cantonese clay pot chicken

After making my first nabe dinner, reader HoiYan mentioned making clay pot chicken.

So, I looked online and found a recipe that sounded really delicious.

I planned to try it yesterday, because I thought it would be Chinese New Year over the weekend...

Disappointed that I had gotten the days wrong, I decided to try it anyway since Satoshi and I could eat dinner together.

Cantonese Claypot Chicken Rice (2-3 servings) adapted from Travelling Foodies

Ingredients
9 chicken drumsticks
2 lup cheong, chinese sausages
1 piece dried scallop, reconstituted overnight
4 fresh shiitake mushrooms, stems removed
2 cups of rice, brown
3 cups of water
1 chicken consomme cube

Marinade
2 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp pepper
1 cloves of garlic, grated
A small knob of ginger, grated
2 tbsp of cooking sake
1/2 teaspoon of sesame oil
1 heap tbsp cornstarch

Topping and Garnish
dark soy sauce
sliced green onion

Process
Rinse drumsticks and prepare marinade.
Soak drumsticks for a couple of hours, mixing every so often.
Rinse rice and add water and consomme cube to clay pot.
Slice mushrooms, lup cheong, green onions, scallop. Set aside.

Turn on heat, bring mixture to a fast boil and then lower flame to low, lid on and allow to simmer.
Stir the mixture once in a while to make sure that the consomme cube is well dissolved and incorporated.
After 5-7 minutes, quickly but carefully lay the chicken pieces from the marinade over the rice, followed by scallop, mushrooms and chinese sausages.
Turn to the lowest flame possible and allow it to continue to simmer.
When the steaming through the vent on the lid has somewhat subsided, remove lid and drizzle in half of the chicken wing marinade over the top. Cover with lid again. There should be some steam from adding the marinade.
When the steaming has once again subsided (about 5 minutes later), turn off flame.
Remove lid and check that the chicken pieces have just cooked through.
If not, simply cover and let the clay pot sit for another 5-7 minutes allowing the residual heat to cook everything through.
Just before serving, garnish with green onions and a generous drizzling of dark soy sauce and give everything a good toss.

NOTES: I marinated the chicken for about 6 hours or so.

And then I started the cooking about an hour before we planned to eat...following the directions as best as I could...there were parts I didn't quite understand.

According to the recipe, you are supposed to use long grained rice but since I only had brown, which is a short grain, that is what I used.

This made things a bit "mushy" rather than having a "browning" on the rice at the bottom. If you use long grained rice, cut the liquid (water) back to 2 cups.

At the end of the cooking time, there was still quite a bit of liquid, so I turned off the heat and left the pot covered on the stove until we were ready to eat.

By the time we were ready for dinner, about a half hour later, the rice had soaked up most of the liquid. I didn't drizzle soy sauce on it before serving, but did put a nice amount of green onion.

It didn't look like the original recipe, but there was lots of flavor--it was kind of sweet-salty.

We had this with brussels sprouts sautéed simply in olive oil, salt & pepper.

If I can find long grained rice, I wouldn't mind trying this again. If not, I definitely want to make the marinated chicken again.

What did you have for Sunday dinner?