Cooked the dish about 10 (!) years ago – straightforward but troublesome. But this housewife got time, right?
I chose the smallest chicken but it was still too big. Or rather, my biggest pot was still too small to submerge the entire bird in water. Oh well, we’ll see what happens...
At some point near 3 pm, I decided I should get cracking. First, I read the label.
“Remove the neck and the giblets.”
What?!
Ok.. I dug into the top cavity, and pulled out stuff :(
I’m not sure if I cleaned out everything so I went online..
Step 8 totally freaked me out :((
Took a deep breath and returned to the bird.
Oh, bottom cavity was already emptied!
Phew...
I just removed the neck. Or the stump that was longer..
Pretty gross.. Thing at the right was the stump of the neck..
Rinsed the thing in and out, and laid it out to rest :p
Plenty of salt went on the chicken. The spring onions kept falling out but too bad, I didn’t have any toothpicks to seal the holes!
When the water boiled, in it went! See, the top was not covered..
The bit at the top left was a huge piece of FAT! I dumped it in and it disappeared after cooking!
Time check – it took me almost an hour to get the bird ready! And the sun was already starting to set as I typed *.*
But the water refused to return to the boil so I covered the thing. Now the chicken looked pretty happy in it.. The top started to change colour too. Looked like the steam was doing it well too :)
Kept the fire low to simmer it. While waiting, I typed the above :)
~~~ A few hours later ~~~
Taking out the cooked bird was easier than I thought. It took quite some effort the last time for some forgotten reason..
Used a pair of chopsticks to hook the bird out onto a tray and ran cold water over it. It suddenly occurred to me that Sito would dip himself in cold water after a soak in a hot spring :p After all, I’ve always said that he’s a 白斩鸡!
So the chicken was done and left alone to cool. Next was the rice! Lots of rice cos I wanted to keep some for ourselves :p
I don’t like to fry the rice before steaming it. I just steamed it with the fatty chicken soup :p
While the rice was cooking, I started to cut the chicken. What a challenge! It was oily, and I was trying to keep the skin together! And the breast meat was quite impossible to separate from the bones! So I torn the bits off the bones and dumped them with some leftover pasta for my lunch tomorrow :p
There was still a lot left!
I didn’t try the chicken at all but I tried the rice and I was disappointed =( There was barely a hint of chicken rice flavour, sighs.. I just added some sesame oil to give it more taste.. Was talking about it with some students and came to the conclusion that it was the chicken here... I mean, 10 years ago it turned out perfectly in Circus St!
Bah!
Anyway, the potluck was fun – plenty of food! I had an Indian kati roll which was really spicy, Chilean empanada which was so much like our curry puffs, two Venezuelan arepas with cheese, and of course the catered Chinese food! I had loads of dessert too, happy!
No comments:
Post a Comment