1st Year @ Bristol: Nasi Ayam (Chicken Rice)

Woohoo! The second of my first year dishes has finally come out! This is an easy recipe for Nasi Ayam (chicken rice) but today, I decided to "complicate" it a little, since one of my friends has recently suggested another way to prepare this. Italics denote the extra step. So... here we go!

What you need:
Chicken pieces - preferably something juicy, such as thighs or whole chicken even
Salt
Chicken stock
1-inch piece of fresh ginger, chopped 6 tablespoons sweet soy sauce (kicap manis) 1 tablespoon oyster sauce 1 tablespoon light soy sauce

What you do:

1. Place the chicken pieces in a pot big enough to hold them, and fill with boiling water.
2. Season well with salt and chicken stock, add the ginger and continue cooking over medium heat for about 45 minutes (depending on what pieces you have) or until the chicken is cooked through. Do not overcook.
   
3. *Meanwhile, preheat an oven to 150 C. Combine all the sauces together.
   
4. Once the chicken is done, use the remaining water in the pot to cook rice. Include the ginger pieces into the mix. Top up with more water as necessary, and season well.
   
5. Extra step: While the rice is cooking, place the chicken in a baking dish and baste all over with the soy sauce mix. Place in the oven, and baste the chicken every 5 minutes or so until rice is cooked.
6. Serve chicken and rice with chilli sauce and any leftover soy sauce mix.

This dish came through big-time for me during my first year, hehe. It was such a simple dish! To keep my chicken warm while the rice was cooking, I would put it in a steamer basket over the rice, hehe. It worked pretty well. :)

The reason I wanted to try the extra addition was because I like the roasted chicken rice from Brunei Chicken Rice (BCR), hehe. Well, the resulting dish wasn't as tender as their chicken, but it was pretty good, I guess. It might have been because I only had chicken drumsticks available. Slightly better than the original recipe, since I usually eat it plain (while other people add soy sauce to theirs). This was definitely more flavoursome.

Maybe I haven't got the exact ratios of soy sauce and oyster sauce yet... The chicken was sweet and everyone else liked it, but it was actually a bit too sweet for me. I might put in more light soy sauce and less of the sweet one next time. (Hadi might complain though :P) Hadi also mentioned that some ginger would be nice. That's a good point, I completely forgot about it, actually. But I added it to the recipe steps, hehe, since it really does improve the taste.

I also had some trouble with the rice. Maybe I didn't add enough water or something, but it turned out slightly hard. Not quite bullet rice yet, but still not that fluffy. Our rice cooker seems to get a bit wonky when we cook a lot of rice, hehe. Also, I didn't season it enough I guess, so Hadi found it tasteless. Everyone else was fine with it though, heh. Just the hard rice was the problem. Oh well, next time improve~! :D

Quote of the day: Happy and successful cooking doesn't rely only on know-how; it comes from the heart, makes great demands on the palate and needs enthusiasm and a deep love of food to bring it to life.