Chicken Rice

This is a slightly different take on the Singaporean classic-the chicken rice. Often, we would see shops selling 'steamed' chicken when they were actually poached in water and quickly cooled in ice water to make the skin springy. During the poaching, plenty of flavour would be lost and the chicken would not taste as sweet as it could have been. So, using the original ingredients in chicken rice (for both the rice and chicken) and a different cooking technique (steaming instead of poaching), I can assure that this would taste as good as, if not better than, any chicken rice sold elsewhere.

Sorry no photos for this!

Ingredients (Serves 2):
2 chicken legs
A good chunk of fresh ginger (5-8cm)
10-12 cloves of garlic
Half a red onion
1 stalk of lemon grass
1 good bunch of fresh pandan leaves, one stalk of it
Salt
Olive oil
Chicken stock
1 cup of rice, washed
Sesame oil (optional)

Paste
1. Remove the skin of the garlic and cut the ginger into smaller pieces. With the traditional mortar and pestle (you can use a food processor), pound the garlic, ginger and red onion into a paste. Flavour the paste, and eventually the dish, by adding salt to the paste. It would be good to add coarse grains of salt as it will act as an abrasive and make the pounding slightly easier.
2. Peel off the outer layer of the lemon grass. Using the pestle, smash the lemon grass slightly on a chopping board.
3. Heat up a pan using high heat. Add a few lugs of oil to the hot pan. Allow the oil to heat up and start to smoke slightly. Add in the smashed lemon grass first. When it starts to smell good, add the paste into the pan. Keep stirring the paste and add more oil if necessary to prevent it from sticking. After frying till fragrant, remove the paste from the pan. Make sure you remove as much oil as you can, because that is where the fragrance is.

Rice
4. To the rice, add 2 tablespoons of the paste, or the remaining paste if you are preparing the chicken first. If you do not like bits and pieces of stuff in your rice, spoon the paste into a herb bag. You will get the same taste without the paste residue. Add in 1 cup of stock. It will be best to use the water gauge at the side of the rice pot and add enough stock to match the number of cups of rice used.
5.Fold half of the pandan leaves into about 10cm in length. Using a couple more blades of leaves, tie the folded leaves together. Place the pandan leaves in the rice pot. Place the rice pot in the rice cooker and let it cook.

Chicken
5. Using the remaining pandan leaves, line the base of a steaming dish. Use a metal dish that is not perforated at the base because you want to retain all the juices from steaming. To each the chicken legs, add half a tablespoon of the paste. Rub the paste all over the legs but concentrate on the side not covered by the skin. Place the legs on the pandan leaves, skin side up.
6. Steam the chicken for about 10-12 minutes. The chicken should be fully cooked through by then.
7. If you prefer it, you can de-bone the chicken before serving. Either way, drizzle the chicken with sesame oil before serving.

8. Scoop the rice onto a plate and serve with the steamed chicken. Enjoy.