Can we?

When my missus cooked the sambal sotong with the squids that I bought that day, our girl asked her to cook her nasi lemak which, of course, would put all the not-so-lemak or not-lemak-at-all ones outside to shame. Needless to say, we enjoyed our meals to the max that day even though it was just the sambal sotong and the rice to go with it, a little bit of cucumber and some dabai seluang by the side.

I did mention in that post that her chicken rice is pretty awesome too, definitely a whole lot nicer than most, if not all, of the ones we can get outside. I would say we have a couple of good ones like the ones here or here, for instance but I have noticed how they seem to lack quality control – some days, it can be so good while on other days, it can be quite disappointing. Anyway, we are #stayingsafe #stayingwell #stayinghome these days and since I felt like eating that the other day, I asked her if we could have that for our meals. My girl, of course, had no problem with it – she loves her mum’s chicken rice, that goes without saying!

My missus would always pair her chicken rice with steamed chicken…

…even though she can do a great job at roasting it too. Of course, when cooking chicken rice, what is most important will be the rice. We can buy very nice roast chicken at a lot of places outside and yes, there is steamed chicken here and there too. Unfortunately, most of the time, their rice does not make the grade.

It does look, therefore, like the challenge is in cooking the rice and a whole lot of effort is required to do that. I popped into the kitchen to have a look and I saw that my missus had rendered the fat…

…that would be used to cook the rice.

She had prepared a whole lot of ingredients…

– the shallots, ginger, lengkuas (galangal) plus the garlic (she usually peels and chops a whole lot of that and keeps it in the fridge instead of having to do it all the time) and some spring onions as well as daun sup (Chinese celery) for the garnishing when serving the chicken later.

There were also these ingredients…

– the sesame oil, the traditional Foochow red wine, salt, chicken stock and chicken rice paste and of course, these pandan leaves…

…were a must for its special fragrance.

I did not stick around too long for fear that I might be getting in the way so I left her and my girl to get on with what they were doing and when everything was done, the much-looked-forward-to lunch was served. Yes, the rice…

…was superb, as always and the chili dip…

…that my missus also prepared was spicy and went absolutely well with both the chicken and the rice.

We sure enjoyed everything immensely that day but it did seem like a whole lot of work. Perhaps in future, we should reserve this for some special occasion and stick to some simple easy-to-cook dishes on ordinary days.