The Refreshingly Cool Chicken in Shaoxing Wine

If you need a refreshing change for a Sunday meal, try drunken chicken. It’s amazingly simple to cook. I bought a chicken (already chopped) from the supermarket. As usual, I have had a busy week and needed a simple Sunday meal. I have been wanting to cook drunken chicken for a while, so I steamed the chopped chicken pieces in a wok on Thursday evening for about 30 minutes. Then I added Shaoxing wine (Chinese rice wine) and soya sauce. I left the chicken soaking in the wine and soya sauce in a plastic container to cool before keeping it in the fridge. The sauce became a gelatin, and the fat solidified on top, making it easy to remove.

Chinese drunken chicken is served as a cold dish. It’s good to remove it from the fridge about 15 minutes before serving. Contrast makes a meal more interesting. A hot vegetable soup goes well with this cold meat dish, or a hot green vegetable dish. A simple green vegetable dish like blanched Shanghai greens with cream of mushroom (from a can of soup) is a good match.

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It’s always a good (and healthy) idea to serve fruit for dessert, but there always seems to be someone who will go into the kitchen looking for REAL dessert, preferably cold like ice cream. I try to keep ice cream for special days.

This week I made another quick dessert and named it Marie (biscuits), Mango and Me (M3) and topped it off with chocolate flakes. I try to keep life simple. I used 1 fresh mango, 2 packets of mango jelly, some Marie biscuits and grated some dark chocolate. A tangerine came in handy for the final touches.

A taxi driver told me that his children only want to eat “Grab Food”. It’s a new term to me. (Since the pandemic started, people have turned to ordering food online and having a Grab rider deliver the food.) His children are adults who don’t realise that home-cooked food can be easy to cook and taste better than Grab Food.

I was annoyed with an online grocery chatbot this week, because it couldn’t help me with my problem, so I told the chatbot that I wanted to chat with a human. It answered me with: “Give me a chance.” If you are think cooking is too daunting a venture, I would use the chatbot’s idea: “Give yourself a chance.”

By Chayo, Homskil Editor 1, 25 April 2021