First cooked-from-scratch chicken rice

I was still inspired to cook Hainanese Chicken Rice. I have sort of made it before, but it was all ready-pack mix for the rice, and fried chicken or takeaway chicken from outside. So this time, I followed Michelle's easy-to-follow recipe.

Although Michelle mentioned chicken with skin, I chose a pack from the supermarket with the chicken skin already extracted (since my father and sis are so afraid of OIL). I also made my niece helped me pound the ginger and garlic into paste, using our traditional mortar (which I think is even older than me). Niece was more than happy pounding away while I washed the rice and pandan leaves, as well as prepared the ingredients. I boiled the big chunks of chicken in a boiling pot of water for 20 minutes, adding a little salt and some pandan leaves, till they were cooked and dipped them into cold water for a minute, and then left to cool. I added a cube of chicken stock into the pot (for fuller taste) to be used for the soup later. I sieved out some chicken oil that was floating on top. 

  

Here was the crushed garlic cum ginger paste, plus one cinnamon stick, and one star aniseed. I think I was supposed to add cloves too but I did not have this ingredient. Next I added sesame oil into the pan and started to fry the above ingredients, as well as the uncooked rice. Afterwards, I pour everything into the rice cooker, added the chicken stock from the earlier pot of water and threw in fresh pandan leaves into the cooker. I actually added a few more slices of ginger and a little light soya sauce as well, and left the rice to cook. For the proportion of ingredients, you can check Michelle's recipe in her blog. I was cooking enough for 6 servings.

Tadah!!!  The final touch was chopping the chicken into smaller pieces, and sprinkling sesame oil and light soya sauce onto the chicken and garnishing the dish with chopped spring onions and chinese parsley. The soup was from the chicken stock earlier, I just garnished the soup with chopped spring onions and a little wolfberries for colour. I didn't know I could actually cook the soup that tasted like "outside chicken rice soup", if not better, haha!

This plate of chicken rice, garnished with cucumber slices, went to my niece, she knew how to choose the drumstick over breast meat. I forgot to snap a picture of the lemon chilli with a dash of dark soya sauce (to dip the chicken in).

Mom and niece said the chicken was succulent, and quite nice with the fragrant taste of sesame oil and light soya sauce. I added lots of chinese parsley because my sis likes this veg.  I would have garnish fried shallots too if I had not ran out of them.  Guess what, I did not managed to try this dish, my first time making chicken rice cooked from scratch (because I am still on vegetarian diet!). But it is ok, I can cook it again the next time, which I am sure will taste even better.  ;)