Half on a bet, we made two dishes this weekend with only a single difference: the sauce. The original goal was to make Indian and Mexian, but the Kroger where we picked up supplies this time around doesn’t have the same selection of Indian sauces. So instead we went with Chinese. Turns out, that was a really interesting decision… 😄

To start with, we have the shared ingredients:

• rice
• a can of corn
• a can of tomatoes
• mushrooms
• green peppers
• jalapenos
• onions
• ground turkey

Yes, about half of those ingredients don’t make the least bit of sense in a Chinese dish. That’s what makes improvising so exciting!

Start with the rice. We used a cup uncooked.

Then the veggies. I went ahead and cut up all of the veggies for both the Chinese and Mexican versions at the same time.

Here we have the canned supplies. You may notice that the Chinese sauce we used was Panda Express orange sauce. I do love Panda Express and particularly their orange chicken, but this may not have been the best choice I’ve ever made. See… it turns out that orange sauce is loaded with sugar and really sweet. Not exactly what we were going for. It was even stranger with the spicy sort of bite that the jalapenos gave it.

Ground turkey! Unless you’re working with lean beef, it’s better for you than ground beef and (if you catch Kroger’s sales) cheaper. Best of all, if you season it right, there really isn’t much difference in the final taste.

All done. I had to move over to a pot when things started expanding. Also, I wasn’t originally planning on making soup… So yeah. I made soup. It looks an awful lot like vegetable soup really. But it definitely doesn’t taste like it.

In all fairness, I actually really like it. It’s definitely a unique taste. Just… I probably won’t be making it again. 😄

(I really should have taken some of this into work and offered it to unsuspecting coworkers. It looks so normal… and then you take a bite.)

Edit: I don’t actually have any pictures from the Mexican version, but it didn’t actually look that much different. A bit more solid and less soupy and that’s about it. Instead of the orange sauce, we used fajita seasoning. With some cheese and tortilla chips, it was the sort of thing I could eat day in / day out. And between the two of them, I have a feeling that’s exactly what we’ll be doing for the next week or two… 😄