Recipe : Chicken rice and steamed dong guai chicken with Chinese rice wine

If you are do not consume wine or Chinese herbs, just ignore the ingredients I mentioned below. Just use things that you like, e.g. cili padi in the chicken, more ginger and serai or even some vinegar or lime juice to make a sourish and pedas steamed chicken.

The idea of this recipe is to show how easy it is to cook a pot of oily chicken rice and a dish of chicken to accompany the rice in the same pot.

I use 2 cups of rice, a few slices of ginger and the white part of the spring onions.

I took a few pieces of those ugly, artery clogging chicken fats and fry them with some chopped garlic. The fats will release chicken oil, which is essential to make the oily chicken rice.

Good chicken rice must be cooked with chicken stock. I boiled the boney parts of the chicken to get the stock. Add about 2 cups of stock to boil the rice in an electric rice cooker. Add a teaspoon of salt for flavour.

Here is the pot of rice ready for cooking. I added 2 pandan leaves for extra fragrance.

Meanwhile, for the chicken….

Chop half a chicken into bite sizes. Season the meat (if you can try to season it long before you prepare the rice) with oyster sauce, pepper, soya sauce and Chinese rice wine. For the quantity, use about 1 teaspoons of oyster sauce, dash of pepper, 1 tablespoons of soya sauce and several glug of rice wine. Add a few drops of sesame oil if you have them.

I would have added wolfberries but I ran out of supplies. So, I added five red dates, 4 slices of dong gwai, slices of ginger and 1 black mushrooms to the chicken.

I put the chicken in a metal container on top of the rice to be cooked. Add enough water to cover the chicken. This will make a delicious soup after steamed.

The time it takes for the rice to be cooked is enough to steamed the chicken.

Here is the steamed chicken with Chinese herbal and wine.

And the pot of chicken rice cooked to perfection. Comparing to the chicken rice sold outside, it is still a much healthier alternative because I don’t use that much oil. Plus it is so cheap to have a big pot of rice to feed several kids in the comfort of my home. And I didn’t use a single styrofoam box, that is eco-friendly, eh?

Basically, there are only a few steps :

1) Cook your rice with some oil and garlic plus good stock
2) Steam the chicken with flavourings of your choice
You can use salted fish and ginger or fermented soya beans (tau cheo) with red chillies or any way you fancy.

There are no hard and fast rules to get a plate of steamed chicken and a pot of rice for delicious home cooked meals.