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Chicken claypot rice

I bit the bullet last weekend and bought a claypot from the Chinese supermarket. These traditional cooking pots are finickity beasts to cook with; a claypot isn’t shatter resistant, so you have to be very, very careful when cooking with it to allow it to heat up very slowly (complete with cold ingredients) and cool down equally slowly, or risk shards of pot and sauce all over the kitchen. Cooking in a claypot gives the dish a very particular texture and a smoky flavour. The rice on the very bottom of the pot will catch and singe into a gorgeous crisp layer, and the meat at the top will steam delicately, giving its juices to the flavourful rice.

I’ve used Chinese sausages here – you will be able to find them at any Chinese supermarket. If you can’t get your hands on any, use lardons of smoked bacon instead. They won’t taste the same, but they’ll give the dish the smoky, porky depth you’re looking for.

If you don’t have access to a claypot, you can cook this dish in a heavy-bottomed (not non-stick) saucepan with a lid. A well-used claypot, however, will give a lovely smoky taste to whatever’s cooked in it.

To serve three hungry people or four less-hungry people, you’ll need:

3 Chinese sausages
4 chicken thighs
2 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tbsp dark soy
1 tbsp light soy
2 fat garlic cloves, crushed
5 chopped spring onions
1 tsp cornflour
½ glass rice wine
1 inch julienned ginger
1 tablespoon brown sugar
4 baby pak choi
5 dried shitake mushrooms, soaked in boiling water for 20 minutes
2 cups rice
3 cups stock

Mix the chicken and sausages in a bowl with all the ingredients except the rice, pak choi, mushrooms and stock. Leave to marinade for at least half an hour.

Put the rice and chicken stock in the cold claypot and place it over a medium heat with the lid on. Bring to the boil and immediately reduce the heat to a low simmer, then leave the rice to steam for 15 minutes. The rice should be nearly cooked, with little holes in the flat surface.

Spread the chicken mixture, the pak choi and the chopped mushrooms all over the top of the rice, and put the lid back on. Continue to steam over a low heat for another 15 minutes, until the chicken is white and cooked through. Serve piping hot.

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Smoked salmon kedgeree

Kedgeree is one of those curious dishes to come out of colonial India, with European ingredients (in this case smoked fish, usually haddock) alongside Indian spices and rice. There’s an Indian dish called Khichri which is a close cousin of our kedgeree, made from rice, lentils, onions and spices.

Here in the UK it’s a (now rather uncommon) breakfast dish. When I was a kid, our neighbours used to invite the whole street round for a New Year’s breakfast, in which kedgeree played a starring role. Kedgeree is a good idea if you’ve a lot of people staying in the house; you can prepare it the day before and microwave it for a very rich and delicious brunch.

This kedgeree is a bit more delicate than the traditional smoked haddock version. It uses barely cooked smoked salmon and fresh, sweet and juicy king prawns, and instead of strong onion, I’ve used spring onions. The salt used in curing the salmon is sufficient for the whole dish; you will not need to add any extra.

It’s important that the rice is chilled before you cook; if it is warm or hot, the grains are prone to break up and become mushy in cooking.

To serve four, you’ll need:

100g basmati rice, cooked and chilled
10 spring onions, chopped
1 inch of ginger, grated coarsely
1½ tablespoons Madras curry paste (I used Patak’s)
10 raw, peeled king prawns
1 pack smoked salmon, torn into shreds
1 egg per person
½ pint chicken stock
¼ pint double cream
1 handful coriander, chopped
1 knob butter

Carefully slide the eggs into boiling water and boil for six minutes; the yolk should still be soft, and the white just set. Peel, halve and set aside.

Stir fry the ginger and spring onions in a wok until soft, then add the curry paste and prawns and stir fry until the prawns have turned pink. Add the rice to the wok and stir fry. After five minutes, add the stock and salmon, and continue stir frying until the salmon has turned opaque.

Remove the wok from the heat and add the cream and coriander. Stir well, and serve with a segment of the soft, creamy egg.

This dish is inextricably associated with New Year in my head, so I served it this evening with a glass of toasty, nutty champagne. Delicious.

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Slow-simmered Chinese beef and fried rice

Slow braising in soya sauce is one of the best things you can do with stewing meat, making it scented, tender and melting. Here, I’ve used some whole spices, oyster sauce, sugar, garlic and ginger to turn some cheap cubes of stewing beef into meaty gold.

To accompany it, I’ve broken out my packet of Chinese sausages (lap cheung). These are a sausage rich in pork fat, sugar and anise, preserved by wind-drying. You can buy two kinds of Chinese sausage; these, which are red in colour and made from pork and pork fat, and the darker ones, made from duck meat and liver. I’ve put the rest of the packet in the freezer, to use another day in some steamed rice. Today’s sausage is going in some stir-fried rice.

The beef is easy – all its deliciousness comes from long, slow simmering. You’ll need:

1 lb cubed stewing beef
1 bulb of garlic, halved
3 slices ginger
2 dried chilis
2 stars of anise
1 stick of cinnamon
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
2 tablespoons soya sauce
1 wine glass Chinese rice wine
1 teaspoon sesame oil
Water to cover

Put all the ingredients in a heavy-bottomed pan and simmer very gently for two to three hours, until the meat is tender. Top up with water if the pan starts to look dry.

The fried rice is full of simple, assertive flavours. I used:

4 Chinese sausages, sliced thin
3 cloves of garlic, sliced
2 inches peeled ginger, julienned (cut into matchsticks)
8 spring onions, sliced into circles
1 pack shitake mushrooms, sliced
1 large handful frozen peas
1 large bowl cold, pre-cooked rice
2 eggs
1 teaspoon sesame oil
2 tablespons soya sauce

Stir fry the sausage slices, moving everything round quickly over a high heat until they give up some of their fat, then throw in the garlic, ginger and spring onions and stir fry for three minutes. Add the mushrooms and peas and continue to stir fry until the mushrooms are soft and cooked. Crumble the rice with your hands into the wok. It’s vitally important that the rice is cold from the fridge; warm rice will go gungy and come apart. Cold rice will keep its grains whole and keep its texture. Stir fry the rice until it’s all piping hot, then make a well in the middle so you can see the bottom of the wok, break the eggs into it and use your spatula to scramble them in the well. Stir the cooked egg into the rest of the rice, add the sesame oil and soya sauce, stir fry for another twenty seconds, and serve.

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Mushroom risotto

It’s cold. It’s windy. When these conditions prevail, our bodies are programmed to do something rather special. They are programmed to crave stodge.

One organism, the mushroom, does better than we do in the cold, leafy months. The supermarket shelves are overflowing with punnets upon punnets of mushrooms, and they’re quite reasonably priced. On top of this, almost everybody I know seems to have a cold at the moment, and I think some garlic, said to have a mild antibiotic effect, is in order. Stodge, mushrooms and garlic. This is a perfect excuse for some mushroom risotto.

Carnaroli is my favourite risotto rice. It’s a fat, short grain which will absorb more than its own weight in stock, and cooks to a fluffy, swollen, creamy risotto. If you can find carnaroli rice, do try using it instead of arborio, which is more often sold as a risotto rice in supermarkets.

For six people, I use:

500g fresh mushrooms, sliced
1 small handful dried cepes (porcini), soaked, the soaking water reserved
5 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 tablespoon fresh thyme, chopped
1 large handful parsley, chopped
1/2 a teaspoon cayenne pepper
juice of 1/2 a lemon
2 pints of stock
5 shallots, chopped
3 stalks celery, chopped
400g carnaroli rice
1 glass marsala
2 tablespoons creme fraiche
4 heaped tablespoons grated parmesan
3 large knobs of butter
Olive oil
Seasoning

I used shitake mushrooms (meaty, robust little beasts which keep a good, toothsome texture; they don’t melt to a slime) and oyster mushrooms (less good, honestly, but still pretty darn nice). I don’t wash them, but wipe them instead with kitchen towel so that they don’t absorb unwanted water. I fried all the mushrooms (including the cepes) with two of the cloves of garlic and half the thyme in a mixture of butter and olive oil, and when they were cooked, stirred in the parsley, squeezed over the lemon and sprinkled over a little salt and some cayenne pepper.

While the mushrooms were frying, I made the risotto base. The celery, shallots, the rest of the garlic and the rest of the thyme were sauteed in oil and butter, and when soft the rice was added, and then fried gently, without changing colour, for a couple of minutes until transluscent.

I added the marsala, and stirred until it was all absorbed. Then I added the soaking liquid from the cepes and stirred until that was all absorbed. The two pints of stock were then added a ladle at a time, each time stirring and stirring until all the liquid had gone before adding another ladle.

After about twenty minutes, the liquid was all absorbed, and the rice creamy and tender. I stirred in the mushrooms, cheese and creme fraiche. Serve this quickly, while it’s still hot and moist. I have managed to convert at least one mushroom-hater with this risotto – try it yourself, and open your arms and welcome winter.

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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.