Sharpen your large kitchen knife and start chopping! That’s all it takes to make Chicken in Lettuce Cups! This recipe requires no cooking if you buy already-cooked chicken or use leftovers (see my Roasting a Chicken Video).

For the ingredients you will need:

• 2 Cups of Chicken, cooked
• 1 small red onion, minced
• 2 green onions, sliced 
• 1/3 cup of cilantro, chopped
• 1/2 cup peanuts, chopped
• 1/2 cup of hoisin sauce
• 1 head of lettuce

The cilantro and the hoisin sauce are incredibly strong flavors that work really well in this recipe.

Cilantro looks like flat leaf parsley, but tastes totally different. They are often right next to each other in the grocery store, so be sure you grab the right one! (Pinch off one leaf of the cilantro and roll it in your finger tips. The aroma from cilantro is very unique. Ask at the grocery store if you are unsure.)

Hoisin sauce is a sweet, spicy, rich brown sauce sometimes called Peking sauce. It is often a table condiment in Asian restaurants.

Start by chopping up 8 ounces of chicken. That’s about 2 cups. Put the chicken into a medium sized bowl.

The red onion needs to get minced. (That means cut up really fine.)

The cilantro needs to get washed and chopped. (Check out my blog on Chopping Parsley to see how)

Trim the ends off the green onions and slice them up.

Chop the peanuts S-L-O-W-L-Y, or they will go flying around the kitchen.

Put all of these prepared ingredients, and the hoisin sauce, into the bowl with the chopped chicken.

Gently mix everything together.

It will look like this (below) when it’s all mixed together.

There are several different types of lettuce you could use. (I only had green leaf which is really a bit too frilly to roll everything up in, but it does look pretty!) Bibb lettuce or Iceberg works really well. Or you could serve these lettuce cups as an hors d’oeuvres using endive leaves.

Enjoy!

You can view and print this recipe here.

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