Stranded in the land of a foreign tongue, where cultural food disorders are common and McDonalds in every corner, it gave me every reason to miss my food way back home. Even if you would try to still the asian hunger by going to an asian restaurant, you will never ever find good old chicken rice in the menu. I wonder why? Is it too cheap to sell? Is it too infamous? Is this too strange for the foreign tongue to eat? Till today I have not found the reason.

Chicken rice is a favourite in asia. This food is a must sell in every coffee shop in the corner. Without it, how would you want to have your lunch, brunch, dinner or supper….or breakfast? And it’s yummy. You would find variations in white cooked chicken, baked/grilled chicken, duck and char siu hanging mercilessly on their necks on those metal hooks, just waiting to get all chopped up when the next guest come to peer over that chopping board to see what part of the chicken he would want to have. The cook behind that giant chopping board nods, grabs the chicken neck from the hook and starts chopping that bird into fine bite peaces. Within the next 2 minutes, you’ll find a tasty full course meal that is served with a bowl of chicken soup, your chopped bird or char siu and chilly sauce mixed with ginger in front of you….an absolute asian delight…**sigh**

No doubt about it, there are quite a few ways to prepare this dish. There’s a very traditional, complicating way, a very simple way and a moderate way to create this actually very simple dish. A few must have ingredients like the coriander leaves, sesame oil, and cucumber are compulsory to make the meal round. If you’re missing on those, I’d suggest you pull off the idea of trying to make them at all.

My grandma told me once that the real way to prepare this dish was to take the chicken, holding the chicken at it’s neck over a boiling pot of hot water, take a soup spoon and scope that hot water gently over the chicken until it gets cooked. In that way, the chicken meat would stay tender and …well, put it this way, in this period of time, you might risk getting avian flu and cramps in your forearms. Who knows? I have a much easier way to handle this and I would like to share this with you.

Ingredients:

4 chicken drumsticks with thighs or 1 Chicken, cleaned and cut in 4
5cm Ginger, sliced roughly
1 Stalk scallion, sliced in 10cm piece
1 tsp. Vegetable stock

Rice:
3 cups of rice
6 cups of water (depending on rice quality)
chicken broth / oil (from the soup)

Garnish:
1 stalk scallion
1 stalk corainder leaves
1/2 cucumber, cut in wedges
Chillypadi, sliced
Lemon
Soy sauce
Sesame oil

Method:

Fill a pot of water and bring it to boil. Once it’s bubbling, put in your cut chicken, ginger, scallion and turn down the heat. Cover your pot and let it simmer gently for about 45 minutes. Take care not to overcook your chicken as the longer you cook, the more the meat will just fall apart.

Somewhere after 20 minutes, you can start cooking the rice. Either steam it or prepare it in the rice cooker. Instead of using water, scoop out the top layer of the still simmering chicken soup, removing and transferring the oil and some soup to the rice cooker. You could add some mashed & grinded ginger into the rice – to taste. Sprinkle a dash of salt and start cooking.

After 45 minutes of simmering, take the chicken out of the soup and let it cool down. Add salt to taste to the soup, or a tsp. of vegetable stock. Once almost cold, cut the chicken into the pieces you would find comfortable to eat. Add a dash of sesame oil over the meat and garnish with sprigs of coriander leaves. Spoon out the soup into a bowl, garnisch with some finely chopped scallions and sreve this together with chicken rice, and a bowl of chilly lemon soy mixture.

There you go….I’m getting hungry already again!