Spicy Shredded Chicken

Hadi was actually planning to make some kind of roast chicken again, but suddenly decided to get creative and made a very Chinese stir-fry dish instead. In this dish, chicken is shredded and cooked in a spicy soy sauce mixture. :) So... here we go!

What you need:
3 chicken pieces, boneless or not, it doesn't matter

Marinade:
1 tablespoon Szechuan pepper, ground or crushed
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
2 teaspoons garlic powder (or 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped)
1 tablespoon sesame oil

3 dried chillies, chopped finely
2 shallots, sliced finely
3 tablespoons light soy sauce
1 tablespoon oyster sauce
1 tablespoon sweet soy sauce (kicap manis)
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon sesame seeds
Oil, for cooking

What you do:

1. In a pot of boiling water, add in the chicken pieces. Cook until tender and cooked through. Drain and leave to cool.
2. With your fingers, shred the cooked chicken into thin strips and place in a bowl.
3. Add the marinade ingredients to the cooked chicken and mix well to combine. Marinate for 1-2 hours, or until ready to serve.
4. Heat up some oil in a wok, and fry the shallots and dried chillies for about 2 minutes, or until the shallots are soft. Add in the chicken, and mix well.
5. Add in the soy sauces and oyster sauce, and mix well. Sprinkle over the sesame seeds and serve.

I actually suggested this recipe based on something my flatmate in my first year used to cook quite often. She was Chinese and cooked a LOT of spicy food, and this was one of the few I managed to have a taste of. :) It was really good, and would be her signature dish in every flat dinner, hehe. Everyone really liked it, in fact. Unfortunately, I neglected to get the recipe from her... Hmm... will have to see if I can track it down.

Anyway, I suggested the basics of the recipe to Hadi and sat back, looking forward to a very tasty dinner. But, as usual, he took the recipe and went completely overboard with it. I mean, okay, marination, fair enough, although it really wasn't necessary, since the chicken would absorb the sauce quite well. He said he tasted some of the chicken and found it slightly bland, so he added more sauce. Fine. But to add light soy sauce, oyster sauce AND kicap manis is, quite simply, overkill!

My flatmate's chicken was a light brown, with lots of green and red specks in it (from the chillies she used). But Hadi's chicken, as you can see, is a very dark brown. I would have just stuck to the light soy sauce, and that's it. But no, Hadi likes his food "strong". Sure enough, the dish was very salty and made our lips "pucker" as Hadi said. Sigh. Oh well, looks like I won't be having that chicken just yet. Although Hadi's dish *was* quite tasty (and very flavoursome!). Just not what I expected.

From the water used to cook the chicken, Hadi also attempted to make a chicken gravy thing. He failed. Completely and Utterly failed. Just like last time. This time, he added waaaaaayyy too much salt and flour into the water, and attempted to boil most of the water off. This resulted in a thick mucilaginous .... substance. Hadi and Justin (being "real men") tasted it and tried to pass it off as okay, just a little too salty. But when I tried it... euuuurggghh! It was salty, yet strange tasting. And the texture was just wrong. Definitely not something you would want to eat. And sure enough, no one else touched it after that. By the time we finished dinner, the thing had solidified into a brown gooey mass. Looks like Hadi needs to find yet another way to make gravy. :P Oh well, at least he tried.

Quote of the day: Men like to barbecue. Men will cook if there is danger involved.