Baked Sweet and Sour Chicken

For the Chicken:
3-4 boneless chicken breasts
Salt and pepper, to taste
1 cup cornstarch
2 eggs, beaten
1/4 canola oil

For the Sweet and Sour Sauce:
3/4 cup sugar
4 Tbsp. ketchup
1/2 cup vinegar
1 Tbsp. soy sauce
1 tsp. garlic salt (we just used 1 tsp. garlic powder)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Rinse chicken breasts with water and cut into cubes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Dip chicken in cornstarch to coat, then dip into eggs. Heat 1/4 cup oil in a large skillet and cook chicken until browned but not cooked through. Place the chicken in a greased 9x13 baking dish. Mix all of the sweet and sour ingredients together in a bowl with a whisk and pour evenly over chicken. Bake for one hour, turning chicken every 15 minutes.

Yeah, this was awesome. Courtesy of life-as-a-lofthouse.blogspot.com (again!), this was our first try at Chinese, and it was so so so so good! I kind of freaked out when I started cooking the chicken because it looked like the coating was starting to turn into scrambled eggs, and I knew that the dish was doomed. I am just here to say that everything is going to be ok if that happens to you. It will turn out perfect! Seriously, perfect. Oh, and the vinegar in the sweet and sour sauce will smack you in the face when you first mix everything together, but once it cooks it is wonderful. We have a great Chinese restaurant here in Birmingham that delivers, but they have been unreliable at best when it comes to accurate delivery times...and they have been known to not bring all of our food. This tastes a million times better than anything we have ever gotten from a restaurant, and it doesn't come with a side of guilt. Best of all, the leftovers were delightful, which I have NEVER been able to say about Chinese restaurant leftovers. Inexpensive, relatively quick to throw together, and delicious.