The Food Canon

As you should know by now, there are many ways of cooking a dish.

When it comes to our favourite dinner meal - Claypot Chicken Rice - I have experimented with variations.

I have blogged about it here. If you are starting out on this, please read up on my thoughts on how the home can come up with a great pot of this, rivalling anything you can get outside. From stove to table, you and your family will want this for dinner regularly.

My latest way of cooking this is to simplify to the following:

1. Nothing needs to be added to the rice except for water of course. The 1:1 rice to water ration remains important.

2. Marinate the chicken beforehand and the marinate will also sauce the rice later on.

As is a daily dinner dish, keeping it fast and simple is important. Learning from my experience of cooking this in so many ways, sometimes less is more.

To feed 4 persons

Half a Chicken, chopped into small pieces
1 chinese pork or chicken sausage, slice into small pieces

2 cups of jasmine rice
2 cups of water

For the marinate and sauce:
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp sesame oil
1 tsp dark soy sauce
2 tsp sugar
1 tbsp corn flour
2 tbsp of water
1 tbsp of Hua Tiao wine
a few pieces of salt fish (preferably Mui Heong variety)

Marinating the Chicken

Make the sauce. Toast the salted fish for in a dry pan for a minute or so. Break it into small pieces and add to the sauce. Add the chicken pieces and marinate it for at least half an hour. If you are omitting salted fish, add another teaspoon of light soy sauce to the sauce.

Wash the rice. Put the water and rice into the claypot and start cooking in small to medium flame. After 10 minutes, add the chicken pieces and the sauce. Place the pieces of Chinese sausages on top of the chicken. Cook for another 15 minutes in small flame.

Garnish with chopped spring onions and serve hot.

A bowl of soup and small plate of sambal on the side will be nice.

Trust me, this is delicious!

Every cuisine has their signature rice dishes.

I like them all: Claypot Chicken Rice, Paella, Risotto, Nasi Goreng and so on. The great thing about all the dishes is that the focus, for once, is not on the meat but the rice.

But no rice dish excites my taste buds like Nasi Briyani, especially when it is cooked using Basmati Rice. I have made it from time to time. Indian in origin, there are many types of Nasi Briyani, including versions which are more popular with Malays.

I have worked at a Nasi Briyani recipe for my home dinners using the claypot, simplifying it over a few tries to the point where it can be a regular dinner feature. Tasting good is one thing, but it must be easy to make. In this recipe, the only crockery you use is the pot. You cook in it and serve it at the table. It takes a while longer and involves more steps & ingredients than the Claypot Chicken Rice recipe but it is still practical for the usual daily dinners. From start to finish, it will not take you more than 45 minutes to prepare and cook this.

This versions is more akin to the Indian version of Dum Briyani, where the meat is cooked in the rice. You can use the same method for fish. If you prefer, you can cook the rice and chicken separately and it will taste good too.

I love Claypot Chicken Rice. My family loves it.

As some of you know by now, I am on Sabbatical leave in Toronto till June 2014.

I am living my life again as a hostel student, something I did experience more than 20 yrs ago as a student in NUS and later, in Trinity Theological College. 

Like every student then, towards supper time, the mental breaks come from packet noodles like Maggie Mee or Indo Mie.  

I can still remember in my NUS days,  the things we did with these noodles: we boiled it, we fried it, we microwaved it and sometimes we even eat it "raw" as a snack, after mixing in the flavoured spices. We added eggs, pieces of chicken, sausages and almost anything to make it different for each meal. We were pretty innovative but there is no denying that after that meal, it was only as satisfying as a packet of noodles could give us. 

This is a quintessential Cantonese and CNY dish, well known by it's Cantonese name, "Lap Mei Fun."

It never featured in my home's CNY dinners as we are more of the Hakka-Hokkien tradition. Like the Claypot Chicken Rice, it is easy to like this dish. With smokey and crusted rice perfumed by the waxed meat with encapsulated bursts of flavours - especially the goose liver sausage - and accompanied by a clear soup, your dinner is complete.

It is a WYSIWYG dish and you can make out the ingredients just by looking at it. With waxed meat, rice and a pot, you are good to go. I may just make some this coming CNY.

Since I discovered that one can make good Claypot Chicken Rice at home in real claypots with great results, I have cooked this many times. I have stopped using the rice cooker to make this pot dish.

It needs only a few ingredients.
It is quick to make.
And it is relatively cheap.

I have said that I will blog some other variations of claypot rice recipes. I have cooked Rice Wine Chicken before and I thought it should work well as an idea for claypot chicken rice.

And it did.

Rice wine and ginger go very well together. And with some good fresh chicken and spring onions, it's hard to go wrong with this.