Nothing makes for a quicker, more crowd-pleasing dinner than stir-fry, a Chinese cooking method that uses extremely high heat to cook food quickly. When it comes to making chicken and vegetable stir-fry, there are a few mistakes that can be made, and the biggest is one that happens before you even start cooking.

The worst thing you can do when making stir-fry is to cook your protein and vegetables at the same time — adding chicken lowers the temperature of your pan, and it can’t recover quickly if too much is added. Overcrowded chicken won’t allow the moisture to evaporate, creating a result more like steaming than stir-frying, and adding veggies will only make it worse.

Instead, remove the chicken from the pan as soon as it's cooked through and set it aside, then stir-fry the vegetables separately. When the final vegetables are cooked, add the sauce to thicken, before adding back all of the meat and vegetables that have been set aside, tossing them just long enough to heat through.