August 28, 2012
I’ve used Steamy Kitchen’s Hainanese Chicken Recipe in the past, but returning to it this week, I realized that the way the recipe was organized had me running back and forth so much that I was wasting a lot of time in the kitchen. I’ve reorganized it with some of my own tweaks. (I actually never make the chili sauce. Sriracha and I are not friends.)
While I was cooking tonight, as is usual at the end of a few recipes, we ended up with a scoop and a half of leftover rice and I borrowed the broth from the recipe below to reconstitute it. Figured I had enough green onions to jazz it up a little bit as well. As I was mincing, it occurred to me that the paltry scoop of rice wasn’t going to do much for either of us, so I tripled the broth and brought it all up to a boil. My mind drifted back to a story my parents told me, of days more than thirty years gone.
Facing grinding poverty once the war was over, all the economic opportunities diverted to the hands of the Communists leaders and those who fought on the “wrong” side jailed, my family fled the country to build a better life for their children. The journey was terrible, every step of it. A forced stop in Malaysia, beached in the open air while the pirates and what passed for government at the time traded fire over their heads, sometimes as a game with the captive humans as their target practice. They were provided food in the form of a tiny sack of rice, perhaps a few pounds’ worth, per family once in a while, and a family unit was considered any size from three to ten people at the whims of the distributors.
To make the rice stretch, they cooked rice porridge. Not like I cooked tonight, not like my parents cooked when they sometimes told this story, a nice thick fat grained rice porridge. It started the same way, with cooked rice, thinned it out with water, and cooked down further so that the rice would puff up and “grow” as the colloquialism goes.
But then they would thin it out even further than that, and the added water would take on the taste of the rice. The porridge would become a gruel after enough cooking, a small bowl of rice would stretch to a pot, and feed a family with the rice portion going to those who had to truly eat something and the watery portions going to those who didn’t truly need as much.
It’s been a while since I cooked a porridge but I always remember that story.
It was just a memory for them, but I can’t take food for granted and my parents never chided about starving children anywhere. I just think about all those months they waited and did without to survive until they regained right of safe passage.
Hainanese Chicken Recipe
Ingredients
Whole chicken
kosher salt to clean the chicken
1 teaspoon kosher salt for the rice
4” section of fresh ginger, in 1/4” slices
1” section of ginger, finely minced
2 stalks green onions, cut into 1″ sections (both the green and white parts)
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
2 tablespoon chicken fat or 2 tbsp vegetable oil
3 cloves garlic, finely minced
2 cups long-grain uncooked rice
2 cups chicken broth, reserved from cooking chicken
1/4 cup dark soy sauce
Few sprigs cilantro
1 cucumber, thinly sliced or cut into bite-sized chunks
Chili sauce
1 tablespoon lime juice
2 tablespoon reserved chicken poaching broth
2 teaspoon sugar
4 tablespoon sriracha chili sauce
4 cloves garlic
1” ginger
a generous pinch of salt, to taste
Directions
Prep the ginger and garlic: peel 5 inches of ginger. Take 4 inches and slice in 1/4″ slices. Mince remaining inch of ginger. Mince ginger. Slice green onions in 1″ pieces.
Rinse rice and set aside to soak.
Prep the chicken: Clean the chicken with a small handful of kosher salt. Rub the chicken all over, getting rid of any loose skin and dirt. Rinse chicken well, inside and outside. Season generously with salt inside and outside. Stuff the chicken with the ginger slices and the green onion.
Cooking the Chicken
Place the chicken in a large stockpot and cover chicken w/1 inch of water. If the chicken is smaller than the width of the pot, fill with less water. Bring to a boil over high heat, then turn down to simmer.
Cook for about 30 minutes or less if you’re using a smaller chicken.
To check chicken: See if the juices run clear or check temperature (170 F) when the time is up.
Prep ice bath for the chicken.
When the chicken is cooked, turn off the heat. Transfer the chicken into a bath of ice water to stop the chicken’s cooking and throw out ginger and green onion.
Reserve the broth for your rice, your sauce, and the accompanying soup. There should be at least six or seven cups of broth reserved for soup.
Cooking the Rice
Drain the rice. Heat 2 tablespoons of cooking oil over medium-high heat. Add the ginger and the garlic and add in your drained rice and stir to coat, cook for 2 minutes. Add the sesame oil, mix well.
Stovetop: Add 2 cups of the reserved chicken broth, add salt and bring to a boil. Immediately turn the heat down to low, cover the pot and cook for ~ 15 minutes. Remove from heat and let sit, covered, for 5-10 minutes.
Rice cooker: Combine fried rice, ginger and garlic with 2.5 cups of chicken broth and salt in rice cooker. Follow rice cooker instructions.
Chili Sauce
Blend all chili sauce ingredients in a blender until smooth and bright red.
Serving
Remove from the ice bath and rub the outside of the chicken with the sesame oil. Carve the chicken and slice tomatoes and cucumbers for serving. Heat up the broth and season with salt to taste.
Serve the chicken rice with chili sauce, soy sauce, tomato and cucumber slices, and a bowl of hot broth garnished with scallions.
July 28, 2010
I’m barely mentally unpacked from San Diego Comic Con, and I’m looking up another itinerary to go back down to SoCal. I haven’t been *home* since May but this is another quick round trip. Possibly even a same day trip.
In a couple months, we’ll be memorializing the passing of my dear friend’s beloved father. We lost him exactly midway between my birthday and his – we were four days apart and he always joked that I was four days older than him. Growing up, I hated my birthdays because they were always strangely lonely, now I don’t know how to feel about it.
Every year that passes and takes with it another loved one makes every memory and tradition that much more poignant.
I’m considering using my Southwest award tickets for this trip. Between the recent vacation spending, the purchase of tickets for next year’s vacation, the upcoming dental expenses for both my parents, it behooves me to stop bleeding cash.
May 26, 2010
Watching MythBusters, I wondered if any or all of the hosts are actually as mechanically, engineerically or otherwise functionally ingenious enough to independently conceive, develop and execute their experiments that they demonstrate for the benefit of the masses. Like Zach and Hodgens from Bones, y’know?
Naturally, that led to wondering if mutual friends who are engineers or mechanical genii (genius, plural) would view this show with rather more skepticism than I, and then, of course, I start wondering what I’ve done with my life since high school.
That path of inquiry has been grooved deeply into my musings, though rather subsumed by the more immediate and urgent call of living life, as I approach a milestone graduation anniversary.
As it happens, I’m not attending this event because….
A) they’re charging more than $100 for admission per ticket (plus flight),
B) I already keep in touch with 90% of the friends I wanted to stay in touch with,
C) In addition to running into 30% of the people I’d be quite happier never seeing again,
D) With no doubt that the 10% I DO want to see won’t actually be there.
Despite my resolution to save both time and money, the event itself continues to engenders these musings.
It’s a perplexing sense of insecurity, or a close cousin thereof, that leads me to question why I’ve not yet become an expert martial artist, developed a craft, attained mastery of some incredibly useful survivalist training in the event of near-complete global disaster. (And yet, I’ve had no interest in that show, Survivor.) Or at least completed graduate education.
Now, I’ve been kicking about the PF blogosphere for years, bouncing around among some major achievers whose blogs have grown exponentially, admiring personalities glowing through the internets garnering praise, media attention, and financial success both related and not to their blogs. From time to time, I turn over the same mental stones about the path to blogger success that Funny about Money articulates in her A PF Blogger’s Glass Ceiling? That doesn’t make me feel smaller than I am, nor do I feel compelled to compare myself to bigger and better blogs to my detriment.
Why then does the memory of high school and the person I thought I’d be by now (delusional teenager that I was) make me step back and wonder: What have I done with myself?
I think it’s something to do with the habit of competing against myself. Perhaps there’s also a touch of competing with others but at the end of the day, when you’re laboring to achieve as much as you once dreamed, you’ve set up a tough crowd to impress.
My voice of reason finally pipes up with admonishments that competing with anyone, including yourself, for the sake of winning at life is sheer foolishness. Living life well and happily is all one needs.
It’s just disconcerting that that memory of high school can so viscerally project itself over the panarama of my real life.
Wise Words
The grass isn’t greener on the other side, it’s greener where you water it.
Stacking Pennies
“…it’s just that the things I’ve accomplished haven’t really been plans, just things I fell into.”
Mrs. Micah
A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?
Robert Browning
March 29, 2010
Writing about thrift and the essence of making the best of your life reminded me that it’s been two years and two months since my grandma died. She couldn’t be a physical presence in my childhood but she represented incredible strength and integrity that informed my developing character.
Seventy-five years ago, my beloved grandmother married into a wealthy (in name only, at that point) family with only her bridal money, wedding clothes and her wedding ring. Her father-in-law, a landowner, had gambled away the family fortune, and the clock was ticking on the call date from his last throw of the die. At the time of their wedding, he had less than three years to pay the price of the final debt or forfeit thousands of acres of unworked lands. His children despaired and gave up the land as lost.
Armed with no more than an 8th-grade education and the instinctive determination to reclaim her new family’s property, she rolled up her sleeves and set about creating wealth from the lands. She directed my grandfather in his new duties, walking out the land each day until she was fully satisfied that she knew the terrain down to the last bit of soil, and made her plans.
She contracted out one-half of the land to farmers who could only afford to rent the use of the land, third world sharecropping, with specific terms – they were responsible for their own equipment and maintenance and in return for the use of the land, pay a set percentage of their yield. Her personal cash was strictly budgeted for her own operations on the rest of the land and storage facilities. Not only did she intend to make an income from the land, she meant to keep the entire operation a secret from the debt-holder hundreds of miles away. Her family knew but expected little result. “Too much work, too little time,” they said.
She didn’t just pay people to work the land, she worked it herself every single day. Growing, processing and storing rice over the course of multiple growing seasons, she guarded against word getting out that she would have rice to sell, and sent Grandpa to keep up the ruse by asking for short extensions on the final loan due date whenever he paid an installment.
When the deadline loomed, she sold all the stored and newly harvested rice.
On the final day, my grandpa’s eldest brother sat down with the banker to whom they owed the debt for the formal title transfer. Instead, Great-Uncle unpacked a suitcase of cash. The man was stunned. After his departure, she turned around and handed the title and deed to her equally shocked father-in-law.
To his credit, he tried to make her take the title. As far as he was concerned, she had rightfully earned every penny that bought back the land, and he insisted she was the new owner. And as was typical of her, she refused, agreeing only to take an appropriate fraction of the land if the rest was parceled out evenly among all his children.
Honor, Duty, Family, Birthright.
She lived her entire life by those watchwords. She raised nine children, fostered dozens of relatives, stood firm when her family and neighbors were caught in the middle of the war, buried a son, supported a son-in-law imprisoned for 15 years after the war, buried her husband, and continued to farm well into her 80s. The woman never blinked in the face of adversity; she served it hot tea and a freshly cooked meal. And a well deserved lecture, if need be.
Fun side note: when she was 82, she ambushed the wildcat who’d been raiding her outdoor kitchen in the middle of the night. She might have been 80 pounds soaking wet, but that never stopped discipline in her house. A whack across the nose, a firm tie-up in the corner of the kitchen so he’d keep until morning, and her poor housekeeper nearly had a heart attack when she inspected the “stray dog” that Grandma had captured. So her eyesight wasn’t great anymore at that age, but is it any wonder no one ever sassed her twice?
Sometimes I wonder what she would have been like in our modern world.
_______________________
March 24, 2010
Six months ago, we said goodbye to a very dear friend.
It’s tax season, he always thrived during this time of year.
“Uncle,” they called him. As in, “Uncle, here are my forms, will you do my taxes?” Or “Uncle, I have a problem, I need your help.”
Through the years ….
“Uncle, it’s good to see you again. [hug] How have you been? Are you ready for another year of Comic-Con? Is there anything we can bring you back? No? We’ll see you for dinner tonight, I’ll call when we’re on our way home!”
“Uncle, we got you a t-shirt! Thanks for all the fruit you picked out, they were all fantastic for lunch. We saw so much today, I’ll tell you all about it …. “
“Uncle, what were you like as a boss? I’m going to be just like you, never stop working.”
Today …
“Uncle, we miss you. Your oldest is doing so well at his new job. You’d be so proud of him. You’d shake his hand. And give him a good pat on the back. He’s taking care of the family just like he promised. It’s not easy, you knew it wouldn’t be, but you just trust in him. He can do it. Youngest is still, well, still the youngest. Still needs a lot of attention, and more now that you’re gone. Youngest always needed someone to fight with and you were a sure thing. Youngest is a little lost without that anchor now. We all are. I’m still going to be just like you when I grow up. I just wish I’d taken better notes.”
He’s sorely missed.
February 3, 2008
If I weren’t already completely impressed by the familial legacy my Grandma left behind, the early tidbits I’ve heard about her funeral so far would pretty much wrap that up.
Over a thousand people descended on her farm in a tiny village to pay their respects within a 24 hour period. Whole families from out of town came, despite the tradition of sending one or two family representatives to long distance services. My poor relatives were run ragged! I have a sneaking suspicion that even more would have come from out of the country had the funeral not been scheduled so quickly.
The near equivalent of a Bishop in the religion she observed came from the big city to deliver a eulogy and chant absolution-type prayers.
It’s good to have a little *confirmation* that a great many other people, not all her relatives, loved and respected her.
December 4, 2007
As we search for photos of A, I realize that I have so few photos. Not just of him, but of the past several years. At some point I stopped valuing the memories as much because I didn’t want to spend the money on a camera. I always thought it wasn’t a big deal; someone would take pictures, probably, and I could look at theirs.
Over the weekend, A’s college friends came by with a beautiful photo album they’d made containing photos from the last few years, from his trips to other countries and most recently to Hawaii, and it made me so wistful.
How I wish I’d sprung for a camera years ago and continued my photographing frenzy from high school and our first year of college. During college, it was a big joke among my crowd that everyone always had a camera, and with eight to ten photographers, I assumed we’d have duplicates of every picture.
Eventually, the picture taking dwindled in the face of greater distances, fewer gatherings, and seemingly less intense comradery. It took this tragedy to remind me that there are times I’d regret not spending money.
I didn’t need a digital SLR, but a simple point and shoot would have preserved so many of our experiences and I wouldn’t have to rely just on fond reminiscences.
