Shaoxing Wine Ginger chicken

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chicken, Chinese, easy, easy meals, easy recipe, ginger, ginger wine chicken, healthy, Home Cooking, scallions, sesame oil, shaoxing wine, shaoxing wine ginger chicken, South East Asian, spring onions, white pepper, wine, wine chicken

This dish brings back a lot of memories from my Warwick days. For some reason I remember that the preparation process was long and tedious back then! It involves deboning chicken thighs/drumsticks and skinning and julienning ginger. At the present though, I no longer find it as long and dreary a process. Perhaps I could attribute it to… better knife skills? Or maybe just better knives, I don’t think my knife skills have improved at all since then!

This is a very warming, hearty dish and the sauce is lovely with freshly cooked white rice. It’s currently a favourite with the family and guests who happen to try it! It doesn’t take very long nor need many ingredients and makes a perfect addition to the dining table. I include pictures from two attempts at cooking this dish and I realized that I naturally throw the same ingredients into the pan, despite starting off with perhaps a couple less ingredients in one of the photos. That goes to show that agaration (the South East Asian technique of cooking by guesstimating) isn’t very far off from precision after all!Ingredients from trial number 1Ingredients from trial number 2.

But don’t worry, I’ve consolidated the ingredient list and summarized it as below:-

Ingredients (Serves 4)

• 2-3 stalks of Spring onions including the white bits with roots removed
• 3 inches of ginger, peeled and roughly julienned
• 4 Chicken thighs with skin on, deboned
• 3 tbsp Shaoxing wine
• 3 tbsp clear chicken stock/broth
• 1 tsp kicap manis
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tbsp sesame oil

Chicken marinade

• 1 tbsp Shaoxing wine
• 1 tbsp sesame oil
• 2-3 tbsp soy sauce
• white pepper
• 2 tsp dark soy sauce
• 2 tsp corn flour

Cooking Instructions

Upon deboning the chicken, remove the skin from two of the chicken thighs and discard. Keep the skin on for the remaining two chicken thighs. We want some chicken fat rendering in the gravy but not too much!

Trim off the excess fat and remove the tendons from the chicken. Tendons are tough to cut through and unpleasant to eat so be thorough in removing them whenever preparing chicken! Once that is done, cut the chicken meat into bite-sized, uniform pieces so they cook at the same speed. 

Place the chicken in a bowl and lightly mix in the chicken marinade with your hands. Let it sit for 10-15 minutes at room temperature.

In preparing the scallions/spring onions, cut them into thirds or 2 inch sections. You can take some of the green sections to slice thinly for garnishing as well.

Heat up some oil in a pan/wok on medium fire. When the oil is hot enough (i.e. if you drop a piece of ginger into the oil it starts to sizzle right away), slide the ginger into the oil gingerly (I’m so funny I know) and fry for a minute until the ginger starts to turn a little golden and the gingery aroma seeps out. The point of this step is to flavour the oil with ginger as well as prep the ginger so it’s at its best to mingle with the chicken.Add the chicken pieces and fry until half-cooked.

Then, flip the pieces over and add the chicken stock, sesame oil plus Shaoxing wine and cover to cook for a minute. We’re quick-braising/stewing the chicken with some moisture, not searing it to death. Remember, the chicken has to be swimming in a luscious pool of delicious gravy!Upon uncovering, add the spring onion sections into the pan/wok and stir fry for a little while more. Taste to check if it needs more white pepper or salt.

And it’s done!Not the fanciest of dishes but highly satisfying and easy on the stomach. Healthy too!

Check out the before and after picture of trial number 1. I used 10 thighs for that round of cooking!

Wiped clean. ❤

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Lobster spaghetti in tomato sauce

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basil, chicken stock, chilli flakes, cooking with white wine, cooking with wine, diced tomatoes, dry white wine, garlic, ginger, italian, lobster, lobster meal, lobster spaghetti, onion, oregano, parsley, Pasta, romantic meal, seafood, shellfish stock, spaghetti, special occasion, tomato lobster spaghetti, tomato puree, western, white wine, white wine tomato sauce

Recently I’ve been having this urge to cook lobster. Lobster… anything! I initially wanted to make a lobster roll, then I went to Signor Sassi in London and had a variety of lobster dishes. I eventually settled for making lobster spaghetti in tomato sauce and a lobster version of the Sang Har Tong Fun (big head prawn with glass noodles in wine soup). I’ve done a little research online on how to make this dish. A lot of chefs tend to boil the lobsters and then remove the meat to cook in the tomato sauce. The carcass of the lobster usually goes into a shellfish stock or a bisque later on. I do it a little differently, and I firmly believe that the lobster flavours are able to come out in all its glory this way. Obviously it would involve cooking the shell and head in the sauce ;D.Ingredients (for 2-3 pax)

• Half a lobster (this is of a larger lobster)
• 10g salted butter
• 2-3 thin slices of ginger about an inch in diameter and about 2-3 mm in width
• 1/2 cup dry white wine
• 1 tbsp chopped fresh basil
• 1 tbsp chopped fresh parsley
• 2 tbsp chopped onion or shallots
• 1 tbsp chopped garlic
• 1/2 cup chicken stock (best if you have shellfish stock but chicken is fine too)
• 1/2 cup tomato puree
• 1/2 cup diced tomatoes preferably with herbs and garlic in them
• 2-3 pinches of chilli flakes
• 1 tsp sugar and another 1tsp in case the pasta needs a little more sweetness
• 200g pasta (or around 1/3 of a 500g package of pasta) – spaghetti is slightly too thick so I used San Remo’s vermiccili pasta. Instant spaghetti by San Remo’s will do as well.
• Dash of dried oregano
• Salt, black pepper

Cooking Instructions

Prepare the lobster (prepare yourself I meant…. cutting that thing into half is no joke! It’s all spiny and painful! Coupled with a very tough shell, you may need a lot of strength to cut the head into two… or a very heavy object to help get that cleaver through). I suggest you use a towel to protect your hands from the lobster’s myriad spikes and a pair of strong kitchen scissors to cut through the tail end of the lobster.After a lot of effort… finally..See all that golden stuff?? That’s where the flavour’s at!Heat up some oil in the pan and fry the onions, ginger and garlic.

Add the lobster, brain side down, and let it fry for a minute (do not let the meat sear! It should be on medium fire), before adding the wine to the mix. I wanted to try to flambe the lobster, but the kitchen is so small and I was worried I might singe something so I just put the alcohol into the pan and let the alcohol cook off. This step is where you draw out the flavours in the lobster into the broth. 

Add the stock. Cook the lobster for about a couple more minutes in the stock before removing from the mixture. 

Add the diced tomato, tomato, chilli flakes, some salt, pepper and oregano to the lobster broth.

Remove the meat from the lobster shell. You can see that it isn’t cooked through and this is what we want as we will add the lobster meat back in to be cooked fully along with the pasta noodles. Otherwise we’ll have dry, overcooked chunks of lobster, which is a waste of such an expensive ingredient.

Place the lobster shell back into the tomato sauce mixture and simmer until the sauce is reduced and thickened like so. Then add the butter and mix in. I stuffed the sauce into the lobster shell to get the most of that lobster goodness!

At the same time, start cooking your pasta in boiling water with some salt. Cook it about 2 minutes less than the instructions stated in the packet because you’ll finish cooking the pasta in the sauce. 

Get the chopped basil and parsley ready. Add the lobster chunks back into the tomato sauce probably a couple of minutes before adding the pasta so that it’s cooked just right by the end of the whole process.

Drain the pasta (but not too much as we need some of that pasta water… about 2-3 tbsps or so) and add it directly into the sauce. I forgot to mention, remove the lobster shell before you add the pasta in, otherwise it’s going to be a struggle to toss the pasta in the sauce. Place the shell in the serving dish, it will serve as an aesthetic component.

Toss the pasta over low-medium fire so that the sauce gets incorporated into the noodles. Add the basil and parsley and toss a little more. Check on the seasoning and add more salt/pepper/sugar as you wish.

Place the pasta on the serving dish, top off with the lobster chunks, more parsley and some cheese.

If you like your spaghetti with more sauce, just add more puree and white wine but make sure you season accordingly. You also don’t want the sauce to be too wet otherwise it won’t stick to the noodle very well.

Will most likely make it again as I have another lobster in the freezer! Happy to say my brother seemed to enjoy it. He ate three quarters of it by himself.

Here’s a video that I think quite closely reflects how I cooked it:

Nonya fried chicken (inchi kabin)

Tags

chicken, chilli powder, coconut milk, curry, fried chicken, ginger, heritage food, inchi kabin, malaysian, nonya food, nonya fried chicken, South East Asian, spices, straits

Ingredients:

1 small chicken – 1.25kg – 1.5kg, chopped into sections

Marinate:

• 2 tbsp curry powder
• 3 tbsp grated ginger (or if u can find it, galangal)
• 5-6 shallots
• 2 tbsp chili powder
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp coriander powder
• 1 tsp cumin powder
• 4 tbsp coconut milk
• 1 tsp ground black pepper
• 1 chilli padi (optional – just for the extra kick if you like it spicy)
• 2-3 stalks lemongrass (optional – I didn’t add this in this time round, but I remember my grandmother putting some in hers.)
• 1 tsp salt, or to taste
• 1 tsp sugar, or to taste

1.  Trim the excess fat and skin from the chicken pieces and pat dry.
2. Combined all the marinate ingredients together (blend it if you can, it makes the paste so much smoother. I didn’t ;( )  and add in the chicken. Mix well, really get the marinate into every nook and cranny, then cover with a cling wrap and let the chicken marinate in the fridge for 4 hours or overnight.

3.   Remove the chicken from the fridge at least half an hour to an hour before frying.

4.    I tried frying the chicken two ways, one with my brand new air fryer, and the other using the conventional deep frying method.

5.    For the air frying method, I added a little oil to the chicken and mixed it well before placing the pieces into the air fryer. Here’s the result:

It’s actually pretty good. Saves me quite a bit of oil and manages to also be healthier.

6.   As for the deep frying method, heat up enough oil to completely submerge the chicken pieces. This should be on high heat.

7.   Gently drop the chicken pieces into the oil, taking care not to overcrowd the pot.

8.   Skim off the brown bits from the surface of the oil. This is to prevent being burnt bits floating around the oil and sticking to the chicken.

9.   Fry until the chicken turns golden brown (because of the marinade, the chicken will tend to be on the darker side) and starts to float, take care not to overcook the chicken. Remove from the hot oil and place on a kitchen towel to drain off the excess oil

10. Serve. Obviously the deep fried chicken is going to taste better than the air fried ones. However, for the health-conscious, the air fryer is a pretty good alternative.

Juicy spiced chicken!