I've been measure how long things take lately, and I found out that it took me an hour and forty minutes to make kung pao chicken today. The book says it's thirty minutes of active time.
Maybe twenty minutes of that was frying raw peanuts instead of using pre-roasted ones, but still! It took me forty minutes to wash and dice the chicken and mix the marinade alone.
I'm still going to make it, but only if I know I have a lot of time. There's a bunch of weeknights in which I've crammed this in, without realizing exactly how long it took.
All that said, it was really good.