Hainanese Chicken Rice (Paste)

This aromatic rice is nothing to be sniffed at - fragrant with garlic, shallots and lemongrass, it is a match made in heaven for poached chicken pieces, sliced cucumber, and a garlicky chilli sauce. Easy peasy, tasty paste-y :)

If you somehow end up in a situation where your son, on his birthday, decides spontaneously that he wants to have Hainanese Chicken Rice for dinner, have no fear. I've been there. Here's my emergency recipe. I have no idea if it's authentic since I've not referred to any recipe sites for this and I have basically tried and guessed my way through this, but my husband says it tastes nice and that's good enough for me, really....


Chicken Rice Paste (for 1.5-2 cups of rice)

Ingredients 
(To blend)
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger
3 cloves garlic
1 shallot
1 tsp sesame oil (or more, if you really like sesame oil!)
1 tsp chicken stock powder/granules
1/2 tbsp water
slightly less than 1/4 tsp salt

(Others) 
2 stalks lemongrass, cut into 2 cm sections
1 knot of pandan leaf (also known as screwpine leaf)  if available
1 tbsp cooking oil

Instructions
Blend the above ingredients to form a smooth paste. Pour oil into a warm frying pan and saute the blended paste with the lemongrass pieces until it is fragrant and achieves a nice brownish hue.

Having washed your rice and added the appropriate amount of water into your rice cooker, stir the paste in and add in a little more water (I find that cooking any rice with oily things tend to result in undercooked rice, so a bit more water is required to compensate for this, roughly an extra 1/5 cup). Add the pandan leaf, then cook the rice

When the rice is cooked, remove the pieces of lemongrass and pandan leaf, and stir the rice to ensure even distribution of the paste. Serve warm, with appropriate accompaniments.

Note: If you don't fancy using chicken stock granules, just use the poaching liquid from your chicken (but that of course means that you'll have to cook your chicken FIRST before cooking the rice....). Me, I prefer to do the exact reverse, which is to fry off the paste in a deep pan, and after I've added the paste to the rice, I add water into that pan and use that liquid to poach the chicken....

Toothache-induced headache

Apparently you can get headaches as a result of a toothache. That would explain the blinding pain in my skull right about now....

Can't wait till I see the dentist on Tuesday

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Dedicated to my colleague who lent me the DVD and is also himself a tinker, a tailor, a soldier and definitely a spyyyyyyyyy. It may not be immediately obvious what it means since most of it concerns inside jokes, but if you know a certain Matt Eckold do ask him ^_^

You know....

You know your roast duck recipe is an epic fail when the feedback you get is "OH that's DUCK?! I thought you seriously overcooked the chicken!" -__-"

LADIES: If you're in the middle of eating a rendang and your husband starts batting his eyelashes at you, you know he wants you to cook a sambal to go with it.
MEN: If you live overseas and your wife is cooking rendang in the middle of the week for no celebratory reason, you know she is stressed. Why are you asking her to cook sambal!