Do you know that leftover rice kept in the fridge can become too dry?
When I have to heat up a bowl of leftover rice in the microwave oven, I always add a tablespoon of water to it. If I used leftover sauce, I will heat it up in a pot over the stove. I can add water to the sauce if I think it is not enough for the amount of rice I am heating. Once the sauce is boiling, I will then add the rice to heat up. Once the rice is fully heated, I will taste it to see if I need to add any other sauce to enhance its flavour.
Recently, I used the excess sauce from cooking Ginger Soya Sauce Chicken to heat up a bowl of leftover rice and discovered that it tasted just as flavourful as claypot rice.
These are the ingredients used for making a basic claypot rice.
You can see how the ingredients are prepared and cooked in this video:
These are the ingredients I used for making my ginger soya sauce chicken.
As my family do not eat food that are too sweet or salty, I am able to double the amount of water for making the sauce. However, should I found the sauce too bland, I can always add sugar, soya sauce and oyster sauce accordingly. Once the sauce is boiling, I will pour the excess sauce out into a bowl for storage. Then I continue to cook the ginger soya sauce chicken till the sauce thickens.
When I use the sauce from my ginger soya sauce chicken, I can also include the additional seasoning sauce and ingredients used for flavouring the clay pot rice which are as follows:
-Sesame Oil
-Shaoxing Wine
-Chinese Sausage
-Fried Shallot Oil
-Tsp Sesame Oil
-Spring Onion
-Fried Shallot
If I want Chinese sausage in the rice, I sliced one thinly to pan fry in a little oil. Once it is ready, I add the sausage and a little of its lard to the rice. It should taste good enough even without the spring onion and fried shallots added.
If I am running short on time to cook a full meal for your family, I would consider cooking a one-pot meal as it is a time saving cooking process. It will also reduce the number of dishes I have to wash.
One of such meal you can find at hawker stalls in Asia is the claypot rice. Let's learn from a chef who has retired, how to cook it.
Do you like eating the crispy, slightly burnt rice that you can dig out from the bottom of a claypot? He also shared how you can get that right by moving the sides of the pot over the fire.
You can also use a rice cooker to cook it if you do not have a claypot. It may not be as flavourful without the scotched rice that you can only get from using claypot.
You can also cook this one pot meal with glutinous rice. If you would rather not as you will get a nauseous feeling like you have overeaten after eating glutinous rice, here is a tip the cook shared. Instead of using just glutinous rice, for every 1 cup of glutinous rice, add 1/2 cup of white rice. She said that you do not even have to wash the rice cooker after you have cooked the required ingredients in it. Just wash the rice and add it to the (stained) rice cooker with the required amount water to cook it. Then add the cooked ingredients to mix in once the rice is ready.
Here is another method to prepare this one pot meal. You can marinate the ingredients used and keep it aside. The boil the rice. Once the water is reduced and bubbles can be seen on top of the rice arranged the chicken on top the rice to continue cooking. The heat from the rice will cook the raw ingredients properly.
I would prefer to use boneless chicken to cook it as I do not like the idea of bitting into bones when I eat the rice.
Another way to cook this one pot meal is to steam it and serve it with rice.
You do not have to use a steam oven. I will steam it over the pot of soup boiling for the day (which will not be Lotus soup).
