Cilantro Lime Chicken Fried Rice

Fried Rice is easier than stir-fry, y'all. And it's so tasty. The only exotic thing in this recipe is ginger--and if you read my blog then you know I've told you at least three times now to buy a hand of ginger and keep it in your freezer so you can grate it as you need it.

If you don't read my blog, then know that I live in a rural Texas town where I can't buy fresh ginger or leeks, or anything more exotic than a red onion. This blog is about tasty cooking with simple ingredients that are available just about anywhere.

Fried Rice is best made with leftover rice but who usually has six cups of leftover rice in the fridge? If I can, I just make the rice a day ahead or early the day of.

Cilantro Lime Chicken Fried Rice
This is not something you want to eat if you're going to be kissing anybody.
Ingredients:

2 large boneless, skinless chicken breasts cut up pretty much how you please. Strips or cubes is fine.

6 garlic cloves, peeled

2-3 serrano peppers with the stems removed

2 bunches of green onions, cleaned and cut into thirds and then julienned. You can substitute one red bell pepper, also julienned, in place of one bunch of the green onions if you like bell pepper. Leeks go well in this recipe and are more mild than the green onions, a very nice substitution if you can get them and definitely my preference.

1 cup of coarsely chopped cilantro, loosely packed (use up to 1.5 cups if you like, it won't hurt a thing). If you have fresh basil, you can use it instead of the cilantro if you like. Use the basil leaves whole. Do garnish the dish with cilantro, though, it adds excellent flavor.

3 TBS grated ginger

1 TBS honey or a teaspoon of white sugar

1 lime, juiced

1/8 cup soy sauce

Six cups of cooked rice (preferably Jasmine but whatever)

1/4 cup peanut or vegetable oil

Using a mortar and pestle mash peppers and garlic cloves until pulverized. If you don't have a mortar and pestle, dice the garlic and peppers and mash them with the flat of a large blade by laying the blade flat on the garlic and peppers and pressing hard with your hand repeatedly. Mashing them brings out their oils and flavors better. But, if you prefer, you could also use a Cuisinart or an electric coffee grinder.

In a wok or dutch oven heat oil over medium heat, not too hot, and saute garlic and peppers for thirty seconds to a minute.

Add the chicken and turn the heat up to high. Stir constantly until chicken is about halfway cooked, then add all of the rice and combine well. If rice starts to stick to the pan too much (and it will very likely stick, don't let that bother you a bit, just don't let it burn) you can turn the heat back down to medium.

Add soy sauce, ginger, lime juice, and honey, combine well. It takes a while to combine six cups of cooked rice, all that chicken, and all these seasonings. Don't fret, your chicken will have plenty of time to finish cooking while you are busy getting it all combined.

Add green onions and cilantro and combine well, allowing it to cook for a minute or two until the green onions start to go limp. Do not overcook.

Serve and enjoy as an entree or as a side dish.

You can substitute fish sauce and/or oyster sauce for the soy sauce. It will add a great depth of flavor as well as adding all the saltiness the dish will need.

Making Fire Oil

While it's not fast, it's extremely tasty and doing all this work in one afternoon will provide you months of cheap, fast, and tasty goodness. It's also a great way to utilize an abundance of peppers.

I learned to make fire oil last year when my husband and his mother grew so many peppers that I was ready to rip my own eyes out. They were so proud of their peppers. And my mother in law, although we were growing our own, kept "gifting" us with bag after bag of peppers. They were growing Kung Pao, Jalapeño, Caribbean Red, and Scotch Bonnets. Pickled jalapeño peppers are CHEAP and so I had no interest in pickling my own. I dried a lot of these peppers and use them when I make beans or stir fry--but I wanted another way to preserve them. Hubby reminded me of the hot oil served in Asian restaurants and I began Googling this. After much research, this is how I make fire oil. You can do this with any type of peppers and you can use dried or fresh peppers when making it.

Instructions:

1. Rinse peppers to be used in your fire oil and dry them completely before proceeding.

2. Remove stems from peppers. Put peppers and a teaspoon of salt in blender (don't fill blender more than 3/4's full of peppers), and add peanut oil until peppers are covered. Puree on high until you have created what looks like a pepper smoothie. You can use a lighter, but high quality, oil if you prefer but I use the peanut oil to ensure I don't burn the mixture and so that if I'm cooking with the oil later on, I don't have to worry about burning it. Peanut oil has a high smoke point.

3. Pour mixture into a pot that has a properly fitting lid (a pot with a glass lid that you can see through would be ideal). Place lid on pot and turn heat on high. Then don't move or go anywhere until you can either hear the mixture boiling or until the lid starts to dance a bit from the boiling mixture. Lower heat to allow mixture to simmer and set timer for seven minutes. It's important that you are very careful boiling fire oil as you do NOT want this very dangerous mixture splattering on your skin. Yes, I have a photo here of the mixture boiling--I took my safety in my hands to do this. I don't recommend you try it.

4. When timer has gone off set pot aside and forget about it until it has cooled enough to work with.

5. It's time to strain your fire oil. Last year I used a chinois (metal, cone-shaped strainer) and while it was nice, it didn't filter out enough of the pulp and all my fire oil bottles ended up with pulp at the bottom. This pulp does no harm, but when you gift someone with fire oil they tend to be dubious when they see that stuff floating on the bottom of the bottle. This year I decided to filter the fire oil the way my Mom taught me to filter peanut oil (since you can re-use peanut oil several times before it's bad).

With this method, you use one to two layers of paper towel (depending on the quality of the paper towel--never super cheap paper towel, please) which you clip to the top of a pot with clothes pins. The paper towel should not be pinned in such a way that the paper towel looks like a drum head on top of your pot. It should be concave in shape--clipped well but in such a way that when you pour your oil in, there is room for it to sit as it drains. Only pour as much oil in at a time as the paper towel can hold. Give it plenty of time to drain before adding more oil. Depending on how much pulp you have and how good your paper towel is, you may or may not have to refresh the paper towel you are using. You'll have to judge this yourself. If you have made a lot of fire oil, why not go ahead and set up several pots with paper towel so you can strain it all at once? It will mean more washing, but hey, at least you won't have to baby the one strainer for endless hours. I liked this straining method very much except that the pulp holds on to SO MUCH OIL and I have yet to figure out how to keep from wasting that--perhaps loading it into some linen cloth and squeezing it out? I am open to suggestions.

Or maybe I simply need to rethink the process of making fire oil--it may be that my best bet is to dehydrate all the peppers and add them to the oil then let it sit and infuse the oil with flavor. I may try that next year and see how the flavor compares.

6. Once the oil has drained you can pour it into a jar or bottle and it's ready to use. There is no need to refrigerate.

Link to a more printer-friendly version of this recipe.








































How to use fire oil: Drizzle on any dish that you want to "heat up." Drizzle on pizza before you bake it to add delicious flavor or add it to hot pizza. Splash on your tacos, eggs, beans, or any food at all that you like. You can saute in fire oil but if you do, make sure you have good ventilation. Cooking in fire oil creates some spicy fumes!

Jalapeño fire oil will fade--the color will go from a vibrant, neon green to a kind of murky green, to an almost clear (but not attractive) green. This is normal and does not mean it has gone bad. So far, our Scotch Bonnet and Carribbean Red fire oils have not changed color very much. The Scotch Bonnet has stayed a gorgeous pineapple yellow color, the Caribbean Red went from a rich, thick red to a slightly clearer red, but it's still pretty. Our Kung Pao oil turned a bit murky, but it started out that way. It was never a pretty oil but it's our favorite fire oil for stir-fry and other Asian/Asian-style cooking. If hubby had had the patience to let the Kung Pao peppers turn red before harvesting them, I think they'd have made a really pretty oil.

Ohm Rice

I wanted something simple and different to do with ground Axis and rice tonight. I was Googling for ground beef and rice recipes when I found Ohm Rice at Recipezaar.com. I changed it up to suit our love for peppers and spices! The recipe in the link is a bit bland as is, but I gave it a five star rating. It's just so good and so simple. And easily changed to suit your own tastes. I now have this wonderfully simple Korean recipe to add to my repertoire. I'll be cooking this a lot--especially for guests as it's so inexpensive and different! The leftovers are obviously going to heat up extremely well, I can't wait to heat some up in the morning and fry an egg to put on it. Mmmm.

This recipe is so cheap, fast, and tasty I can't even begin to express my complete joy in finding it! In fact, I'm so eager to blog it that my freshly prepared bowl of Ohm Rice is sitting on the counter with only three bites eaten out of it. Hubby ate one of those bites and gave it two thumbs up before he dashed off to the studio. Although he had several bites before the egg was added--he was helping me season it. By the way, Ohm Rice does not taste like your average ground beef recipe! It's so good you'd think it couldn't possibly have something so mundane as ground meat in it. I actually detest cooked carrots but don't even notice them in this dish.

It's a good dish for chopsticks, which is how we eat all our Asian dishes. The fork you see in the images way below was used only for taste testing and to cut the egg open for the camera--fat lot of good it did me visually. The ingredients seem (mostly) so American that I nearly forgot it was an Asian dish and grabbed the chopsticks only at the very end.

No, runny egg yolk is not gross. It's bursting with delicious texture, and flavor and enhances a dish like this amazingly well. Think of thick, yellow, warm egg yolk as a rich and exotic sauce.

I do wish I'd had green onions instead of plain onions for this dish, I think it would have been tasty and more attractive. I'd have kept the chopped green tops separate and added them toward the end so they would have retained their color and crunch. Heck, even just having a few chopped green onion tops to add at the end of this exact recipe would have been fine.

Ingredients:

1 lb ground beef, pork, turkey, or venison. I used ground Axis
1 large potato, grated
2 large carrots, grated
1/2 a large onion, chopped
3 Kung Pao peppers, chopped (if available) -- if not, substitute 1 tsp. crushed red pepper or more to taste
1 tsp. honey
2 minced garlic cloves or 1/2 tsp. garlic powder
Instead of the above two ingredients, I used about 1/4 tsp. of My Beloved Garlic Honey and minced one of the Garlic Honey Pickles in addition to a few unmeasured dashes of garlic powder. The recipe really did need just a touch of sweetness and a little garlic!
4 TBS soy sauce (more if needed for taste and for liquid)
2 TBS Olive oil or fire oil because it will be threatening to stick to your pan if you don't add oil.
salt
1 cup uncooked Jasmine rice if you have it, if not, just use your favorite rice.
1 egg per serving

Directions:
Cook rice according to package directions or in your rice cooker--when done set aside until ready to use.

Cook ground meat until just over halfway done, drain off excess fat and liquid, then add grated vegetables, garlic, honey, peppers, soy sauce, the oil, and 1/2 tsp. salt. Cook this mixture until onions are soft and potatoes seem done. The vegetables should not be mush. Please don't overcook!

Mix rice in to dish and stir well. Taste and see if you need a bit more salt and/or soy sauce.

Put mixture into as many bowls or onto as many plates as people you will be serving and fry eggs in butter for each individual serving, putting a fried egg on top of each serving. I prefer mine rather runny but others may not. Another option is to make individual, one-egg omelets for each serving. The omelets should be flat, open, and unstuffed with anything. Garnishing with a bit of chopped green onion would be very attractive. Once served, the eater would chop their egg up a bit and stir it into the dish to eat. I've also seen this dish (online) served wrapped inside an omelet and covered in ketchup. All I can say about that is, ew! But to each her own, yo.

This dish reminds me a lot of really good fried rice, although the potato adds a new and filling dimension!

Below is the photo journal of this dish. I was too hungry to cook another egg and try to make it prettier for the photos. It was plenty tasty all the same! And this isn't the pretties dish anyway, but it's definitely homecooking, Korean style. At the very bottom is a little tutorial on how to chop an onion for those of you who don't watch the Food Network.




























Images will enlarge when clicked.









How To Chop An Onion:



















The trick to chopping an onion is to cut it in half lengthwise and leave the big, gnarly end intact on each half, cutting off the smoother ends only if needed and peeling the onion. Long slices aimed more or less towards the core of the onion, going from tip to tip of your onion half (without cutting into the gnarly end), are the next step. Then slice across your longitudinal cuts, thinner for more finely chopped onions and wider for more coarsely chopped. This is as simple and fast as it gets without a fancy onion chopper. Leaving the big, ugly end in place holds everything together while you chop and allows you to waste none of your onion. By the way, I chop, slice, and dice as much as possible on heavy-duty paper plates. It's probably not very "green" but I don't have the energy for endlessly washing cutting boards. I also don't have enough cutting boards! I figure I am saving water by using paper plates so maybe it all works out in the end.

If it matters, we very rarely eat on paper plates. I like a real plate when I chow down!

Click here for the slightly easier to print version of Ohm Rice.

Stir-Fry Sauce Recipe Update

I made stir-fry tonight and updated the sauce from my Stir-Fry Recipe. Hubby went so far as to say, "You outdid yourself with this, dear." That's high a compy from the DH. I thought it was purdy darn good m'self.

Brown Sauce a.k.a. Stir-Fry Sauce:

3 1/2 TBS Cornstarch or 2 TBS Arrowroot powder
1-2 tsp. grated ginger depending on your tastes, I like a lot.
2-3 cloves minced garlic
3 TBS brown sugar You can substitute any sugary substance for the brown sugar--honey, molasses, agave nectar, pure cane syrup (my favorite in stir-fry)--whatever works for you.
1/4 tsp. Chinese style hot mustard if you've got it
1/3 cup soy sauce
Somthing HOT if you like spicy. We use a couple of dried Kung Pao peppers (crushed) or about 3 TBS of fire oil (I'll have a recipe for this up soon). But you could use whatever spicy pepper you have available. Crushed red pepper is fine--start with 1 tsp. and use more or less next time depending on your taste. You could also use any minced fresh pepper that you fancy.
1 1/2 cups chicken, beef, or turkey stock (use bouillon cubes or canned broth if you must--but don't use just water if you can help it or your sauce will be blah). Don't be afraid to use chicken stock with beef--it tastes marvelous.

Whisk all ingredients together except the stock. Add 1 TBS. of quality white wine vinegar, rice vinegar, or beer vinegar for a little depth to your sauce. Heat stock to boiling and remove from heat (heating it in the micro is fine). Slowly whisk this in with the rest of the ingredients. Microwave for 30 seconds at a time, whisking in between, until it just begins to thicken. This wakes up the peppers, garlic, and ginger. Set sauce aside to "marry up" while you prepare the rest of your stir-fry.

Taste Testing

I finally taste tested the Ninniku Hachimitsu-zuke and was very surprised. At first sniff I thought, "Oh man, no way." The smell of the garlic was so stingingly strong. But I dutifully warmed up half a cup of water and added three spoonfuls of the honey to it. The honey poured from the spoon. It's viscosity is entirely different with the garlic in it, very thin and pourable. The taste was of diluted honey and the garlic was only a mild aftertaste. The smell of the garlic was strong, but not the taste. It's hard to explain except to say it's not horrible. I could easily see myself drinking this concoction a few times a day if I found myself down with a cold. Hubby decided he could handle it too.... if it had a little hooch in it.

I've drunk worse things for my health.

I used the Ninniku Hachimitsu-zuke in some brown sauce for Egg Foo Yung the other day and it was excellent! Saved me having to mince garlic and provided the necessary sweetness for the sauce. I think I'll always have a jar of this stuff around if for no other reason than using it in Stir-Fry sauce.

7-13-08 Update: I am making some stir-fry with leftover lime and pepper roasted chicken and while making the sauce I broke down and tasted the Ninniku Hachimitsu-zuke garlic, straight up, all by itself, and was shocked! It's so good! Now, keep in mind that they were refrigerated because I'd used all the honey from the jar and was worried about the garlic going bad with no honey to float in. Honey and garlic both are antiseptic and anti-many other things. That's why honey almost never goes bad and why "Cookie" always added plenty of garlic to the beans on the cattle drive--it kept the beans from going bad when they got re-heated over and over again throughout the long, hot day. So, back to the refrigerated garlic honey pickles. DELICIOUS! And the texture reminded me of crystallized fruit. Lip smacking good! Yeah, I can smell the garlic, but I don't taste it. It's more like some kind of honeyed candy. YUM!!!!!!!! I can't wait to make two more batches of this. One with just garlic and one with GINGER in it too!

The cheapest, fastest, and tastiest.... Stir Fry

We had beef and broccoli stir fry today. The brown sauce I use is based on This Recipe. It took me a long time to find a brown sauce I liked. I like this one because it's just the right consistency and doesn't have too much soy. I like PLENTY of stir-fry sauce when I cook because my favorite part of stir-fry is sauce-soaked rice. This sauce recipe is a good base for any kind of Asian cooking you are doing. It can perk up and thicken a soup or be used as a sauce over veggies and rice. It can also be used in your Top Ramen noodles instead of the enclosed seasoning packet. You won't be sorry for throwing out the Ramen seasoning packet and doctoring your own ramen noodles, they can make quite a meal. Wait until you try your Ramen noodles cooked in Your Own Stock instead of plain water!

If you do a lot of stir-fry or Asian style cooking, you can double or triple the sauce recipe and store it in a jar in the fridge (which makes it easy to grab, shake, and pour) for a week or so and use as needed.

Recipe for Stir-Fry Sauce:

3 1/2 TBS Cornstarch
1-2 tsp. grated ginger depending on your tastes, I like a lot--we buy a Hand Of Ginger "in town" and keep it in the freezer, it's the only way for us to keep "fresh" ginger in the house. Your palate will never know the difference and that hand will last you for a long time.
2-3 cloves minced garlic
3 TBS brown sugar depending on taste. Hubby likes his sweeter, I like mine less so, but the brown sugar is key to the recipe. I don't like enough so that I can taste the sweet, 2 tbs. is plenty for me. But without the sugar, the sauce really suffers. You can subsitute any sugary substance for brown sugar--honey, molasses, agave nectar--whatever works for you.
1/4 tsp. Chinese hot mustard if you've got it
1 1/2 cups chicken, beef, or turkey stock (use bouillon cubes or canned broth if you must--but don't use just water if you can help it or your sauce will be blah). Don't be afraid to use chicken stock with beef--it tastes marvelous. Beef stock would be better with beef, but any stock is better than none in this recipe.
1/3 cup soy sauce

Somthing HOT if you like spicy. We use a couple of dried Kung Pao peppers (crushed) or about 3 TBS of "fire oil." But you could use whatever spicy pepper you have available. Crushed red pepper is fine--start with 1 tsp. and use more or less next time depending on your taste. You could also use any minced fresh pepper that you fancied. I'm fortunate that hubby grows peppers in his garden that we can't buy here. I'm also fortunate to have Not One But Three of These Dehydrators. I love thrift stores!


Whisk all ingredients together except the stock. Add 1 TBS. of quality white wine vinegar or beer vinegar if you like a more "sweet and sour" aspect to your stir-fry--if using vinegar be sure to balance it by using the full amount of sugar/syrups/whatever. Heat stock to boiling and slowly whisk this in with the rest of the ingredients. Microwave for 30 seconds at a time until it just begins to thicken. This wakes up the peppers, garlic, and ginger. Set sauce aside to "marry up" while you prepare the rest of the dish.

Simple Stir-Fry Recipe:
Cook 2 cups of your preferred rice according to package directions. We use a cheapie rice cooker that I adore. It frees up stove top space and I don't have to worry about a timer or burning my rice. Although I do unplug the cooker as soon as I realize the rice is done--it stays hot for quite a while after it's cooked and I find that this amount of rice reaches an unpleasant consistency if left on the "warm" setting in the rice cooker for too long.
1 lb of thin sliced, bite-sized pieces of beef, venison, chicken, or turkey, put in a sealable plastic bag with a wad of several clean, fresh paper towels--the drier the meat the better the sear. WET, super moist meat dripping in juices and/or marinade won't sear properly unless you are lucky enough to have a specialty stove that will super heat your pan or wok. If you want to marinate your meat first, go ahead, but then be sure and pour off the marinade and stuff several clean paper towels in the bag and let it sit for awhile to soak up excess moisture. However, if your sauce is good and you are using tasty veggies, your meat will be just fine plain and unadulterated. Leftover meat instead of raw meat is fine, by the way--no need to sear it of course. We often make this recipe using leftover roast chicken or our canned venison (it's SO tender and delicious) and whatever vegetables we happen to have. If using pre-cooked meat in this recipe, shred it or slice it thin and set it aside until you are cooking the last of the veggies and add the meat to them in order to heat the meat.
7 or 8 green onions. Separate the green tops from their white bottoms and julienne them all, but keep them separate.

1 14oz. bag of frozen broccoli, unopened. Yes, use fresh if you like but in our area the best quality broccoli is usually frozen. The fresh stuff tends to be expensive and pathetic. Stab one side of your frozen broccoli bag a few times with a knife and then set in the microwave on the defrost setting until the broccoli is just soft enough to cut but still mostly frozen. Don't "cook" it. Cut your broccoli in strips, if you can. This isn't easy to do but the smaller, thinner strips will cook faster, be better tasting, and be easier to eat in stir-fry. We often use a frozen mixture of Asian-style veggies that are already the perfect size and shape for stir-fry, but I let them defrost a bit so they cook faster in the skillet. You can defrost them a bit by just leaving them on the counter for a while or by stabbing them repeatedly on one side of the bag (oh so cathartic) and defrosting them (slightly) in the nuker. The stir-fry veggies above are about $1.40 a bag and worth every little penny. If I bought these veggies fresh and seperately I'd not only have to prep them, but I'd have to use 'em quick before they rotted. Buying them like this is cheap, fast, and easy. The broccoli, at $1.99 a bag is still cheaper than fresh and requires almost as much prep as fresh would (for this particular recipe), but it's worth it to always have brocolli in the freezer when I need it.


What to cook this in: First things first, go set your A/C on "fan" so that you've got plenty of air circulating (or open the windows if it's nice out) and take the battery out of your smoke detector.

We can't get our wok hot enough to cook our stir-fry properly so we use an iron skillet. I put the skillet on high heat until it's smoking hot, usually takes five to seven minutes. I'm too lazy to cook small portions of the food at a time so I don't get that nice sear on the meat or the scorch on the veggies that you'd get in a good Asian restaurant. You need serious HEAT for that kind of searing. I'm determined to acquire a second, large iron skillet one day to speed up the process of cooking things like stir-fry AND to help increase my chances of getting seared meat and scorched veggies! With two large iron skillets, I think I could.


Have a large container with a lid nearby, get your pan smoking hot, add a tablespoon or two of peanut or other oil, and toss the meat in. Don't turn down your heat at any point from here on. Stir-fry the meat until it's nearly done and then put it into the lidded container to keep it hot and moist. If you want more of a sear on your meat, you can cook your meat a little at a time--but you'll have to let the pan re-heat between portions.

When your meat is cooked and set aside, let the pan reheat, add a little more oil, and cook 1/3 to 1/2 of your veggies (minus the green onion tops) the same way you did your meat. They'll cook fast. And you don't really want them to "cook" as much as you just want them to get hot. Stir-fried veggies should be crisp. As you can see from my photo, I didn't get a sear on my meat or veggies. But the meat wasn't overcooked and the veggies were still crisp--although the broccoli does look a little dull. Ah, well, can't have everything.

Once your last portion of veggies is heated through, put everything back in the pan and add your sauce. Cook this for about two minutes until sauce has thickened a bit, add the green onion tops and stir well, then remove it all from the pan and put it into your lidded dish to keep it hot and moist and also to keep your food from tasting like an iron skillet.

Serve over rice adding soy sauce to taste. This recipe sounds like a lot of work, but once you get used to it, it really is fast and easy. The most time consuming part is preparing the veggies. Everything else is a snap. I can prepare and cook it all in about 30 minutes. This serves us two with leftovers for one of us to have lunch the next day. We're big eaters, this would probably serve four normal, adult eaters, if you had a little something on the side to go with it, just fine.

Asian Style Soup

Last night I wanted something DIFFERENT! But I didn't have anything DIFFERENT in the house. Yet I managed to come up with a surprisingly good soup that reminded me of Hot & Sour soup. So good. This Asian style soup recipe really lends itself to some experimentation, have fun with it!

Ingredients:
Three boneless, skinless chicken thighs. I buy these frozen and by the bagful at the grocery store and keep them for recipes just like this one--they're individually frozen and it's so convenient and time saving to be able to just pull out what you need.

8 cups Chicken Stock

A tablespoon or two of grated ginger-- if you are remote like me, buy a hand or two of ginger the first chance you get and stick it in a Ziplock freezer bag and keep it frozen, grating off what you need. It will last you a long while. The ginger will soften quickly out of the freezer, so you can always opt to just let a hunk of it sit out for a little while and slice it super thin if you prefer it that way. I prefer it grated. You'll really have to use your own judgment as to how much ginger to use for this recipe. I've never gotten too much.... yet. You don't have to cook with ginger more than a few times to figure it out though. By the way, ground or crystallized ginger is not the same as fresh or frozen ginger. You can't substitute ground ginger for fresh/frozen ginger.

4 cloves of garlic, 1 left whole but peeled and the other three peeled, and sliced thin.

1 and 3/4 cups of rice, preferably Jasmine or some other aromatic rice. Whole grain is fine. So is any old white rice. If using quick cooking rice then you'll need to adjust the cooking time accordingly. The rice needs to be cooked in the stock, however. Leftover rice in this recipe wouldn't be right.

1 and 1/2 TBS chili powder

2 TBS soy sauce

Dried or fresh peppers. We grow Kung Pao peppers and I dry them and store them for use such as this. I used three dried Kung Pao peppers in this recipe. Crushed red pepper would be fine instead and it's certainly very easy to find. Use according to your taste.

1 large lime -- we only had some of the really small ones in the fridge for some reason, I used three.

1/2 a large, coarsely chopped onion (I prefer to cut it in short, fat strips but it's really not a big deal how you cut it)

1 TBS chopped fresh cilantro

2 TBS cornstarch (optional)


Directions:
Place the thighs, frozen or not, in a small pot, cover with water, and add 1/4 of the lime (with skin), 1/2 TBS of the chili powder, about 1/4 of the onion you have chopped, a chunk of the ginger--no need to slice it for this, some of the spicy pepper--half a teaspoon if using crushed red pepper, a tablespoon of the soy sauce, the whole clove of garlic, and black pepper if you like. Bring to a boil then simmer until the meat is done and tender enough to cut it easily.

After you've got the chicken simmering, put the stock into a pot big enough to make your soup in. Add the remaining soy sauce, chili powder, peppers (spicy and/or black) according to your taste, the juice from the remaining lime, the remaining onion, the ginger, and the rice. Don't worry about the cornstarch yet. Bring to a boil, reduce to simmer and cover and cook on low for 20 minutes. The chicken will likely be done before the rice is. This is a good thing. As soon as the chicken is done remove it from the liquid it's cooking in and set it on a cutting board to cool. Dispose of the liquid you cooked the chicken in, you won't need it. When the chicken has cooled enough, chop it into bite sized pieces or shred it if you prefer.

Five minutes before the rice is done, add the chicken to the soup pot--don't stir it, replace the lid and continue cooking for the last five minutes. When the time is up, check the consistency. Would you like it thicker? To a small amount of tepid water, less than 1/8th of a cup, add your cornstarch and whisk. Once combined, add the mixture to the soup and raise the heat under the soup pot, stirring constantly, until it begins to thicken. Turn off heat, stir in the tablespoon of the fresh, chopped cilantro, and serve. Drizzle with more soy sauce if you like.

If you don't have cilantro you could use some fresh chopped green onions (just the green tops), or some fresh chopped lemongrass (yeah, like I can run out and buy THAT at our local grocery store), or a very small amount of fresh, chopped spinach, or a small amount of the softer, greener bits of bok choy could also be used.

Thin sliced tofu would probably be lovely in this recipe as well, either in place of or in addition to the chicken. The recipe doesn't NEED the chicken, by the way, the stock provides plenty of flavor but without the chicken, there's not much protein in the dish.

My favorite thing about this recipe is that the next day, it will be much thicker and won't be at all unlike congee. I'll get to that recipe in the near future. Congee is one of my favorite foods.

What makes this recipe really work is the chicken stock. That's the secret.