This is my 2nd Wefifo dinner. Hainanese Chicken Rice is the theme. The reason I chose this theme is that chicken rice is a perennial favourite with all Malaysians, and Singaporeans as well. Sometimes I cook this for the family, but of late, I have not cooked this for some time now. When I serve this to my friends and fellow Buddhists ( I try to entice them to my house for meetings by serving my lovingly cooked, and terribly delicious food. I try to be positive, ahem!) I always have good comments. So I said to myself, ” Why not serve this for Wefifo dinner?” So here you are, my Hainanese Chicken Rice.
But wait, there is actually a catch! In the years yonder, we only have poached chicken for the chicken rice. The chicken is poached in a certain way that gives it the silky smooth meat and crunchy skin. It looks plain, and it is actually quite bland. The chicken is normally served with flavoured rice which is cooked using the chicken stock from the poaching. I remember mum used to take us to this nice chicken rice shop in Campbell Street in Penang. The main condiment that made the chicken rice so yummy was the chilli sauce. The chicken would also be garnished with cucumber and coriander. Not any coriander, but very small, just sprouted coriander. It has a very delicate taste, and not as strong as the matured coriander that we usually have. Mind you, this is now known as “micro herbs”. So you see, we are quite trendy even in the good old days!!!
Nowadays, we can find roast chicken in the chicken rice stalls and restaurants. The chickens are roasted in a large oven, mostly fashioned out of disused oil drums. But nowadays restaurants do use purposely made ovens – a bit like tandoor style. Now roast chicken is the prefered chicken as it is more flavourful.
Coming back to the dinner, so I decided to serve both poach and roast chicken, with all the trimmings including my Killer Chilli Sauce.
The accompaniments were:
Soup made from the chicken stock with fish cake and baby spinach, garnished with bits of preserved tien tsin vegetables and chopped spring onions.
French beans stir-fried with large prawns. You can find the recipe here, but be informed that the photo is not so nice as it was my first post. I decide to leave it there without any updates so as to see how far I have come as far is my photography and blogging is concerned.
Chicken rice flavoured with the stock, as well as ginger and pandan leave.
Blanched Cos Lettuce in oyster sauce. Here is the recipe, but using brocoli. This is called ewe chye in the Penang dialect. Click here for recipe.
Dessert is Brownie (home-made) served with ice-cream, mango sorbet.
All in all we had a great time. Maria and Alan were super fun, Anna and Clara were equally wicked. Since Anna misses Malaysian / Singaporean food I packed some for her to take home for lunch the next day!
Here is a photo of us after the dinner.
BTW, there were some left-overs and I cooked the chicken using this recipe. Please click here.
More here
Sorry, I haven’t posted the chicken rice recipe and the roast chicken recipe as well. I will post it when I have some free time. I have a lot of posts to write.
I hope you enjoy reading this. I will need to discipline myself to post more to catch up with all the travel that I have done.
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Until the next post, don’t forget to spread the word about my supper club to your contacts.
Cheers,
Penang Lassie.
