Thursday, March 19, 2009

Simple, Easy, Complete: Hainan Style Chicken, Mustard Greens with Double Garlic

So, as Bittman alludes to in his intro to this recipe, it's a bit bland. You definitely need a dipping sauce or three to rescue it. It's easy, though, and it left me with a ton of leftovers, including some stock. Also, it's really cheap since you can use a whole chicken, although I guess some people would rather use just breasts. If that's the case, I implore you, go bone-in. I think this would be really bland and dried out without the bone, since the stock probably wouldnt pick up all that much flavor from just plain breast meat.

All you do is boil water with some salt, ginger, and garlic, add chicken, cover and turn off the heat after 10 minutes and let it sit for an hour. This keeps it pretty moist and tender. Then you cook rice with the stock, and serve it with the chicken and Ginger Scallion sauce for dipping. It's nice and light, lets the chicken flaunt its poultriness, and tastes pretty good. Also, there was this whole thing in the recipe about tomatoes and cucumbers, but I didn't have any of those around, so I skipped it. Maybe the recipe would've been a bit more remarkable had I included it, but I mean, what are the odds of that?

I think next time I would slice up the chicken before serving, which would make it look a bit less sloppy, but other than that, this is a pretty good, pretty easy (if a bit time consuming) one pot dish. We made it with the How to Cook Everything recipe for dandelion greens (we substituted mustard greens), which was good, even though Talia oversalted it. Clownshoe.

There were pictures of this, but really, they didn't make it look very tasty, so they aren't getting posted here. It was worse than the Chicken with Yogurt debacle.
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