Kung Pao Chicken Mochi Balls

We don't often post more than once a day, but with 10 days left to the end of the year, we still have about 17 more posts on the 52 week cooking challenge, all the posts from two different geographic locations in the Around the World Cooking Challenge, and lots of other WorldEats and Trader Joe's posts we just haven't gotten to yet, besides the usual year-end round-ups. Going to post as much as we can to try to preserve as many memories as possible and wrap up the year!

These kung pao chicken mochi balls are the type of hors d'oeuvres I'd expect to see closer to New Year's/end of the year, but they appeared at Trader Joe's back in the late spring/early summer. They've been sitting in our freezer since then, and we finally got around to trying them recently. Since we haven't been doing many grocery haul photos this year (thanks, COVID), I have no idea how much we paid for them, but the TJ's blog says they were $3.99 for 8 balls.

Inside each ball was a chicken and vegetable filling consisting of chicken, cabbage, red bell peppers, water chestnuts, celery, green onions, soybean oil, rice wine, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, and chili oil (according to the box). Not sure which components were part of the sauce and which were part of the chopped filling, so I'm not going to guess, but they were all in there somewhere.

Each mochi ball had a crisp exterior (they were fine, probably would have been crispier if we cooked them longer, but we followed the box instructions), and then the shell got chewy once you bit into it. It definitely had the chewiness of a mochi baked good, and it stuck in our teeth. The filling was actually spicy like kung pao chicken, so between that and the sticky chewiness, it was probably good that we didn't share them with baby B for lunch. The balls weren't that filled with stuff, although they did have good flavor. Together though, A thought that the sweetness of the mochi didn't always pair well with the spicy chicken filling.

Buy again? Probably not. We thought they tasted good and we were glad we tried them, but just didn't feel that excited about them. If you really like kung pao chicken, you'd probably enjoy them.