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Hainanese chicken rice

Mr Weasel and I are still feeling rather jet-lagged and delicate. It’s also the cold season, and my office, which I share with six people, has a horrible miasma of runny nose.

If I were a New York grandmother, I might have prescribed chicken soup with matzoh balls for what ails us. As it is, I’m the product of Malaysian Chinese and British families. As we all know that the English are bred to maximise upper lips and minimise tastebuds, I decided that what we needed was a nice bit of soothing Malaysian cookery – Hainanese chicken rice.

Hainan is a southern island province of China. Many of the Chinese living in Malaysia and Singapore originated in Hainan, and they brought their recipes with them. This chicken rice is probably the best known of these recipes, and it’s a wonderfully soothing, clean-tasting dish. The chicken in this dish is poached, and its cooking liquid is used to cook the rice, flavour the chili sauce that accompanies the meat, and to make a clear broth.

Chicken and broth
One chicken, without giblets
Four pints water
Chicken stock cube
One teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon MSG (go on – you can leave it out if you absolutely must, but it won’t kill you)
Wine glass of Shaoxing rice wine
Two tablespoons of light soya sauce
Thumb-sized piece of ginger, sliced
Ten cloves of garlic, squashed lightly with a knife blade
Two large spring onions (scallions)

Chili sauce
Two limes, peeled and segmented
Thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled
Two cloves of garlic
Two red chilis
Tablespoon of caster sugar
Half a wine glass of the chicken broth

Rice
One tablespoon rendered chicken fat (see below)
Rice
Chicken broth (adjust amounts according to how many people are eating)

Begin by bringing the water, stock, salt, msg, rice wine and soya sauce to a rolling boil. Pull out any poultry fat from the inside of the chicken, and put it in a dry frying pan on a medium heat to render out the fat. Stuff the chicken with the ginger, garlic and spring onions, and place it in the boiling water. Bring back to the boil for two minutes uncovered, then put the lid on and simmer for 40 minutes. It’s helpful if you use a heavy, thick-bottomed pan like one by Le Creuset, as the heat will disperse better and you will avoid catching the bottom of your chicken.

Meanwhile, place all the ingredients for the sauce except the chicken stock in a blender (or you could use a pestle and mortar. I’m lazy and use the Magimix). Lime doesn’t give up its juice readily like a lemon, so the best way to get all of the juice out is to quarter and peel the lime by hand as in the picture, then process in the Magimix.

I don’t want to make the sauce too spicy here, so I’ve removed the seeds and the white ribs from these chilis. The hottest part of the chili is these ribs, and then the seeds. Removing them still leaves this sauce very hot indeed; use more or less chili as you wish.

When the chicken has been poaching for forty minutes, remove it from the cooking liquid and put aside. Add half a wine glass of the stock to the pureed sauce ingredients, and mix well. (This isn’t a great photo – I’ve sloshed the sauce about a bit here. It tastes fantastic, though.)

I had run out of Thai fragrant rice, so used basmati for this; you may prefer a stickier rice. I always use a rice cooker, so I put my rendered fat in with enough rice for two, stir well to make sure all the grains are coated, and fill the rice cooker with the chicken broth up to the two-portion line, as I usually would with water.

The broth is served alongside the chicken and its flavoured rice as a soup. It’s got a tiny amount of glossy fat from the chicken floating on it, and it’s clean-tasting, clear and delicious. We prefer to eat it as a starter before serving the chicken and the rice, which isn’t traditional (but I defy you to have a kitchen smelling of this stuff and not eat it at the first opportunity). Any broth you have left over can be frozen and used as chicken stock. It’s surprisingly successful used as a base in Western dishes – try it in gravy and soups.

This dish would usually be served with some sliced cucumber. I don’t have any in the fridge, so we’re just eating the chicken and the rice on its own. I’m rubbish at carving, but thankfully Mr Weasel, a butcher’s grandson, has meat-chopping in his blood, and sets about the chicken (in Malaysia it’s always eaten at room temperature, which I prefer – the chicken is somehow much juicier this way, and the muscle tissue relaxes and makes the meat tender and toothsome) with abandon. And a very sharp knife.

The hot rice has taken on all the flavour from the broth, and a gorgeous sheen from the fat. It’s a glorious contrast with the, moist, tender chicken. The meat is served with the dipping sauce and a bowl of soya sauce. Any cold bug that might have been thinking of settling has given up in the face of all this nutrition and gone to pester the neighbours.

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Sloe gin

**UPDATE** For pictures of the finished gin, pictures of a sloe bush, tips on finding a sloe bush and drinks recipes, click here.

This is, apparently, the hottest autumn on record in the UK. Things are definitely not behaving like they usually do outdoors; the leaves are staying on the trees, the apples and pears came ready early, and there are shoots in the garden which shouldn’t be there until next year. Most importantly for the hedgerow foragers among you, the sloes (the fruit of the blackthorn plant – see this post for pictures of the bush) were early, and there has been no frost.

This recipe is much more successful if you pick and use the sloes after they’ve been subject to a good hard frost. Since Mother Nature was not prepared to provide me with one, I turned to Mother Miele, and bunged a box of them in the freezer in September.

Raw sloes are bitter and astringent, and this drink needs a lot of sugar to balance them and result in a syrupy, deep pink liqueur. Gin is used as the traditional base, and I love the combination of the juniper and the plummy sloes, but you can use vodka or another clear spirit.

No cooking is involved. Each of the sloes is pricked all over once defrosted (you can embed some needles in a cork to speed this up) and steeped in sugar and gin – for every pound of sloes I use 8 oz of caster sugar and 1 3/4 pints of gin. The gin doesn’t have to be a particularly fancy one; I just used Waitrose’s own brand London Gin. For gin and tonic I usually use Hendrick’s, a far more complicated (and expensive) gin, whose aromatics include rosepetals and cucumber. Steeping sloes in gin was historically used as a way to disguise tainted gin, so it doesn’t make much sense to use your most expensive gin in this recipe.

I’m using a glass Rumtopf (a German pot for making liqueur fruits, usually made from porcelain) to steep the sloes. Although many recipes say you can stir the mixture regularly and then strain the berries out and make a start on drinking after two months, the gin is much more delicious if you can manage to restrain yourself and not stir it, and then leave it steeping for at least six months before you strain and bottle.

The rumtopf is not completely airtight, so I create a seal with some cling film. (You can use any large container you have for this; my parents use a jar which spends the other half of the year as a storage vessel for rice.) The sugar you can see here will gradually dissolve over the months ahead, and the bright, syrupy juices will leach out of the pricked sloes and combine with the sweetened gin. (For those of you who can’t wait six months, Gordon’s started selling sloe gin pre-bottled last year. It’s not as good as the home-made stuff, but it should keep you pretty happy until summer.)

There’s a quarter bottle of neat gin left over. Thankfully, I have prepositioned some tonic water and limes. I’m in for a pleasant evening contemplating my rumtopf.

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India – the food bit

Delhi saw us eating less adventurously than I would have liked – we were on a tight schedule, eating mostly at the numerous ceremonies and parties, and later not able to eat due to a stomach bug. I still managed to get plenty of variety in, though, and can tell you about some of the highlights of the food.

Some of the curry I ordered was startlingly good. This is a Murg Tikka Patialewala – chicken marinated in yoghurt and spices, grilled and cooked in a pureed tomato and cashew sauce. The one-size-fits-all curry powder you see in the UK is a British empire invention, originally mixed for colonials to send home to cook with. No two curries in the same restaurant in India had the same base of spices (unlike those in some lazy Indian restaurants in the UK). This chicken was very heavy on the fenugreek and cumin, and had a lot of raw grated ginger stirred into it.

We ate breads with the curry – crisp parathas and open-textured naan, all made with rich and delicious ghee. Eating a curry with your hands takes a bit of getting used to (the right hand only – the left is reserved for . . . other purposes), but can be done quite neatly if you use a piece of bread as a little envelope to put your curry in. Papads (popadoms), grilled rather than fried, and flavoured with cracked black pepper, were served with every meal.

On one of our two free afternoons, we took a trishaw ride around Chandi Chowk, one of Delhi’s oldest market areas. The driver was pedaling furiously, and it was extremely hard to stop in the constant stream of trishaw traffic, but we were able to look at, if not taste, a variety of street food (all going past at speed).

People were crowding everywhere, many eating on the hoof. Stalls were ordered by type, so we pedaled through a stationery quarter, a car parts quarter, a sari quarter and a jewellery quarter. I asked the driver to take us to the food quarter. He put a spurt on and started to pedal enthusiastically through the crowd; no mean feat on a trishaw with two compulsive overeaters perched on the back.

Asking to see the nutritional sites was a bit of a mistake on my part. Unfortunately, ‘food quarter’ when parsed through our driver turned out to mean ‘chicken market’. Hundreds of chickens, packed five to a wire crate, hunched in damp and stinking misery. Given rumours of bird flu, I spent about half a second ascertaining that none of the chickens were coughing, and, waving my arms furiously, asked the driver to continue. He did.

Straight to an open-air, flyblown goat butchers. I gave up and went shopping for fabric.

One of the most impressive things available on the streets was the fruit. These pomegranates (are those custard apples with them? Let me know if you’ve any idea) were the reddest, glossiest, juiciest ones I’ve ever seen. We were able to enjoy some pomegranate seeds later, sprinkled on a curry. Satsumas, still green but perfectly ripe, were for sale everywhere, and we ate some in our room.

Lurid soft drinks punctuated all the wedding buffet meals. In the interests of science I tried all of these – the pink one tasted of roses, and the green and blue were identical in taste, flavoured with sweet, sweet spices, particularly cardamom. Other dishes at the buffets were tasty, but undistinguished (which is what happens, I suppose, when you’re catering huge amounts for more than two hundred people at once and trying to keep it all warm). Waiters popped up every twenty seconds with different silver platters of spicy canapes, and were not intimidated by my photographing all the food.

The very best thing I ate was this gulab jamun – a tooth-achingly sweet dessert made from a condensed milk sponge dough wrapped around nuts and spices, particularly cardamom, soaked in sugar syrup, and sprinkled with more nuts. The sugar syrup was also spiced – you can see a strand of saffron on the ball of gulab jamun in the front of the bowl.

I wish we’d been in India for longer, and had some more time to sample some less formal foods. Normal service resumes tomorrow – my stomach seems to be behaving again.