I served these skewers as one of the hors d’oeuvres at my recent dinner party.

Basically I wanted to only serve food that held some type of meaning to me. I spent two months in China studying in 2005, so I wanted something to represent this experience. I was into Sichuan cooking for a while. Sichuan is one of the provinces of China which I visited. It’s a beautiful place with a mild climate (although a lot of rain), and you can see the giant pandas there. It also has some of China’s spiciest and most delicious food.

Anyway, when I returned I bought Fuchsia Dunlop’s excellent Sichuan cookbook, Land of Plenty. The basis of this hors d’oeurve is the Strange Flavor Chicken recipe in Land of Plenty. That recipe calls for serving cubes of cold chicken with a sweet, salty, spicy sauce powered by the very Asian flavors of soy sauce, sesame paste (or tahini, which I used), and chili oil.

I added to the dish a little, by putting the cubes of chicken on skewers, with an equal-size cube of cucumber above them. I spread the sauce down a rectangular plate, and arranged the skewers along the sauce. The idea of the cucumber is that it cools your mouth after the piquant sauce, and also adds another color and texture.