey Milo, let’s get off the counter, thank you. Just a touch more of this one.
It does call for an onion. I have canned onions. That saves me the step of having to dice the onion and having to cook the onion, so that’s fantastic. I’m going to drain the liquid right on into the chicken stock. We’ll use this for our rice as well. I should have kept my spoon out.
All right, you need about half as much ketchup as we did soy sauce and honey, a little bit of rice vinegar, a touch of sriracha, really however much you want to taste. I typically add too much, so we’re going to try to not add too much. Okay, and then I’m going to add garlic and ginger. I have minced garlic and minced ginger. I grabbed another spoon. I figured I didn’t want to put the one that had been in the chicken inside of my garlic and ginger. And I will put a link to this recipe down below that I’m following. Just a little ginger, I don’t want too much.
The recipe doesn’t call for any additional vegetables in there, but I am going to add some green beans from last year’s garden in, just because I don’t want to make a side. So if I put the green beans in, then I don’t have to. And these were frozen, not canned, because I didn’t really have enough to can them, so frozen’s what we did.
Now I did get out my sesame seeds so that I can top it with them. I always forget, but I have them out so hopefully I won’t forget this time. I am going to clean up my mess, get this on the stove, and we will make our rice.
I stirred up the chicken and I added some more green beans. It didn’t look like it had quite enough. I am wondering if I’m going to have enough sauce because I do have twice the amount of chicken the recipe called for. I only added one time the amount of sauce though, because I didn’t know how much extra liquid there would be. So there’s a chance I might be adding a little bit of all those ingredients.
I’m going to make rice in the Instant Pot. Mine’s just an off-brand. I think it’s Insignia. It was like $25 at Best Buy years ago, but they did have them for $30 last year I checked at like Black Friday time. I’m using jasmine rice. That’s my favorite when I’m doing anything with like the soy sauce honey type of vibe. We also keep basmati in the house and sometimes a long grain rice, sometimes a sticky rice, but jasmine is my favorite.
I am going to be making two cups of rice, and whenever you’re making rice, of course you want to rinse it really well, so that’s what I’m going to do. I just rinsed my rice right in here. I kind of swirl it around and tip it out and I repeat that. I do have a tiny little bit of water left in here from when I was tipping the water out, but the goal isn’t to add a ton of water.
What I need to do now is add the same amount of liquid that I had rice, so two cups of rice, two cups of liquid, much different than if you were to do it on the stove where you would do four cups of liquid to two cups of rice. So this is how much liquid I have. I need two cups, which is the whole jar. There’s a little piece of chicken, that’s fine. I’m going to put my lid on and make sure that I put it to sealing, and this couldn’t be any easier. I’m just going to hit the button that says rice and then the start button. There we go. It’s going to do its thing and then it’ll tell us that we have rice.
Let me show you how this is coming. It’s only been on the stove for about a minute, but here’s how we’re looking. I am just going to let this simmer, and on a, let’s lower it a little. I’m just going to let it simmer while the rice is cooking and then we’ll be back to see how everything turns out.
The Instant Pot just beeped. I’m going to do a quick release. And here’s how this is looking. I will plate it up and then I’ll show it to you.
I did adjust all the flavors in the meat over there while the rice was cooking. It did need a little bit of almost everything. I didn’t add any more honey though. I felt like that was fine. Let me show you how this rice has turned out. It’s like the perfect fluffy rice. There’s a little bit of coloring in it because I just use the same spoon that I use from over here, so let me grab a little bit of this.
Now this isn’t the prettiest meal I’ve made, but it’s definitely delicious. I’ve stirred it so much that the chicken’s kind of just falling apart. I’ve mentioned before, but I do like to clean as I go and it just helps to keep everything so much more neat and tidy, and then I don’t get so overwhelmed at the end of the cooking with so much left.
So here’s how this looks. Definitely not a gourmet meal, but tastes like one to me at least. So let’s give it a taste test. I really like this flavor profile. I am going to go sit down, watch some YouTube, and eat my dinner. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe, and I will see you in my next video. Bye-bye!
