A few months ago we had dinner over at GM’s aunt’s and she cooked us a Hainanese chicken, minus the rice. It was really smooth and fragrant and even a boiled white chicken hater like me thought it was absolutely delicious. So I asked her how she prepared it, expecting a detailed explanation of some long and arduous process (she’s very good at cooking, she cooks for a living) whereupon she said, “I used seasoning out of a packet” o_____O Wow. I was a bit nonplussed by that; I would never have thought it was packaged seasoning, it tasted so authentic!
Anyway a few weeks ago, GM’s aunt gave me a box of the said seasoning and told me to try it myself. How nice of her :)
Now, you all may or may not know that Tpa and Hic have this dinner arrangement going with GM and I. As in, it’s meant to be us taking alternate turns to cook dinner for each other. However, right now GM and I are in arrears (we owe them 2 meals to be exact) and we’re trying to catch up. The thing is, Hic is really good at cooking! He makes the best salt and pepper pork chops. In fact, everything he makes tastes like it came out of a restaurant. Which means that it’s kind of pressurising for me because I don’t want to serve up some crappy sub-standard food to an expert like him, right? Also, I can’t keep cooking my repetoire of 3 dishes every time hahaha.
Which brings me to the chicken rice! I was telling Tpa and Hic that they can’t come over for meals anymore as I’ve run out of things to cook, when I remembered that seasoning sitting in my larder :) So I thought, “Hey! It’s out of a packet, I can do that easy” and invited them over for a big surprise meal (“surprise” because i refused to tell them what I was cooking just in case it went horribly wrong and I had to order Indian takeaway and pretend I cooked that lol).
I’ll tell you something, that seasoning is fantastic! They not only give you this handy packet for the water in which the actual chicken is meant to be boiling in, they even give you seasoning for rice! Maybe most seasoning sets are like this and I sound like I’ve been living in a cave all these years, but you know, I don’t use pre-packaged seasoning much so I have an excuse. Haha.
All I had to do to the rice was cut the packet open, gloop it into the uncooked rice in my cooker and mix it in! Then I poured in some of the chicken stock from my chicken boiling.
This is what it looked like before it was cooked.
And this is what it looked like cooked! It tasted like the real thing! I’m very excited, I’ve been wanting to eat chicken rice for a while now and finally I can make it myself, with no fuss! GM, Tpa and Hic seemed to like it too, esp Hic who ate three bowls of rice.
As for the chicken, it’s prepared in exactly the same way as normal boiled chicken, only once again, I had a handy little packet of seasoning for the water to flavour the chicken with.
I’m really paranoid about my meats being uncooked, so I think I left the chicken in for a little too long because it was really soft when I took it out. I was going to wait till Hic got here and get him to chop up the chicken because I had NO IDEA how to chop a whole chicken up into little bits. In fact, I always worry that I’m going to chop my hand off as I can’t seem to swing the cleaver in a straight line and always end up at a different place from where I was aiming. Very scary.
However, Tpa and Hic called to say they were stuck in traffic and running late, and I was really impatient to see if my chicken was cooked properly or if the bones were still bloody, so in the end I decided to tackle it myself, with my non-cleaver holding hand tucked safely behind my back. (Oh my god, I just had a thought, I hope none of my neighbours were looking in at me with my crazed hair and shiny face wielding a massive meat cleaver and chopping the hell out of that chicken hahaha.)
Firstly, I took off the chicken’s limbs, i.e. the wing and thigh bits. So far so good, I was thinking all those hours of lounging on the couch watching Jamie Oliver and eating Jaffa cakes had a use after all. Then came the hard part. I looked at the body of the chicken and couldn’t decide how to chop the whole thing up. So I split it sideways into breast part, and back part. That went a bit messy because all the oil from the chicken was slicking up the chopping board and the stupid chicken was sliding up and down it like contestants in a foam wrestling match. But I managed it anyways and I was feeling really buoyed by my quite successful efforts so far so I decided to tackle the back bit and chop it up into nice chunks like Andy’s mum and aunt always do. The thing is, cutting through bone is a lot more difficult than cutting at the joints, and my first chop made only a mark on the dear chicken. So I thought, “Okay, more strength” and I raised the cleaver up high and TWOK! Whereupon the bit that was meant to come off as a lovely chunk disintegrated into a thousand flakes and flew all over my kitchen. Good grief. You’d think I should have stopped at this point and waited for GM to get home or Hic to get here so they could tackle it, but by then I was seized by this near demonic desire to just plough ahead and I seriously couldn’t have stopped myself even if I wanted to.
I chopped and I chopped, and chicken was just strewn all over the chopping board and up the side of my microwave, it was a violent scene. I was a bit sad when I moved it all over to the serving plate and it looked like a mess of chicken meat and bone rather than what I had hoped it would look like – a nicely divided up chicken back (is it called chicken back? There must be another name, but I forget). Not that I was put off for long, I moved on to the breast! Breast bone is a lot harder to chop, it’s so thick! But the breast chopping was actually better presumably because it’s harder meat and so it didn’t disintegrate so easily. I actually got some decent chunks!
I managed to get it all done in the end, although it didn’t look like what it should have. But at least I managed to chop my first chicken, ALL of it! I’m quite proud of myself, Andy was really amazed too when he got home. And it turns out, Hic doesn’t know how to chop chicken neither! So that’s okay, no experts around to give me marks and scoff at my feeble (or violent) attempts. You should have seen my chopping corner of the kitchen afterwards though, it was absolutely carnage, bits of chicken everywhere.
Ta-dahh!!! My chopped up chicken!
Phew that was tiring, even the re-telling was tiring!
So this seasoning set, it even had a sesame oil dressing which had to be warmed whilst in the packet, and then poured over the chicken.
And also a trio of three dipping sauces! Such attention to detail. They gave us chilli sauce (the chicken rice kind!), ginger dip and sticky soya sauce!
I made my own pickles a la Ah Ma.
Tpa was complaining that I didn’t invite her and Hic over when I cooked my little CNY meal and she was telling everyone how I made fish maw soup and everything and kept it to myself haha. So I made fish maw soup again, just to shut her up.
And made my own little dipping sauce for the fish maw and cabbage.
And rounded up the meal with some kailan with oyster sauce!
I think my chicken rice meal was a huge success! Everyone loved the food, and I certainly ate it all up with relish. I think the huge amount of effort I expended made it a lot more enjoyable!
If any of you should want to purchase the chicken rice seasoning set to make your own chicken rice, email me and I will let you know which brand it is!
